Preface

This book is about the turbulent birth pangs of the American language and the American dictionary. The word wars in its title spotlights the militancy that characterized the development of the English language in America, the contests for dictionary supremacy between American lexicographers in the nineteenth century, and the keen international rivalry between Britain and America that soiled relations between the two countries regarding the use of the English language during the early years of American nationhood.

The dictionary battlefields in these “wars” were mainly in the United States, where after the American Revolution, the English language was fought over with bitterness scarcely imaginable or understood in Britain. These wars not only pitted lexicographers against each other but also drew into the conflict America’s earliest internationally known authors, its first colleges, state legislatures, newspapers, publishers, libraries, and individual citizens all over the rapidly expanding nation. It was a civil war over words that illuminates America’s search to identify and know itself. It was about a defining hunger for knowledge of the language and how to use it, about English linguistic heritage and domination and the way that Americans, restless to come out from its shadows, dealt with it. It was also a war between American reformers versus American traditionalists, between the growth of populist democracy and the defenders of traditional values and manners associated with elegance and refinement. It is also about the private war that America’s dictionary idol, Noah Webster, waged with himself, arguing himself in and out of self-confidence, attacking people in a way that he knew would be damaging to himself, constantly feeling insecure about his vocation and role in the new nation. America’s progress and struggle with the English language, mediated by the country’s ongoing dictionary controversies, amounts to a conflicting, acrimonious heritage that helps account for what America is today.

Pronouncements about the language and the publication of new dictionaries, or new editions of dictionaries, made national news and were taken up by pundits who had to weigh in about the niceties of every detail. Everyone, it seemed—the young and the old; people from differing social and economic classes; scholars and leading authors, educators, librarians, and journalists—was looking in different ways at how the language should be managed—or if it should be managed at all. The goalposts for dictionaries were constantly being moved. And overlying that was the ever-present theme of how patriotism should play its part.

This book is also about the personalities and passions vying with each other for a voice in the debates, eager to be heard regarding the English language. And at the center of those disputes were the lexicographers and editors working mostly alone for years on end, struggling to get their books out amid the din of language battles. Their desperation and agonies, triumphs and failures, praise and mockery, seemed to them sometimes not to be worth the lives they feared they were wasting in their studies. It was their fate, wrote the literary “colossus” Samuel Johnson, “to be disgraced by miscarriage, or punished for neglect, where success would have been without applause, and diligence without reward.”

Note to readers: Original spelling in quoted sources is preserved throughout. For the sake of clarity, in some instances the modern equivalent is provided in brackets. The reader also may consult the glossary of publishing terms in appendix C, which includes explanations of frequently mentioned book sizes and other aspects of publishing. For currency equivalents of the American dollar between the early nineteenth century and the present, I have used the consumer price index (CPI) provided by the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics: on that basis, $1 during that period is equivalent to about $25 today.