4. [By 1754 literary London was already sufficiently conscious of the new words arriving from the New World for Richard Owen Cambridge … to be suggesting that a glossary of them would soon be in order.] Cambridge’s suggestion is reprinted in “British Recognition of American Speech in the Eighteenth Century,” by Allen Walker Read,1 and it is from that reprint that I take the following extract:
I wish such a work had been published in time enough to have assisted me in reading the following extract of a letter from one of our colonies.… “The Chippeways and Orundaks2 are still very troublesome. Last week they scalped one of our Indians; but the Six Nations continue firm;3 and at a meeting of sachems it was determined to take up the hatchet and make the war-kettle boil.4 The French desired to smoke the calumet of peace,5 but the half king would not consent. They offered the speech-belt, but it was refused.6 Our governor has received an account of their proceedings, together with a string of wampum and a bundle of skins to brighten the cabin.” … A work of this kind, if well executed, cannot fail to make the fortune of the undertaker.1
Read’s paper, just cited, is a valuable review of the impact of Americanisms upon the English in the Eighteenth Century, and I have made further use of it in what follows. He undertook a diligent search, not only of the more obvious English literature of the time, but also of many obscure books and periodicals. In the Connoisseur for 17602 he found a brief humorous sketch showing that the English were beginning to find a certain pungency in such American locutions as sachem, wampum, war-whoop and to scalp, and a little while later references to them multiplied. In the 1780s, says Read, John Wilkes was greatly struck by the American sense of cleared, relating to woodland, and in 1794 Thomas Cooper, in his “Some Information Respecting America,” was explaining that it meant “the small trees and shrubs grubbed up, and the larger trees cut down about two feet from the ground.” The American delight in cleared land rather amazed these Englishmen, for in their own country forests were cherished, and one of the standing English objections to Scotland was that it was almost bare of trees. Dr. Johnson, as everyone knows, hated all things American, and it was hardly to be expected that he would admit any Americanism into his Dictionary of the English Language (1755); nevertheless, according to Edmund Malone, he quoted an American-born author, Charlotte Lennox, as authority for the use of two words,3 one of which, talent, had a satellite adjective, talented, that was to be denounced as a vile and intolerable Americanism when it began to be used toward the end of the century.1 Johnson himself once condescended to use an Americanism in the Idler2 to wit, tomahawk, but he at least had the decency to change it into tom-ax. In 1756, a year after his Dictionary was published, he was sneering in a review in the London Magazine at the “mixture of the American dialect” in Lewis Evans’s “Geographical, Historical, Philosophical and Mechanical Essays,”3 and calling it “a tract4 of corruption to which every language widely diffused must always be exposed.” “Johnson,” says Read, “probably was offended by such of Evans’s words as portage, statehouse, creek, gap, upland, spur (glossed as ‘spurs we call little ridges jetting out from the principal chains of mountains, and are of no long continuing’), branch, back of, or fresh (noun).”
But not all Englishmen of that era were as hostile to American speechways as Johnson. I have heard of none, in the Eighteenth Century, who actually praised American neologisms, but there were some, at least, who noted with approval that most educated Americans used very few of them. Thus Sir Herbert Croft, Bart., in 1797:
[The] natives write the language particularly well, considering they have no dictionary yet, and how insufficient Johnson’s is. Washington’s speeches seldom exhibited more than a word or two, liable to the least objection; and, from the style of his publications, as much, or more accuracy may be expected from his successor, Adams.5
The Monthly Review, which is described by William B. Cairns1 as “always kindly toward America,” praised the contents of “Addresses and Recommendations of the States,” issued by Congress, as “pieces of fine, energetic writing and masterly eloquence.” It would be, it said, “a curious speculation for the philosophical inquirer to account for the perfections to which the English language has been carried in our late colonies, amidst the distresses, the clamors and horrors of war.”2 Benjamin Franklin’s writings were nearly always praised by the English reviewers, but Franklin had spent so much time in England that he wrote like an Englishman, and was himself dubious about most Americanisms. Paine also got a pretty good press, probably on the score of his English birth, though his atheism alarmed the more orthodox reviewers, but even the friendly Monthly protested that many of his words and phrases were “such as have not been used by anybody before, and such as we would not advise anybody to use again.” Jefferson was also cried down because of his free-thinking, but even more because of his free use of such Americanisms as to belittle.3 Most of the English travelers before 1800 reported that the Americans, at least of the educated class, spoke English with a good accent. Indeed, one of them, Nicholas Cresswell,4 declared that they spoke it better than the English. But this favorable verdict was mainly grounded on the discovery that there were no marked dialects in America. “Accustomed as he was to the diversity of dialect in his own island,” says Read, “the Englishman found a principal subject of comment in the purity and uniformity of English in America.”5 This was before the Oxford dialect of today had appeared in England, and there was but little uniformity of pronunciation, even in the court circles of London.
4. [The first all-out attack on Americanisms came in 1781 from a Briton living in America, and otherwise ardently pro-American. He was John Witherspoon, president of Princeton, a member of the Continental Congress, and a signer of the Declaration of Independence.] His observations were printed in the Pennsylvania Journal and Weekly Advertiser of Philadelphia on May 9, 16, 23 and 30, 1781, under the general heading of “The Druid.” He began by admitting that “the vulgar in America speak much better than the vulgar in Great Britain, for a very obvious reason, viz., that being much more unsettled, and moving frequently from place to place, they are not so liable to local peculiarities either in accent or phraseology. There is a greater difference in dialect,” he went on, “between one county and another in Britain than there is between one state and another in America.” But in sharp dissent from some of the Englishmen lately quoted, he argued that “gentlemen and scholars” in the new Republic were much less careful and correct in their “public and solemn discourses” than the corresponding dignitaries of the Old Country. He coined the word Americanism1 to designate the novelties they affected, and explained that he did not mean it to be opprobrious but simply desired it to be accepted as “similar in its formation and signification to the word Scotticism.” “There are many instances,” he explained, “in which the Scotch way is as good, and some in which every person who has the least taste as to the propriety or purity of a language in general must confess that it is better than that of England, yet speakers and writers must conform to custom.” He then proceeded to list Americanisms in seven classes, the first of which included “ways of speaking peculiar to this country.” Of these ways he presented twelve examples, as follows:
1. The United States, or either of them. This is so far from being a mark of ignorance, that it is used by many of the most able and accurate speakers and writers, yet it is not English. The United States are thirteen in number, but in English either does not signify one of many, but one or the other of two. I imagine either has become an adjective pronoun by being a sort of abbreviation of a sentence where it is used adverbially, either the one or the other. It is exactly the same with ekateros in Greek, and alteruter in Latin.
2. This is to notify the publick; or the people had not been notified. By this is meant inform and informed. In English we do not notify the person of the thing, but notify the thing to the person. In this instance there is certainly an impropriety, for to notify is just saying, by a word of Latin derivation, to make known. Now if you cannot say this is to make the public known, neither ought you to say this is to notify the public.
3. Fellow countrymen. This is a word of very frequent use in America. It has been heard in public orations from men of the first character, and may be daily seen in newspaper publications. It is an evident tautology, for the last word expresses fully the meaning of both. If you open any dictionary you will find the word countryman signifies one born in the same country. You may say fellow citizens, fellow soldiers, fellow subjects, fellow Christians, but not fellow countrymen.
4. These things were ordered delivered to the army. The words to be are omitted. I am not certain whether this is a local expression or general in America.
5. I wish we could contrive it to Philadelphia. The words to carry it, to have it carried, or some such, are wanting. It is a defective construction; of which there are but too many that have already obtained in practice, in spite of all the remonstrances of men of letters.
6. We may hope the assistance of God. The word for or to receive is wanting. In this instance hope, which is a neuter verb, is turned into an active verb, and not very properly as to the objective term assistance. It must be admitted, however, that in some old English poets, hope is sometimes used as an active verb, but it is contrary to modern practice.
7. I do not consider myself equal to this task. The word as is wanting. I am not certain whether this may not be an English vulgarism, for it is frequently used by the renowned author of “Common Sense,”1 who is an Englishman born; but he has so happy a talent of adopting the blunders of others, that nothing decisive can be inferred from his practice. It is, however, undoubtedly an Americanism, for it is used by authors greatly superior to him in every respect.
8. Neither to-day or to-morrow. The proper construction is, either the one or the other, neither the one nor the other.
9. A certain Thomas Benson. The word certain, as used in English, is an indefinite, the name fixes it precisely, so that there is a kind of contradiction in the expression. In England they would say a certain person called or supposed to be Thomas Benson.
10. Such bodies are incident to these evils. The evil is incident or ready to fall upon the person, the person liable or subject to the evil.
11. He is a very clever man. She is quite a clever woman. How often are these phrases to be heard in conversation! Their meaning, however, would certainly be mistaken when heard for the first time by one born in Britain. In these cases Americans generally mean by clever only goodness of disposition, worthiness, integrity, without the least regard to capacity; nay, if I am not mistaken, it is frequently applied where there is an acknowledged simplicity or mediocrity of capacity. But in Britain, clever always means capacity, and may be joined either to a good or bad disposition. We say of a man, he is a clever man, a clever tradesman, a clever fellow, without any reflection upon his moral character, yet at the same time it carries no approbation of it. It is exceeding good English, and very common to say, He is a clever fellow, but I am sorry to say it, he is also a great rogue. When cleverness is applied primarily to conduct and not to the person, it generally carries in it the idea of art or chicanery not very honourable; for example — Such a plan I confess was very clever, i.e., sly, artful, well contrived, but not very fair.
12. I was quite mad at him, he made me quite mad. This is perhaps an English vulgarism, but it is not found in any accurate writer, nor used by any good speaker, unless when poets or orators use it as a strong figure, and, to heighten the expression, say, he was mad with rage.
Looking back from the distance of more than a century and a half, it seems rather strange that Witherspoon should have been able to amass so few “ways of speaking peculiar to this country.” Of the twelve that he listed, Nos. 5, 6 and 10 have long since vanished, No. 11 is pretty well played out, and Nos. 1 and 8 are still belabored by the American schoolma’am.1 The others remain sound American to this day. To notify did not, in fact, originate in America, but was in use in England in the Fifteenth Century, though by the end of the Seventeenth it had dropped out there; since then it has been an Americanism. Fellow countrymen must have been a novelty in Witherspoon’s time, for the DAE’s first example is taken from his denunciation of it, but it is now in perfectly good usage. So is the omission of to be in “These things were ordered delivered to the army,” though purists may often restore it; and so, again, is the omission of as from “I do not consider myself equal to this task.” Witherspoon’s objection to the use of certain before a full name was mere pedantry. There may be, in fact, more than one Thomas Benson; indeed, there may be more than one Franklin D. Roosevelt. Mad, in England, is commonly used to designate what we call crazy, but it is by no means unknown in the sense of angry. The NED traces it in that sense to the Fourteenth Century and says that it is the ordinary word for angry in some of the English dialects. But it is much more commonly heard in the United States than in England, and most Englishmen regard it as an Americanism.
Witherspoon’s second category of errors consisted of “vulgarisms in England and America” and his third of “vulgarisms in America only.” Among the former he listed an’t (now ain’t), can’t, han’t (now haven’t),1 don’t, shouldn’t, wouldn’t, couldn’t, knowed for knew, see for saw, this here, that there, drownded, gownd, fellar, waller for wallow, winder for window, on ’em for of ’em, lay for lie, thinks in the first person singular, has for have, as following equally, most highest, had fell, had rose, had spoke, had wrote, had broke, had threw, had drew, sat out for set out, and as how. Most of these are common vulgarisms, discussed in Chapter IX of AL4. The astonishing thing is that Witherspoon reported them in use by “gentlemen and scholars” in America. “There is great plenty,” he said, “to be found everywhere in writing and conversation. They need very little explication, and indeed would scarcely deserve to be mentioned in a discourse of this nature were it not for the circumstance … that scholars and public persons are at less pains to avoid them here than in Britain.” Apparently the American politicians of those days, encountered by Witherspoon in the New Jersey constitutional convention, in the Continental Congress and on the stump, were as careless of their parts of speech as those of today — and no doubt as calculatingly so. As for can’t, don’t, shouldn’t, wouldn’t and couldn’t, they are obviously quite sound in both English and American. As for ain’t, it is apparently coming into countenance in the United States, even among pedagogues.
Witherspoon’s list of “vulgarisms in America only” was thus set forth in the second of his “Druid” papers:
1. I have not done it yet, but am just going to. This is an imperfect construction; it wants the words do it. Imperfect constructions are the blemish of the English language in general, and rather more frequent in this country than in England.
2. It is partly all gone, it is mostly all gone. This is an absurdity or barbarism, as well as a vulgarism.
3. This is the weapon with which he defends himself when he is attacted, for attacked; or according to the abbreviation, attack’d.
4. As I told Mr. —–, for as I told you, I hope Mr. —– is well this morning — What is Mr. —’s opinion upon this subject? This way of speaking to one who is present in the third person, and as if he were absent, is used in this country by way of respect. No such thing is done in Britain, except that to persons of very high rank, they say your Majesty, your Grace, your Lordship; yet even there the continuance of the discourse in the third person is not customary.
5. I have been to Philadelphia, for at or in Philadelphia; I have been to dinner, for I have dined.
6. Walk in the house, for into the house.
7. You have no right to pay it, where right is used for what logicians would call the correlative term obligation.
8. A spell of sickness, a long spell, a bad spell. Perhaps this word is borrowed from the sea dialect.
9. Every of these states, every of them, every of us; for every one. I believe the word every is used in this manner in some old English writers, and also in some old laws, but not in modern practice. The thing is also improper, because it should be every one to make it strictly a partitive and subject to the same construction as some of them, part of them, many of them, &c., yet it must be acknowledged that there is no greater impropriety, if so great, in the vulgar construction of every than in another expression very common in both countries, viz., all of them.
At the end of this list Witherspoon charged, as in the case of the other list, that even the worst barbarisms on it were affected in his day by Americans of condition. He ascribed this habit to a desire to avoid “bombast and empty swelling,” and though he did not say so, I suspect again that a desire to curry favor with voters may have had something to do with it. The first of his caveats has certainly not disposed of the elision he condemns: “I have not done it yet, but I am just going to” is perfectly good American idiom at this moment. So is “I have been to Philadelphia.” So is the free use of spell to designate a stretch of time or action. The DAE traces the latter, in the form of “a spell of weather,” to 1705: it was not encountered in England until 1808. In the more general sense, as in “I’ll continue a spell,” it goes back to 1745, and in the form of “a spell of sickness” to 1806. It must be remembered that the DAE’s examples do not always show the first actual use; all they indicate is the first printed use encountered by its searchers. The forms denounced by Witherspoon in his fourth and ninth counts are now extinct, but those mentioned in his second and seventh still survive in the vulgar speech, and so does attacted or attackted.
His fourth list, devoted to “local phrases or terms,” shows that, despite his statement that the Americans of his time were not “liable to local peculiarities either in accent or phraseology,” there were still differences in regional dialect. He offers, unfortunately, but seven examples, so his list is not very illuminating. Three are ascribed to New England or “the northern parts”: the use of considerable as a general indicator of quality or quantity, the use of occasion as a substitute for opportunity, and the use of to improve in such a sentence as “He improved the horse for ten days,” meaning he rode it. The DAE says that this use of considerable is old in English, and the NED cites an example from Hobbes’s “Leviathan,” 1651. But the Americans seem to have employed the adjective much more freely than the English, and may have originated its application to material things, as in considerable snow and considerable money. Combined with of, as in considerable of a shock, it appears to be clearly American. The other New Englandisms that Witherspoon mentions survive only in rural dialects. He offers two specimens of “improprieties” from the South and two from the middle colonies. The former are raw salad for salad and the verb to tote, which he spells tot. Raw salad does not appear in the DAE, but to tote goes back to the Seventeenth Century, and is still in wide use. It is, in fact, a perfectly good word. Witherspoon’s two examples from the middle colonies are chunk, in the sense of a half-burned piece of wood, and once in a while in the sense of occasionally, as in “He will once in a while get drunk.” Chunk is but little used in English, but it is very familiar in American, and in many senses indicating a thick object. Once in a while for occasionally was apparently a novelty in Witherspoon’s day, for the DAE’s first example of it is taken from his denunciation of it. It is still somewhat rare in English, but in American it has long been perfectly sound idiom.
Witherspoon’s fifth category of Americanisms is made up of “common blunders through ignorance.” The first is the misuse of eminent for imminent, and he follows with the misuse of ingenious for ingenuous, successfully for successively, intelligible for intelligent, confisticate for confiscate, fictious for fictitious, susceptive for susceptible, veracity for credibility, detect for dissect, scrimitch for skirmish, duplicit as an adjective from duplicity, and rescind for recede. Most of these must have been rarely encountered among educated persons, even in Witherspoon’s day. He says specifically, however, that one of them, the substitution of veracity for credibility, was “not a blunder in conversation, but in speaking and writing.” The example he gives is “I have some doubt of the veracity of this fact.” Well, why not? Veracity has been used as a synonym of truth by some of the best English authors, including Samuel Johnson. In fact, the NED’s second definition of it is “agreement of statement or report with the actual fact or facts; accordance with truth; correctness, accuracy.” As for scrimitch, it is obviously only a bad reporting of scrimmage, not a manhandling of skirmish. In the precise sense of skirmish it goes back in English to the Fifteenth Century. In America it was in common use during the Revolution, and since the post-Civil War period it has been made familiar as a football term, often used figuratively in the general speech. Witherspoon, in fact, had a bad ear, and not only missed many salient Americanisms, but reported others that probably did not exist. He was archetypical of the academic bigwigs of his day, and showed many of the weaknesses that have since marked the American schoolma’am.
His sixth class of improprieties consists of “cant phrases introduced into public speaking or composition.” Most of them are what we would now call slang, e.g., to take in (to swindle), to bilk, to bite (to swindle), quite the thing, not the thing, to bamboozle, to sham Abraham. All of these save to sham Abraham (a sailor’s locution, meaning to pretend illness) are now in common use, and not one of them originated in America. Witherspoon, always prissy, reproved Johnson for admitting to bamboozle to the Dictionary, but he was nevertheless intelligent enough to see that the fate of a word is not determined by lexicographers, but by public opinion. “It is first,” he said, “a cant phrase; secondly, a vulgarism; thirdly, an idiom of the language. Some expire in one or other of the two first [sic] stages; but if they outlive these they are established forever.… I think topsy-turvy and upside-down have very nearly attained the same privilege.”
He was right about both. Topsy-turvy, as a matter of fact, had been in familiar use in England since the early Sixteenth Century, and today not even the most fanatical purist would think of questioning it. Upside-down is two centuries older, and quite as respectable. It appeared in the Coverdale Bible, 1535, and occurs five times in the Authorized Version.1 It was used by Chaucer, Gower, Spenser and Addison, and got into the Encyclopedia Britannica ten years after Witherspoon discussed it.
His seventh and last category comprises “personal blunders, that is to say, effects of ignorance and want of precision in an author, which are properly his own and not reducible to any of the heads above mentioned.”2 These throw a revealing light upon the sad state of American writing in 1781, but have little to do with the subject of Americanisms. His examples are:
1. The members of a popular government should be continually availed of the situation and condition of every part.
2. A degree of dissentions and oppositions under some circumstances, and a political lethargy under others, impend certain ruin to a free state.
3. I should have let your performance sink into silent disdain.
4. He is a man of most accomplished abilities.
5. I have a total objection against this measure.
6. An axiom as well established as any Euclid ever demonstrated.
Witherspoon hints that he found these in the political writing of the time. All they show is that when the primeval American politicians tried to imitate the bow-wow manner of their elegant opposite numbers in England, they sometimes came to grief. In fact, they still do. No. 6, I suspect, was introduced mainly to show off Witherspoon’s own learning. It must have been a considerable satisfaction for a president of Princeton to be able to inform a non-academic publicist that Euclid “never demonstrated axioms, but took them for granted.”3
Witherspoon’s account of the Americanisms prevailing in his day must be received with some caution, for he was a Scotsman and had never lived in London. Wyld shows in “A History of Modern Colloquial English” that not a few of the words, phrases and pronunciations that he denounced in America were commonly heard in the best English society of the time. Mathews, below cited, reprints two letters from readers that appeared in the Pennsylvania Journal in June, 1781, commenting upon the “Druid” articles. The first, published June 20, was signed X and included the following additional list of alleged Americanisms:
Manured for inured.
Bony-fidely for bona fide.
Scant-baked and slack-baked, meaning deficient in understanding.
Sarten for certainly.
Nice for handsome.
E’en amost and e’en just for almost.
Tarnal for eternal.
Grand for excellent.
Keount for count.
Keow for cow.
Darn for d—–d.
To swear e’en amost like a woodpile.
Power for multitude.
To these the writer appended a “speech said to have been made by a member of an important public body, soon after the evacuation of Ticonderoga,” as follows:
General Clear behaved with great turpitude at the vacation of Ty; Gen. Burgoyne shot language at our people, thinking thereby to intimate them; but it only served to astimate them, for they took up the very dientical language, and shot it back again at the innimy and did great persecution; for their wounds purified immediately.
This anticipation of the later struggles of colored preachers with hard words (a favorite subject of American humor in the 1850–1900 period) is scarcely, of course, worth recording, save perhaps as an indicator of the primitiveness of philological discussion in that era. It is, indeed, not at all impossible that the whole communication was intended to be a sort of burlesque of Witherspoon. Manured for inured is not listed in the DAE, and probably was never in use. Nor does the DAE list bony-fidely, scant-baked or slack-baked. Sarten, as an illiterate or dialectical form of certain, goes back to the Fifteenth Century, and still survives in the speech of Appalachia.1 Nice for handsome is encountered in many English dialects, and tarnal lives on in various American dialects.2 Grand in the sense of excellent is now almost good American; set beside swell, indeed, it takes on a certain elegance. Power, in the sense of a multitude, was used by Thomas Fuller in “The Worthies of England,” c. 1661, and retained such respectability in England until 1803 that it appeared in “Thaddeus of Warsaw,” published in that year by the refined lady author, Jane Porter. As for a’most, Wyld shows1 that it was commonly heard in England, even in good society, in the early Eighteenth Century. It was listed without objection in a work on phonology published by one Jones, a Welshman, in 1701. Many other words in which l follows a, at that time, dropped the l, for example, almanac, falter, falcon, and the proper nouns, Talbot, Walter and Falmouth.
The second letter to the Pennsylvania Journal on Witherspoon’s “Druid” papers was signed Quercus, and consisted mainly of frank spoofing of the learned and rev. grammarian on his own failings in English. There were, in fact, many slips in his four articles, especially misplacings of only, as in “The poor man only meant to say,” and a certain shakiness in number, as in “The scholars … write all their life afterward.” Good Witherspoon, in truth, was not only the first American writer on “correct” English, but also a shining exemplar of the failings of the whole fraternity, now so numerous, for it is a lamentable fact that but one book on “good” writing has ever been written by an author of any recognized capacity as a writer. That exception was by Ambrose Bierce — and his “Write It Right,” published in 1909, was so pedantic and misleading as to be worse than most of the treatises of the pedagogues.
7. [John Adams wrote to the president of Congress from Amsterdam on September 5, 1780, suggesting that Congress set up an academy for “correcting, improving and ascertaining the English language.”] This was not the first proposal of the sort. In the January 1774, issue of the Royal American Magazine, a writer signing him self An American published a short article suggesting the organization of what he called the Fellows of the American Society of Language. Krapp hazards the opinion that An American was probably Adams, and I am inclined to agree. Most of the text of the letter is given in AL4, p. 8. The rest follows:
I conceive that such a society might easily be established, and that great advantages would thereby accrue to science, and consequently America would make swifter advances to the summit of learning. It is perhaps impossible for us to form an idea of the perfection, the beauty, the grandeur, and sublimity to which our language may arrive in the progress of time, passing through the improving tongues of our rising posterity, whose aspiring minds, fired by our example and ardor for glory, may far surpass all the sons of science who have shone in past ages, and may light up the world with new ideas bright as the sun.1
Adams’s letter to the president of Congress, omitting the first paragraph, was as follows:
Most of the nations of Europe have thought it necessary to establish by public authority institutions for fixing and improving their proper languages. I need not mention the academies in France, Spain, and Italy, their learned labors, nor their great success. But it is very remarkable, that although many learned and ingenious men in England have from age to age projected similar institutions for correcting and improving the English tongue, yet the government have never found time to interpose in any manner; so that to this day there is no grammar nor dictionary extant of the English language which has the least public authority; and it is only very lately that a tolerable dictionary has been published, even by a private person, and there is not yet a passable grammar enterprised by any individual.
The honor of forming the first public institution for refining, correcting, improving, and ascertaining2 the English language, I hope is reserved for congress; they have every motive that can possibly influence a public assembly to undertake it. It will have a happy effect upon the union of the States to have a public standard for all persons in every part of the continent to appeal to, both for the signification and pronunciation of the language. The constitutions of all the States in the Union are so democratical that eloquence will become the instrument for recommending men to their fellow-citizens, and the principal means of advancement through the various ranks and offices of society.
In the last century Latin was the universal language of Europe. Correspondence among the learned, and indeed among merchants and men of business, and the conversation of strangers and travellers, was generally carried on in that dead language. In the present century, Latin has been generally laid aside, and French has been substituted in its place, but has not yet become universally established, and, according to present appearances, it is not probable that it will. English is destined to be in the next and succeeding centuries more generally the language of the world than Latin was in the last or French is in the present age. The reason of this is obvious, because the increasing population in America, and their universal connection and correspondence with all nations will, aided by the influence of England in the world, whether great or small, force their language into general use, in spite of all the obstacles that may be thrown in their way, if any such there should be.
It is not necessary to enlarge further, to show the motives which the people of America have to turn their thoughts early to this subject; they will naturally occur to congress in a much greater detail than I have time to hint at. I would therefore submit to the consideration of congress the expediency and policy of erecting by their authority a society under the name of “the American Academy for refining, improving, and ascertaining the English Language.” The authority of congress is necessary to give such a society reputation, influence, and authority through all the States and with other nations. The number of members of which it will consist, the manner of appointing those members, whether each State shall have a certain number of members and the power of appointing them, or whether congress shall appoint them, whether after the first appointment the society itself shall fill up vacancies, these and other questions will easily be determined by congress.
It will be necessary that the society should have a library consisting of a complete collection of all writings concerning languages of every sort, ancient and modern. They must have some officers and some other expenses which will make some small funds indispensably necessary. Upon a recommendation from congress, there is no doubt but the legislature of every State in the confederation would readily pass a law making such a society a body politic, enable it to sue and be sued, and to hold an estate, real or personal, of a limited value in that State.1
Despite this ardent advocacy of an academy “for refining, improving and ascertaining the English language” in America, Adams does not seem to have joined the Philological Society that was organized in New York in 1788, with substantially the same objects. But Noah Webster, the lexicographer, was a member of it, and indeed the boss of it. It got under way on March 17 and apparently blew up early in 1789, after he had moved to Boston. Its only official acts of any importance, so far as the surviving records show, were to recommend his immortal spelling-book “to the use of schools in the United States, as an accurate, well-digested system of principles and rules,” and to take part in a “grand procession” in New York in July, “to celebrate the adoption of the Constitution by ten States.” Webster was told off to prepare a record of the society’s participation in the latter, and wrote the following:
The Philological Society
The secretary bearing a scroll, containing the principles of a Federal language.
Vice-president and librarian, the latter carrying Mr. Horne Tooke’s treatise on language, as a mark of respect for the book which contains a new discovery, and as a mark of respect for the author, whose zeal for the American cause, during the late war, subjected him to a prosecution.1
Josiah Ogden Hoffman, Esq., the president of the society,2 with a sash of blue and white ribbons. The standard-bearer, Mr. William Dunlap,3 with the arms of the society, viz. — argent three tongues, gules, in chief, emblematical of language, the improvement of which is the object of the institution. Chevron, or, indicating firmness and support; an eye, emblematical of discernment, over a pyramid or rude mountain, sculptured with Gothic, Hebrew and Greek letters. The Gothic on the light side, indicating the obvious origin of the American language from the Gothic. The Hebrew and Greek upon the reverse or shade of the monument, expressing the remoteness and obscurity of the connection between these languages and the modern. The crest, a cluster of cohering magnets, attracted by a key in the center, emblematical of union among the society in acquiring language, the key of knowledge, and clinging to their native tongue in preference to a foreign one. The shield, ornamented with a branch of the oak, from which is used the gall used in making ink, and a sprig of flax, from which paper is made, supported on the dexter side by Cadmus, in a robe of Tyrian purple, bearing in his right hand leaves of the rush or flag, papyrus, marked with Phoenician characters, representing the introduction of letters into Greece and the origin of writing. On the sinister side, by Hermes, or Taaut, the inventor of letters and god of eloquence, grasping his caduceus or wand. Motto — Concedat laurea linguae, expressive of the superiority of civil over military honors. The flag, embellished with the Genius of America, crowned with a wreath of 13 plumes, ten of them starred, representing the ten States which have ratified the Constitution. Her right hand pointing to the Philological Society, and in her left a standard with a pedant, inscribed with the word, CONSTITUTION. The members of the society in order, clothed in black.1
It is easy here to discern the hand of Webster, who had a deft talent for what is now known as public relations counselling or publicity engineering. The Philological Society was not the first organization of its sort to be projected in America, nor was the “American Academy for refining, improving and ascertaining the English language” suggested by Adams in his letter to the president of Congress in 1780, nor the American Society of Language proposed by An American (as I have noted, probably also Adams) in 1774. So early as 1721 Hugh Jones, professor of mathematics at William and Mary College, had adumbrated something of the sort in “An Accidence to the English Tongue,” the first English grammar produced in America.2 But nothing came of this, and it was not until the end of the century that any active steps were taken toward getting such a project under way.3 They resulted, in 1806, in the introduction of a bill in Congress incorporating a National Academy or National Institution, one of the purposes of which was to nurse and police the language, but that bill collided with a rising tenderness about States’ rights, and soon died in committee, though it was supported by John Adams’s son, John Quincy, then a Senator from Massachusetts. The projectors, however, did not despair, and in 1820 they organized an American Academy of Language and Belles Lettres in New York, with John Quincy Adams as president. Its objects were thus set forth in the first article of its constitution:
To collect, interchange and diffuse literary intelligence; to promote the purity and uniformity of the English language; to invite a correspondence with distinguished scholars in other countries speaking this language in common with ourselves; to cultivate throughout our extensive territory a friendly intercourse among those who feel an interest in the progress of American literature, and, as far as may depend on well meant endeavors, to aid the general cause of learning in the United States.1
There was but little indication here of a design to set up American standards. As a matter of fact, the academy was quite willing to accept English authority, and when it appointed a committee on Americanisms that committee was instructed “to collect throughout the United States a list of words and phrases, whether acknowledged corruptions or words of doubtful authority, which are charged upon us as bad English, with a view to take the best practical course for promoting the purity and uniformity of our language.” Its corresponding secretary and chief propagandist, William S. Cardell,2 made this plain in a letter to Thomas B. Robertson, Governor of Louisiana, on October 12, 1821:
Without any dogmatical exercise of authority, if such words as lengthy, to tote and to approbate3 should be published as doubtful or bad they would generally fall into disuse.
A formidable party of big-wigs supported the academy, including James Madison, former President of the United States; John Marshall, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court (who contributed $100 to its funds); Joseph Story and Brockholst Livingston, Associate Justices; Charles Carroll of Carrollton (who also contributed $100); Dr. John Stearns, founder of the State Medical Society of New York; John Trumbull, the last survivor of the Hartford Wits; John Jay, Chancellor James Kent, Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, William B. Astor, William Wirt, General Winfield Scott and various governors, senators, ambassadors, judges, congressmen and college presidents, but there were also some opponents, and one of them was Webster, though he consented grudgingly to being elected a corresponding member.1 “Such an institution,” he wrote to Cardell, apparently in 1820, “would be of little use until the American public should have a dictionary which should be received as a standard work.” This standard work, of course, was already in progress in Webster’s studio, but it was not to be published until 1828. Before it came out he launched a plan of his own for a sort of joint standing committee of American and English scholars to consider “such points of difference in the practise of the two countries as it is desirable to adjust,” but when he appointed Dr. Samuel Lee, professor of Arabic at Cambridge, to take charge of it in England the dons of the two universities refused to have anything to do with it. Others who opposed the American Academy of Language and Belles Lettres were Edward Everett, then editor of the North American Review, and Thomas Jefferson. Read suggests that “sectional jealousy, Boston against New York,” may have influenced Everett. Jefferson was offered the honorary presidency of the Academy, but refused it. When he was then elected an honorary member he wrote to Cardell from Monticello, January 27, 1821:
There are so many differences between us and England, of soil, climate, culture, productions, laws, religion and government, that we must be left far behind the march of circumstances, were we to hold ourselves rigorously to their standard. If, like the French Academicians, it were proposed to fix our language, it would be fortunate that the step were not taken in the days of our Saxon ancestors, whose vocabulary would illy express the science of this day. Judicious neology can alone give strength and copiousness to language, and enable it to be the vehicle of new ideas.
“Clearly,” says Read, “Jefferson was not sympathetic to the aims of an academy.” But though this one soon petered out, efforts to revive it in one form or another continued for years, and those efforts culminated, in 1884, in the launching of plans for what is now the American Academy of Arts and Letters, with the National Institute of Arts and Letters as its farm or antechamber.2
Among the members of the Philological Society of 1788 was Samuel Mitchill, a famous character of the era. This Mitchill, whose name was erroneously spelled Mitchell in my earlier editions, was a scientifico in general practise, and in his later years was called the Nestor of American science. Born on Long Island in 1764, he took his degree in medicine at Edinburgh, and on his return to the United States became professor of chemistry, natural history and philosophy at Columbia. In 1796 he undertook a geological tour of New York State that got him a lot of notice, and a year later he and two associates set up the Medical Repository, the first American medical journal. He joined the faculty of the College of Physicians and Surgeons when it was organized in 1807, and was at different times professor of natural history, of botany and of materia medica. He was an enlightened physician for his time, but succumbed to some of the crazes that characterized it. Fielding H. Garrison says,1 for example, that he was one of those who, following Lavoisier’s discovery of the physiological function of oxygen, “were carried away by their imaginations to the extent of attributing diseases either to lack or excess of oxygen, or to some fine-spun modification of this theory.” Mitchill’s interests and activities were by no means confined to the physical sciences. He also took a hand in politics, and after service in the New York Legislature and the national House of Representatives, was elected a United States Senator in 1804. He was likewise engrossed by language problems and by pedagogy, and one of his projects was the Americanization of the classical nursery rhymes, which he regarded as too monarchical in tendency for the children of a free democracy. Among other changes he advocated the following revision of “Sing a Song of Sixpence”:
And when the pie was opened
The birds they were songless;
Now, wasn’t that a funny dish
To set before the Congress!2
Of all the early American savants to interest themselves in the language of the country the one destined to be the most influential was Webster. A penetrating and amusing account of him is to be found in “Noah Webster, Schoolmaster to America,” by Harry R. Warfel.3 There was nothing of the traditional pedagogue about him — no sign of caution, policy, mousiness. He launched his numerous reforms and innovations with great boldness, and defended them in a forthright and often raucous manner. Frequently traveling in the interest of his spelling-book,1 he got involved in controversies in many places, and was belabored violently by a long line of opponents. Moreover, he took a hand in political, medical, economic and theological as well as philological disputes, and made a convenient target every time bricks were flying. Not many men have ever been more sure of themselves. It was almost impossible for him to imagine himself in error, and most of his disquisitions were far more pontifical than argumentative in tone. He had no respect for dignity or authority, and challenged the highest along with the lowest. Once he even went to the length of upbraiding the sacrosanct Washington — for proposing to send to Scotland for a tutor for the Custis children. When it came to whooping up his spelling-book he was completely shameless, and did not hesitate to demand encomiums from Washington, Jefferson and Franklin. Franklin responded with a somewhat equivocal letter and Washington with a frankly evasive one, but the franker Jefferson, though inclined to support the Websterian reforms, did not like Webster, and not only refused to help him but once denounced him as “a mere pedagogue, of very limited understanding and very strong prejudices and party passion.”2 Jeremy Belknap, founder of the Massachusetts Historical Society,3 sneered at him as “No-ur Webster eskwier junier, critick and coxcomb general of the United States”; Samuel Campbell, one of his many publishers, called him “a pedantic grammarian, full of vanity and ostentation,” and William Cobbett, while in Philadelphia in 1797, publishing Porcupine’s Gazette, denounced him as a “spiteful viper,” a “prostitute wretch,” a “demagogue coxcomb,” a “toad in the service of sans-culottism,” a “great fool and barefaced liar,” and a “rancorous villain.”4 Webster responded to these assaults in like terms. “His snarling wit,” says Warfel, “lacked the salt of Franklin’s good humor and of Francis Hopkinson’s rollicking fun. He had taken the nation for his scholars, and he used old-fashioned browbeating tactics.”1
But the fact remains that he was often right, and that not a few of the strange doctrines he preached so violently, at least in the field of language, gradually won acceptance. He came upon the scene at a time when there was a rising, if still inarticulate, rebellion against the effort to police English from above, and he took a leading hand in shaping and directing it. “The prevailing view of language in the Eighteenth Century,” say Sterling Andrus Leonard in “The Doctrine of Correctness in English Usage, 1700–1800,”2 “was that English could and must be subjected to a process of classical regularizing. Where actual usage was observed and recorded — even when the theory was promulgated that usage is supreme — this was, in general, done only to reform and denounce the actual idiom.” Webster’s natural prejudices, I believe, ran the same way, for he was not only a pedagogue but also a Calvinist, and not only a Calvinist but also a foe of democracy.3 Indeed, all his attacks upon authority were no more than arguments against the other fellow’s and in favor of his own. But he was far too shrewd to believe, like Johnson and most of the other English lexicographers and grammarians, that language could really be brought under the yoke. He had observed in his native New England that it was a living organism with a way of life of its own — that its process of evolution was but little determined by purely rational considerations. Thus, when he came to write his own books, he knew that the task before him was predominantly one of reporting rather than of philosophizing, of understanding before admonition. He saw clearly that English was undergoing marked changes in America, both in vocabulary and in pronunciation, and, though he might protest now and then, he was in general willing to accept them. The pronunciations he adopted were those of the educated class in New England, and he offered no resistance to American neologisms in vocabulary, provided only they were not what his Puritan soul regarded as “low.” When, after the publication of his trial-balloon Dictionary of 1806, he was taken to task for admitting into it such apparent barbarisms of the New World as customable and decedent,1 he defended them in a letter to Thomas Dawes, dated New Haven, August 5, 1809. “Such local terms exist,” he wrote, “and will exist, in spite of lexicographers or critics. Is this my fault? And if local terms exist, why not explain them? Must they be left unexplained because they are local? This very circumstance renders their insertion in a dictionary the more necessary, for, as the faculty of Yale College2 have said in approbation of this part of my work, how are such words to be understood without the aid of a dictionary?” And as in vocabulary, so in pronunciation. Great Britain, he wrote in the opening essay of his “Dissertations on the English Language,”3 “is at too great a distance to be our model, and to instruct us in the principles of our own tongue.… Within a century and a half North America will be peopled with a hundred millions of men, all speaking the same language.4 … Compare this prospect, which is not visionary, with the state of the English language in Europe, almost confined to an island and to a few millions of people; then let reason and reputation decide how far America should be dependent on a transatlantic nation for her standard and improvements in language.”5 “The differences in the language of the two countries,” he added in 1800,6 “will continue to multiply, and render it necessary that we should have dictionaries of the American language.” His standard of pronunciation, says Warfel,7 “was ‘general custom,’8 or, to use the more recent phrase, ‘standard usage.’ In this choice of current speech, rather than the university, dictionary or stage, as his source of correctness, he anticipated by nearly a century and a half the innovations of the National Council of Teachers of English.” “Common practise, even among the unlearned,” declared Webster in the preface to his “Dissertations,” “is generally defensible on the principles of analogy and the structure of the language.1 … The most difficult task now to be performed by the advocates of pure English is to restrain the influence of men learned in Greek and Latin but ignorant of their own tongue.”2
“Dissertations on the English Language” still makes excellent reading, and it is surprising that no literary archeologist has ever reprinted it. The book was begun while Webster was on one of his early tours of the States, trying to induce their legislatures to give him copyright on his “Grammatical Institute of the English Language,” which included his spelling-book.3 He says in his preface:
While I was waiting for the regular sessions of the legislatures … I amused myself in writing remarks on the English language, without knowing to what purpose they would be applied. They were begun in Baltimore in the Summer of 1785; and at the persuasion of a friend, and the consent of the Rev. Dr. Allison,… they were read publicly to a small audience in the Presbyterian church. They were afterward read in about twenty of the large towns between Williamsburg in Virginia and Portsmouth in New Hampshire. These public readings were attended with various success; the audiences were generally small, but always respectable; and the readings were probably more useful to myself than to my hearers. I everywhere availed myself of the libraries and conversation of learned men, to correct my ideas and collect new materials.4
Webster was convinced that “several circumstances render a future separation of the American tongue from the English necessary and unavoidable,” but, rather curiously, he thought that the greater changes would occur in English. Indeed, he believed that “the vicinity of the European nations, with the uninterrupted communication in peace and the changes of dominion in war, are gradually assimilating their respective languages.” This was a bad guess, nor has time yet borne out his prediction that English and American would eventually become mutually unintelligible, though he based it upon sound premisses:
Numerous local causes, such as a new country, new associations of people, new combinations of ideas in arts and science, and some intercourse with tribes wholly unknown to Europe, will introduce new words into the American tongue. These causes will produce, in a course of time, a language in North America as different from the future language of England as the modern Dutch, Danish and Swedish are from the German, or from one another — like remote branches of a tree springing from the same stock, or rays of light shot from the same center and diverging from each other in proportion as their distance from the point of separation.1
Webster was no philologian, in the modern sense; indeed, scientific philology was barely getting on its legs in the days of his early activity.2 It was thus no wonder that he leaned overheavily, in his etymological speculations, upon Holy Writ, and argued gravely that the original language of mankind must have been what he called Chaldee, i.e., what is now known as Biblical Aramaic. But despite this naïveté he was shrewd enough to see the relationship between such apparently disparate languages as Greek, Latin, English, French and Russian before their descent from a common ancestry was generally understood, and in particular he had the acumen to recognize English as a Germanic language, despite its large admixture of Latin and French terms. He hints, in his “Dissertations,”3 that it was a study of Horne Tooke’s “The Diversions of Purley”4 that convinced him of this last. He was a diligent student of the other English writers on language in his day, and saw that the overwhelming majority of them were quacks.5 “They seem not to consider,” he said, “that grammar is formed on language, and not language on grammar.” In his ponderous introduction to his American Dictionary6 he aired his knowledge of the principal foreign languages, such as it was, at length, and in his preface he described his method of study. “I spent ten years,” he said, “in the comparison of radical words, and in forming a synopsis of the principal words in twenty languages, arranged in classes under their primary elements or letters. The result has been to open what are to me new views of language, and to unfold what appear to be the genuine principles on which these languages are constructed.” Nor was all this show of learning mere blague. “In 1807,” says Warfel, “Webster had mastered twelve languages. Steadily, as grammars and dictionaries were made available, he penetrated the secrets of new languages or dialects. By 1813 he had learned twenty: Chaldaic, Syriac, Arabic, Samaritan, Hebrew, Ethiopic, Persian, Irish (Hiberno Celtic), Armoric, Anglo-Saxon, German, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, Russian, and, of course, English. Later he added Portuguese, Welsh, Gothic and the early dialects of English and German.… He was not only America’s first eminent lexicographer, but also her first notable comparative philologist.”1
11. [Webster dedicated his “Dissertations” to Franklin but Franklin delayed acknowledging the dedication until the last days of 1789, and then ventured upon no approbation of Webster’s linguistic Declaration of Independence.] According to Warfel, Webster first met Franklin in Philadelphia early in 1786, when he called upon the sage to ask for permission to deliver one of his lectures on language at the University of Pennsylvania, of whose board of trustees Franklin was then president. Franklin seems to have been but little impressed by Webster’s plan to set up a purely American standard of speech, but the two found a common ground in the matter of simplified spelling. Eighteen years before, in 1768, Franklin himself had published “A Scheme for a New Alphabet and a Reformed Mode of Spelling,”2 and was still very much interested in the subject. On May 24, 1786, Webster sent him an outline of a scheme of his own, and Franklin replied: “Our ideas are so nearly similar that I make no doubt of our easily agreeing on the plan.” They had frequent palavers on the subject in 1787, but could never come to terms. They remained, however, on a friendly footing, and Franklin’s delay in acknowledging the dedication of the “Dissertations” was due only to his last and very painful illness. He wrote on December 26, 1789, and died on April 17, 1790.
Despite his advocacy of a reform in spelling Franklin was by no means in favor of American independence in language; on the contrary, he was something of a purist, and accepted the dicta of the English authorities without cavil. Thus he was very cautious in his letter to Webster, and had praise only for “your zeal for preserving the purity of our language, both in its expressions and pronunciation, and in correcting the popular errors several of our States are continually falling into with respect to both.” Franklin then proceeded to list some of those “errors,” for example, to improve in the sense of to employ, to notify (a person), to advocate, opposed to and to progress. Of the first he said:
When I left New England in the year ’23 this word had never been used among us, as far as I know, but in the sense of ameliorated or made better, except once in a very old book of Dr. Mather’s, entitled “Remarkable Providences.” As that eminent man wrote a very obscure hand I remember that when I read that word in his book, used instead of the word imployed, I conjectured that it was an error of the printer, who had mistaken a too short l in the writing for an r, and a y with too short a tail for a v; whereby imployed was converted into improved.1
But when I returned to Boston, in 1773, I found this change had obtained favor, and was then become common, for I met with it often in perusing the newspapers, where it frequently made an appearance rather ridiculous. Such, for instance, as the advertisement of a country-house to be sold, which had been many years improved as a tavern;2 and, in the character of a deceased country gentleman, that he had been for more than 30 years improved as a justice-of-peace. The use of the word improved is peculiar to New England, and not to be met with among any other speakers of English, either on this or the other side of the water.
To improve, in the sense that Franklin complained of, has now become obsolete, but it continued in respectable usage long enough to be admitted to Webster’s American Dictionary in 1828. It still survived, indeed, in the edition of 1852, edited nine years after his death by his son-in-law, Chauncey A. Goodrich. He also gave his imprimatur to to notify, to advocate, opposed to, and to progress, and all of them are now in perfectly good usage. To notify (as in “The police were notified”) is not actually an Americanism, but it is much oftener encountered in this country than in England, and most Englishmen take it to be native here. The DAE’s first example of its use in America is dated 1697. To advocate is also English, and was used by Milton, but it dropped out in England in the Eighteenth Century, and in Webster’s day it was one of the “Americanisms” chiefly belabored by English purists. Opposed to and to progress have much the same history. Of the latter the NED says:
Common in England c. 1590–1670, usually stressed like the substantive. In 18th c. obs. in England, but app. retained (or formed anew) in America, where it became very common, c. 1790, with stress progréss. Thence readopted in England after 1800 (Southey 1809); but often characterized as an Americanism, and much more used in America than in Great Britain in sense in which ordinary English usage says go on, proceed.
After Franklin’s death in 1790 Webster published his letter in the American Mercury (New York), and used it as a text for fourteen articles on language.1 There was little sign in these articles of Franklin’s influence; they were radical rather than cautious. In one of them Webster actually argued for the use of them in such phrases as them horses. Such expressions, he said, “may be censured as vulgar, but I deny that they are ungrammatical.” He then went on to deny that they were even vulgar:
As far as records extend we have positive proof that these phrases were originally correct. They are not vulgar corruptions; they are as old as the language we speak, and nine-tenths of the people still use them. In the name of common sense and reason, let me ask, what other warrant can be produced for any phrase in any language? Rules, as we call them, are all formed on established practise and on nothing else. If writers have not generally admitted these phrases into their works it is because they have embraced a false idea that they are not English. But many writers have admitted them and they are correct English.
In his last article, printed August 30, 1790, Webster included the following exposition and defence of his general position:
Much censure has been thrown upon the writer of these remarks by those who do not comprehend his design, for attempting to make innovations in our language. His vanity prompts him to undertake something new, is the constant remark of splenetic and ill-natured people. But any person who will read my publications with a tolerable share of candor and attention will be convinced that my principal aim has been to check innovations, and bring back the language to its purity and original simplicity. In doing this I am sometimes obliged to call in question authorities which have been received as genuine and the most respectable, and this has exposed me to the charge of arrogance. I have, however, the satisfaction to find the ground I have taken is defensible; and that the principles for which I contend, though violently opposed at first, have afterwards been believed and adopted.1
At this time, in all probability, Webster was already at work upon his first dictionary, but it did not appear until 1806.2 The reception it got was certainly not altogether cordial; in fact, there were denunciations of it before it actually came out.3 Webster, always ready for a row, defended it both before and after publication. On June 4, 1800 he inserted a puff in the New Haven papers describing it as “a small dictionary for schools” and announcing that enlarged revisions, “one for the counting-house” and the other “for men of science,” would follow, but it was actually a very comprehensive work for its time and listed 5,000 more words than Johnson’s dictionary of 1755. His qualifications for the task of compiling it are thus rehearsed by Warfel:
1. “He had literally taken all knowledge for his province, and he had achieved distinction as a contributor in many departments,” e.g., law, medicine, economics and theology.
2. “In every essay he took time to define carefully each important term he used.… Fuzzy thinking, arising from fuzzy terminology, had led astray people and legislators alike. From the day he entered the newspaper scribbling contest in 1782 until his death he was writing definitions to help his countrymen think straight.”
3. He “delighted in etymological investigations.”
4. His “curiosity was fortified by the scholar’s greatest asset, patience.”1
But the best proof of his qualifications lay in the work itself. It was full of the author’s crotchets and prejudices, and many of its proposed reforms in spelling were so radical and so grotesque that even their author later abandoned them, but despite all these deficiencies it showed wide learning and hard common sense, and so it opened the way for the large American Dictionary of 1828. In all the years since its first publication there has been no working dictionary of English, of any value whatsoever, that does not show something of its influence. There are plain tracks of it even in the Concise Oxford Dictionary of the brothers Fowler.2
11. [In 1801 a savant using the nom de plume of Aristarcus delivered an attack on Webster in a series of articles contributed to the New England Palladium and reprinted in the Port Folio of Philadelphia.] There were three of these articles, and they were admirably summarized by Leon Howard in American Speech in 1930.3 The author, who has never been identified, objected to various real and imaginary Americanisms, among them, spry, lengthy, illy, sauce (in the sense of a vegetable), caucus, to wait on (in the sense of to wait for), and the use of grand and elegant as intensives of all work. Howard, in his commentary, shows that some of these were not Americanisms, but had been in use in England for many years. Spry is listed by the NED as “current in English dialects, but more familiar as an Americanism”; the DAE, however, does not give it at all. The NED’s first example is dated 1746, and is from an English dialect source; the first American example is dated 1789. The NED lists sauce, in the sense of a vegetable or salad, as “chiefly U.S.,” but its first quotation is from an English book of 1629, and it finds no use of the word in America until 1705. It says, following Bartlett,4 that long-sauce is used (or was used) in the United States to designate beets, carrots and parsnips, and short-sauce to designate potatoes, turnips, onions, pumpkins, etc. The DAE’s first example of long-sauce is dated 1809, and its first of short-sauce is dated 1815. Garden-sauce is traced to 1833. In the sense of stewed or preserved fruit, as in apple-sauce, sauce is undoubtedly an Americanism: the DAE’s first example is dated 1801. The word was then almost universally pronounced sass, as it is to this day by rustics. Cranberry-sauce is even older, for it is found in John Adams’s diary, April 8, 1767. To wait on is a hawking term, used of a hawk circling above the head of a falconer, waiting for a bird to be flushed, but it has been used in England in the sense of to wait for since the Seventeenth Century. In that sense it is now reduced to dialectical usage in this country,1 but in the sense of to court it still enjoys some vogue, especially in the South, and in that sense the DAE calls it an Americanism, tracing it to 1877. Grand and elegant, as mellifluous intensives, seem to be genuinely American, and many of the English travelers of the early days marked their prevalence. The DAE does not list grand, but the NED’s first example comes from John Pickering’s “Vocabulary or Collection of Words and Phrases Which Have Been Supposed to be Peculiar to the United States,” 1816. Elegant is traced by the DAE to 1764. The NED, whose first example is from Bartlett’s first edition of his Glossary, 1848, hints that it may owe something to the influence of the Irish iligant. But this surmise is probably only a hazard inspired by the date of Bartlett’s book, which came out before the close of the great Irish immigration to the United States. Caucus and lengthy are discussed elsewhere.
Howard suggests that the motive behind Aristarcus’s onslaught upon Americanisms and upon Webster’s effort to set up independent standards of speech in the United States was largely political. “The organ which placed its stamp of approval upon the papers, in reprinting them prominently,” he says, “was notoriously Federalistic and pro-British; and although Webster was definitely an opponent of Jefferson democracy and strongly Federalistic in his sympathies, he had attacked Alexander Hamilton during the previous year.” Like most of the other Englishmen and Anglomaniacs who wrote against Americanisms in his time, Aristarcus objected to them on the idiotic ground that they were unnecessary. In his first article2 he stated his case as follows:
A language, arrived at its zenith, like ours, and copious and expressive in the extreme, requires no introduction of new words. On the contrary, it is incumbent on literary men to guard against impurities, and chastise with critical lash all useless innovations. The decline of taste in a nation always commences when the language of its classical authors is no longer considered as authority. Colloquial barbarisms abound in all countries, but among no civilized peoples are they admitted with impunity into books, since the very admission would subject the writer to ridicule in the first instance and to oblivion in the second.
Now, in what can a Columbian dictionary differ from an English one, but in these barbarisms? Who are the Columbian authors who do not write in the English language and spell in the English manner, except Noah Webster, Junior, Esq.? The embryo dictionary then1 must either be a dictionary of pure English words, and in that case superfluous, as we already possess the admirable lexicon of Johnson, or else must contain vulgar, provincial words, unauthorized by good writers, and in this case must surely be the just object of ridicule and censure. If the Connecticut lexicographer considers the retaining of the English language as a badge of slavery, let him not give us a Babylonish dialect in its stead, but adopt at once the language of the aborigines.… If he will persist, in spite of common sense, to furnish us with a dictionary which we do not want, in return for his generosity I will furnish him with a title for it. Let, then, the projected volume of foul and unclean things bear his own Christian name, and be called “Noah’s Ark.”
The doctrine that the English language was already complete and sufficient and thus needed no enrichment from Yankee sources persisted among Englishmen and Anglomaniacs for a generation after Aristarcus’s time. Captain Basil Hall, who ventured into the American wilds in 1827 and 1828 and published an account of his sufferings on his return home,2 went so far in urging it as to visit Webster in New Haven and tackle him in person.
“But surely,” argued Hall, “such innovations are to be deprecated.”
“I don’t know that,” replied old Noah. “If a word becomes universally current in America, where English is spoken, why should it not take its station in the language?”
“Because,” replied Hall loftily, “there are words enough already.”
13. [There is an amusing compilation of some of the earlier English diatribes against American speechways in William B. Cairns’s “British Criticisms of American Writing, 1783—1815.”]1 More out of the same barrel are in Allen Walker Read’s “British Recognition of American Speech in the Eighteenth Century,”2 in the same author’s “Amphi-Atlantic English,”3 and in John Pickering’s “Vocabulary or Collection of Words and Phrases Which Have Been Supposed to be Peculiar to the United States of America.”4 Pickering, as we shall see in Section 4 of the present chapter, was inclined to acquiesce in the objections raised by British reviewers to the new words and phrases that were crowding into the American language of his time, but he was honest enough to quote those reviewers when they were idiotic as well as when, by his standards, they were more or less plausible, as, for example, when the Annual Review denounced the use of appellate in appellate court,5 the British Critic argued that have arrived should always be are arrived6 the Eclectic Review sneered at avails in the sense of the proceeds of property sold,7 and the Edinburgh frowned upon governmental.8 Not infrequently Pickering adopted the pawky device of showing that a locution complained of by one review was used by another, as, for example, derange, which the British Critic disapproved,9 but the Edinburgh employed without apology.10 This device was especially effective against an American imitator of the English — the intensely Anglo-maniacal Monthly Review of Boston. When it called presidential a “barbarism,” Pickering showed that the word had been used by the Quarterly Review,11 which surpassed all others in its animosity to America.
Cairns’s valuable monograph is mainly devoted to English criticism of American publications, but Read, in his two papers, also gives some account of the observations on the spoken language made by English travelers. Cairns’s conclusion is that the majority of the English and Scotch reviewers “were disposed to be fair, though they were unable to restrain the expression of their own feeling of superiority, and were likely to adopt a paternal, if not patronizing manner. The extremists of both sorts — those whose political conservatism led to bitterness in literary as in other judgments, and those whose liberalism led to absurd praise — were relatively few in number, but they were highly conspicuous; their articles were likely to be longer and to contain more quotable passages than the judicious estimates of the relatively unimportant literary work which America was at this time producing.” Most of the more eminent English literati of the post-revolutionary period, observes Cairns, took little interest in that work, and seldom so much as mentioned it. “Gibbon’s published letters,” he says, “discuss American political affairs, but contain no literary references.” Johnson was against everything American, but Boswell was indifferent. So was Crabbe. Cowper was much more interested in the theological uproars which engaged the citizens of the new Republic than in their contributions to beautiful letters. Blake’s poem, “America,” published in 1793, had a lot to say about soldiers and politicians, but nothing about literati. Coleridge met Washington Allston1 at Rome in 1806, and the two became friends, but Cairns says that the author of “The Ancient Mariner” “never refers to Allston’s poetical works.” Wordsworth also knew Allston, but apparently thought of him as a painter only, not as a writer. Scott admired Irving’s “Knickerbocker’s History of New York” and Freneau’s “Eutaw Springs” and had kind words for Charles Brockden Brown, but that is about as far as he went. Byron was delighted to hear that he was read in America, and wrote in his journal that “to be popular in a rising and far country has a kind of posthumous feel,”2 but there is no record that he ever lent (or gave) a hand to an American author or an American book. And so on down to Southey and Landor. Landor admired some of the American politicoes of his time, and proposed to dedicate one of his books to James Madison, but he showed no interest in either American literature or American Kultur in general, and when Southey sent him a bitter protest against this dedication,1 he replied complacently, “I detest the American character as much as you do.” Only Shelley seems to have discovered anything of genuine merit in American literature, and his discovery was limited to the novels of the aforesaid Charles Brockden Brown.2
Of the English and Scotch reviews of the time, Cairns says that those most constantly anti-American were the European Magazine and London Review, the Anti-Jacobin Review, the Edinburgh, the Quarterly, and the Monthly Mirror, and that those which showed most friendliness were the Monthly, the Literary Magazine and British Review, the Eclectic, the Scot’s Magazine and the Bee of Edinburgh, the last-named a weekly. The Anti-Jacobin and the Quarterly were not only hostile, but also scurrilous. Both were edited, at different times, by the William Gifford lately mentioned. The Anti-Jacobin specialized in reviling George Washington and the Quarterly in spreading scandal about Thomas Jefferson. The former, in 1788, denounced Washington as not only guilty of “the horrid crime of rebellion, which nothing but repentance can efface,” but also of the still worse infamy of deism. The latter propagated the fable that Jefferson maintained a harem of Negro mistresses at Monticello, and derived a large revenue from the sale of their (and his) children. In addition it accused Americans in general of a long list of incredible offenses against sound morals, among them, employing naked Negro women to wait upon them at table, and kidnapping Scotsmen, Welshmen and Hollanders and selling them into slavery.1 On the literary front both reviews were implacably contemptuous of American writing, and to their diatribes they commonly added flings at the whole of American civilization. Thus the Quarterly in two reviews2 quoted by Cairns:
No work of distinguished merit in any branch has yet been produced among them.… The founders of American society brought to the composition of their nation few seeds of good taste, and no rudiments of liberal science.
The English who toured America in the post-revolutionary period were, on the whole, more favorable in their comments, both upon the spoken and written speech of the new Republic and upon its institutions, than the English and Scotch reviewers. Even after the turn of the century they seem to have been generally friendly: it was only in the years following the War of 1812 that they took over the job of denouncing everything American. They noticed, of course, the strange neologisms that had appeared on this side of the water, and sometimes they were shocked by them, but in the main they showed a tolerant spirit, and were pleased to discover that the dialectical differences between the speech of various parts of the country were less marked than those familiar to them in Britain. This fact had been noted, indeed, before the Revolution — for example, by William Eddis, who came to America in 1769 and stayed until 1777. In a letter written on June 8, 1770 he said:
In England almost every county is distinguished by a peculiar dialect; even different habits and different modes of thinking discriminate inhabitants whose local situation is not far remote. But in Maryland and throughout the adjacent provinces it is worthy of observation that a striking similarity of speech unirersally prevails, and it is strictly true that the pronunciation of the generality of the people has an accuracy and elegance that cannot fail of gratifying the most judicious ear.… The language of the immediate descendants of a promiscuous ancestry is perfectly uniform and unadulterated, nor has it borrowed any provincial or national accent from its British or foreign parentage.… This uniformity of language prevails not only on the coast, where Europeans form a considerable mass of the people, but likewise in the interior parts, where population has made but slow advances, and where opportunities seldom occur to derive any great advantages from an intercourse with intelligent strangers.1
Testimony to the same effect was offered by Nicholas Cresswell, whose journal in America ran from 1774 to 1777. He said:
No county or colonial dialect is to be distinguished here, except it be the New Englanders’,2 who have a sort of whining cadence that I cannot describe.3
Nevertheless, the English travelers of the time noted that American speech was not quite identical with any form of English speech — that it made use of many words not heard in England, and was also developing certain peculiarities of pronunciation and intonation. “There are few natives of the United States,” wrote the editor of the London edition of David Ramsay’s “History of the American Revolution” in 1791, quoting an unnamed “penetrating observer,” “who are altogether free from what may be called Americanisms,4 both in their speech and their writing. In the case of words of rarer use they have framed their own models of pronunciation, as having little access to those established among the people from whom they have derived their language.” The more naïve travelers were sometimes astonished to discover that familiar objects had acquired new names in America. Thus Richard Parkinson, in “A Tour in America, 1798–1800”:5
It was natural for me to enquire what they kept their cows and horses on during the Winter. They told me — their horses on blades and their cows on slops.… [Blades] turned out to be blades and tops of Indian corn, and the slops were the same that are put into the swill-tub in England and given to hogs, composed of broth, dish-washings, cabbage-leaves, potato-parings, etc.6
Read lists some of the other novelties remarked by English travelers — lengthy and to advocate by Henry Wamsey in 1794;1 to loan, to enterprise, portage, immigration and boatable by Thomas Twining in 1796,2 and fork (of a road) by Thomas Anburey shortly before 1789.3 Most of these terms are discussed in other places. Boatable, an obvious coinage to designate streams too shallow to be called navigable, is traced by the DAE to 1683, when it was used by William Penn. To loan, in the sense of to lend, goes back in England to the Sixteenth Century and probably even beyond, but the NED marks it “now chiefly U.S.” The DAE’s first American example is dated 1729; it is now in such wide use in the United States that it has appeared in the text of laws, though purists still frown upon it. To enterprise seems to have died out. The DAE does not list it, and it is marked “archaic” by the NED, though John Ruskin used it in “Fors Clavigera” so recently as 1871.
13. [The famous sneer of Sydney Smith.] This gibe rankled in American bosoms for many years, and was still often cited, always with indignation, during the 90s of the last century, when I was first becoming aware of literary atrocities. It was printed in the first issue of the Edinburgh Review for 1820, as a sort of postscript to a review of Adam Seybert’s “Statistical Annals of the United States,”4 and, in accordance with the custom of the magazine, appeared anonymously, but its authorship was generally known and Smith acknowledged it when his reviews were reprinted in his Works in 1839.5 It is usually quoted only in part,6 so I here give the whole of it:
The Americans are a brave, industrious and acute people; but they have, hitherto, given no indications of genius, and made no approaches to the heroic, either in their morality or character. They are but a recent offset, indeed, from England; and they should make it their chief boast, for many generations to come, that they are sprung from the same race with Bacon and Shakespeare and Newton. Considering their numbers, indeed, and the favorable circumstances in which they have been placed, they have yet done marvellously little to assert the honor of such a descent, or to show that their English blood has been exalted or refined by their republican training and institutions.
Their Franklins and Washingtons, and all the other sages and heroes of their Revolution, were born and bred subjects of the King of England, — and not among the freest or most valued of his subjects. And since the period of their separation, a far greater proportion of their statesmen and artists and political writers have been foreigners than ever occurred before in the history of any civilized and educated people. During the thirty or forty years of their independence, they have done absolutely nothing for the sciences, for the arts, for literature or even for the statesman-like studies of politics or political economy. Confining ourselves to our own country, and to the period that has elapsed since they had an independent existence, we should ask where are their Foxes, their Burkes, their Sheridans, their Windhams, their Horners, their Wilber-forces? — where their Arkwrights, their Watts, their Davys? — their Robertsons, Blairs, Smiths, Stewarts, Paleys, and Malthuses? — their Porsons, Parrs, Burneys, or Bloomfields? — their Scotts, Rogers’s, Campbells, Byrons, Moores, or Crabbes? — their Siddons’s, Kembles, Keans, or O’Neils? — their Wilkies, Lawrences, Chantrys? — or their parallels to the hundred other names that have spread themselves over the world from our little island in the course of the last thirty years, and blest or delighted mankind by their works, inventions or examples? In so far as we know, there is no such parallel to be produced from the whole annals of this self-adulating race.
In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book? or goes to an American play? or looks at an American picture or statue? What does the world yet owe to American physicians or surgeons? What new substances have their chemists discovered? or what old ones have they analyzed? What new constellations have been discovered by the telescopes of Americans? What have they done in the mathematics? Who drinks out of American glasses? or eats from American plates? or wears American coats or gowns? or sleeps in American blankets? Finally, under which of the old tyrannical governments of Europe is every sixth man a slave, whom his fellow-creatures may buy and sell and torture?
When these questions are fairly and favorably answered, their laudatory epithets may be allowed; but till that can be done, we would seriously advise them to keep clear of superlatives.
There was enough truth in this to make it sting, and it kept on stinging long after all truth had vanished from it. It was not Smith’s first essay on America, nor his last. He had tackled the subject in 1818, in the form of a review of four books by English travelers, and he was to return to it in 1824. In the former article he said:
Literature the Americans have none — no native literature, we mean. It is all imported. They had a Franklin, indeed; and may afford to live half a century on his fame. There is, or was, a Mr. Dwight, who wrote some poems; and his baptismal name was Timothy.1 There is also a small account of Virginia by Jefferson, and an epic by Joel Barlow;1 and some pieces of pleasantry by Mr. Irving. But why should the Americans write books when a six weeks’ passage brings them, in their own tongue, our sense, science and genius, in bales and hogsheads? Prairies, steamboats, grist-mills, are their natural objects for centuries to come. Then, when they have got to the Pacific Ocean — epic poems, plays, pleasures of memory and all the elegant gratifications of an ancient people who have tamed the wild earth, and set down to amuse themselves. — This is the natural march of human affairs.
In his 1824 Edinburgh article Smith referred to the uproar that his sneers of 1820 had kicked up in the United States, but professed to believe (with obvious disingenuousness) that it was his 1818 article that was complained of. Thus:
It is rather surprising that such a people, spreading rapidly over so vast a portion of the earth, and cultivating all the liberal and useful arts so successfully, should be so extremely sensitive and touchy as the Americans are said to be. We really thought at one time they would have fitted out an armament against the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews, and burnt down Mr. Murray’s and Mr. Constable’s shops, as we did the American Capitol. We, however, remember no other anti-American crime of which we were guilty, than a preference of Shakespeare and Milton over Joel Barlow and Timothy Dwight. That opinion we must still take the liberty of retaining. There is nothing in Dwight comparable to the finest passages of “Paradise Lost,” nor is Mr. Barlow ever humorous or pathetic, as the great bard of the English stage is humorous and pathetic. We have always been strenuous advocates for, and admirers of, America — not taking our ideas from the overweening vanity of the weaker part of the Americans themselves, but from what we have observed of their real energy and wisdom.
As a matter of fact, Smith’s attitude toward the United States was generally friendly, and in all of his articles he set up contrasts, always favorable to America, between American ways and institutions and those of England.1 But after 1840 his friendliness vanished, for by that time he had inherited £50,000 from his brother, an Indian nabob, and had invested a substantial part of it in American State bonds. When the States, following the panic of 1837, began to repudiate those bonds, he yielded himself to moral indignation of a very high voltage, and in 1843 he published a volume called “Letters on American Debts” which was for years a favorite textbook of all the more extreme varieties of English Americophobes. Most of the bonds he held appear to have been issued by Pennsylvania, and it is probable that he really lost only the interest on them, for in the end the principal was repaid. But maybe he also owned a few of Mississippi, Michigan and Florida, which repudiated both principal and interest.
17. [John Pickering said, so late as 1816, that “in this country we can hardly be said to have any authors by profession.”]2 He added:
The works we have produced have, for the most part, been written by men who were obliged to depend upon other employments for their support, and who could devote to literary pursuits those few moments only which their thirst for learning stimulated them to snatch from their daily avocations. Our writings, therefore, though not deficient in ability, yet too frequently want that finishing, as artists term it, which is to be acquired only by long practise in writing, as in other arts; and this is a defect which, with scholars accustomed to highly-finished productions, can only be compensated by an extraordinary degree of merit in the substance of a work.
This was already something of an exaggeration, for Irving’s “Knickerbocker” had been published in 1809, the North American Review had been set up in 1815, and the Federalist, the writings of Franklin, Jefferson, Paine and Jonathan Edwards and all the novels of Charles Brockden Brown were behind Pickering as he wrote. But the great burgeoning was still ahead. In 1817 came Bryant’s “Thanatopsis”; in 1818, the poems of Samuel Woodworth, including “The Old Oaken Bucket”; in 1819, Irving’s “Sketch-Book”; in 1820, Cooper’s “Precaution”; in 1821, “The Spy”; in 1822, “Bracebridge Hall”; in 1823, three Cooper novels, and in 1824, “Tales of a Traveler” and the début of several lady poets who were destined to enchant not only Americans but also a wide circle in England.1 By 1828 so much progress had been made that Noah Webster was able to say in the preface to his American Dictionary that one of his aims in preparing it was to call attention to the writings of various American authors. He went on:
I do not indeed expect to add celebrity to the names of Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jay, Madison, Marshall, Ramsay, Dwight, Smith, Trumbull, Hamilton, Belknap, Ames, Mason, Kent, Hare, Silliman, Cleaveland, Walsh, Irving, and many other Americans distinguished by their writings or by their science; but it is with pride and satisfaction that I can place them, as authorities, on the same page with those of Boyle, Hooker, Milton, Dryden, Addison, Ray, Milner, Cowper, Davy, Thomson and Jameson.
It will be noted that Webster omitted Cooper, who had published seven novels by 1828, and that he also overlooked Jefferson, Paine, Edwards, Paulding, Bryant, Halleck, Schoolcraft, Audubon, Ticknor and Edward Everett, not to mention Poe, whose “Tamerlane and Other Poems” had come out pianissimo in 1827. Some of the names he listed so proudly are now forgotten by all save pedagogues, e.g., Ramsay, Belknap, Hare, Cleaveland and Walsh.
23. [After 1824, when the North American Review gave warning that if the campaign of abuse went on it would “turn into bitterness the last drops of good-will toward England that exists in the United States,” even Blackwood’s became somewhat conciliatory.]2 But this letting up did not last. Toward the end of the 30s the English reviews began again to belabor all things American, and especially American books, and during the decade following they had the enthusiastic support of a long line of English travelers, headed by Frances Trollope and Charles Dickens.3 During the 50s Harper’s Magazine made frequent protests against the unfairness of the current English notices of new American books. In October, 1851, for example, it took the London Athenaeum to task for a grossly prejudiced notice of Henry Theodore Tuckerman’s “Characteristics of Literature,”1 and complained that it was “systematically cold to American writers.” The month following2 Harper’s quoted and denounced a patronizing and idiotic review of Francis Parkman’s “History of the Conspiracy of Pontiac.”3 In 1864 Tuckerman struck back in “America and Her Commentators,” a well documented and very effective counterblast, but now so far forgotten that the Cambridge History of American Literature does not so much as mention it. To this day the English reviewers are generally wary of American books, and seldom greet them with anything properly describable as cordiality. In particular, they are frequently denounced on the ground that the Americanisms which spatter them are violations of the only true enlightenment.4
24. [Captain Thomas Hamilton, in his “Men and Manners in America, 1833,5 reported that even Americans “of the better orders” assumed “unlimited liberty in the use of expect, reckon, guess and calculate” and perpetrated “other conversational anomalies with remorseless impunity.”] Nearly every other English traveler of the first half of the century was likewise upset by the prevalence of the verbs mentioned. For example, John Palmer, who, in his “Journal of Travels in the United States of North America and in Lower Canada”; London, 1819, put his report into the following imaginary dialogue between himself and “a New England man settled in Kentucky” as an innkeeper:1
On arriving at the tavern door the landlord makes his appearance.
Landlord. Your servant, gentlemen. This is a fine day.
Answer. Very fine.
Landlord. You’ve got two nice creatures;2 they are right elegant3 matches.
Answer. Yes, we bought them for matches.
Landlord. They cost a heap4 of dollars (a pause and a knowing look) — 200, I calculate.
Answer. Yes, they cost a good sum.
Landlord. Possible!5 (A pause). Going westward to Ohio, gentlemen?
Answer. We are going to Philadelphia.
Landlord. Philadelphia, ah! That’s a dreadful1 large place, three or four times as big2 as Lexington.
Answer. Ten times as large.
Landlord. It is, by George! what a mighty heap of houses. (A pause). But I reckon3 you were not reared4 in Philadelphia.
Answer. Philadelphia is not our native place.
Landlord. Perhaps away up5 in Canada?
Answer. No, we are from England.
Landlord. Is it possible! Well, I calculated you were from abroad. (Pause). How long have you been from the old country?6
Answer. We left England last March.
Landlord. And in August here you are in Kentuck. Well, I should have guessed you had been in the state some years; you speak almost as good English as we do.1
Hamilton was one of the most amiable of the English travelers of the first half of the century, and described his adventures in the United States, says Nevins, “in a spirit of picturesque enjoyment rather than of censure.… Only rarely do we catch a captious accent in his book.” But he nevertheless found American English somewhat disconcerting, and in addition to noting the pestiferous prevalence of to expect, to reckon, to guess and to calculate, recorded the fact that he was vastly puzzled by hollow-ware, spider (in the sense of a skillet or frying-pan) and fire-dog. Hollow-ware was not actually an Americanism, despite the fact that it appeared strange to him. But spider, in the sense noted, seems to have originated in this country, and the DAE’s first example is dated 1790. Regarding fire-dog, in the sense of andiron, there has been some dispute. The DAE does not call the term an Americanism, but its first example, dated 1792, precedes by three-quarters of a century the first English example so far unearthed. In a catalogue of the exhibits of furniture and objects of arts at the Paris Exhibition of 1867 is the following:
M. Morisot is one of the most eminent of the Paris manufacturers of fenders, if so we are to term those indispensable necessaries that suit only the fireplaces of France and which resembled the ancient fire-dogs of England.2
Fender may be an Americanism, though this is also uncertain. The DAE’s first example, dated 1647, antedates the first recorded English example by forty-one years. In the sense of a fire-screen the word is undoubtedly American, and also in the sense of a bumper or cowcatcher. The English usually call an automobile fender a mudguard or wing.
25. [Captain Frederick Marryat, in “A Diary in America” (1839), observed that “it is remarkable how very debased the language has become in a short period in America,” and then proceeded to specifications.] This was the same Captain Marryat who wrote “Mr. Midshipman Easy,” “Jacob Faithful,” “Peter Simple” and various other nautical tales, and has been declared by at least one critic1 to have been, “excepting Walter Scott, the only [English] novelist of his period who might lay claim to eminence.” He had put in twenty-four years in the English Navy, and had served against the United States in the War of 1812, but the new Republic interested him greatly, and he came out in 1837 to have a look at it. His observations were recorded in two books, both published in the United States.2 What he had to say about American speechways was in his first book, under the heading of “Remarks, &c. &c. — Language.” It is reprinted in full by Mathews, and in part by Nevins, but it is sufficiently interesting to be summarized here, with annotations. Marryat refused to countenance the common boast of the Americans of his time that they spoke better English than the English: their speech, he argued, was actually a gallimaufry of all the dialects of England, and the fact that this heterogenous mixture had been “collected and bound up” in a dictionary by Noah Webster did not suffice to make it, in his judgment, a Kultursprache. Every Americanism that he investigated, he said, turned out to be either “a provincialism of some English county, or else obsolete English.”1 “The upper class of the Americans,” he went on, “do not speak or pronounce English according to our standard; they appear to have no exact rule to guide them, probably from the want of any intimate knowledge of Greek or Latin. You seldom hear a derivation from the Greek pronounced correctly, the accent being generally laid upon the wrong syllable. In fact, everyone appears to be independent, and pronounces just as he pleases. But it is not for me to decide the very momentous question as to which nation speaks the best English. The Americans generally improve upon the inventions of others; probably they may have improved upon our language.… Assuming this principle of improvement to be correct, it must be acknowledged that they have added considerably to our dictionary; but … this being a point of too much delicacy for me to decide upon I shall just submit to the reader the occasional variations, or improvements, as they may be, which met my ears during my residence in America, as also the idiomatic peculiarities, and having done so, I must leave him to decide for himself.” And then:
I recollect once talking to one of the first men in America, who was narrating to me the advantages which might have accrued to him if he had followed up a certain speculation, when he said, “Sir, if I had done so I should not only have doubled and trebled, but I should have fourbled, and fivebled my money.”2
The Americans dwell upon their words when they speak — a custom arising, I presume, from their cautious, calculating habits; and they have always more or less of a nasal twang. I once said to a lady: “Why do you drawl out your words in that way?” “Well,” she replied, “I’ll drawl all the way from Maine to Georgia rather than clip my words as you English people do.”
Many English words are used in a different sense from that which we attach to them; for instance, a clever person in America means an amiable, good-tempered person, and the Americans make the distinction by saying, “I mean English clever.” Our clever is represented by the word smart.
The verb to admire is also used in the East instead of the verb to like. “Have you ever been at Paris?” “No; but I should admire to go.”3
The word ugly is used for cross, ill-tempered. “I did feel so ugly when he said that.”1
Bad is used in an odd sense; it is employed for awkward, uncomfortable, sorry:
“I did feel so bad when I read that” — awkward.
“I have felt quite bad about it ever since” — uncomfortable.
“She was so bad I thought she would cry” — sorry.
And as bad is tantamount to not good I have heard a lady say: “I don’t feel at all good this morning.”2
Mean is occasionally used for ashamed. “I never felt so mean in my life.”3
The word handsome is oddly used. “We reckon this very handsome scenery, sir,” said an American to me, pointing to the landscape.4
“I consider him very truthful” is another expression. “He stimulates too much.” “He dissipates awfully.”5
And they are very fond of using the noun as a verb, as — “I suspicion that’s a fact,” “I opinion quite the contrary.”1
The word considerable is in considerable demand in the United States. In a work in which the letters of the party had been given to the public as specimens of good style and polite literature, it is used as follows: “My dear sister, I have taken up the pen early this morning, as I intend to write considerable.”2
The word great is oddly used for fine, splendid. “She’s the greatest gal in the whole Union.”3
But there is one word which we must surrender up to the Americans as their very own, as the children say. I will quote a passage from one of their papers: “The editor of the Philadelphia Gazette is wrong in calling absquatiated a Kentucky phrase. (He may well say phrase instead of word.) It may prevail there, but its origin was in South Carolina, where it was a few years since regularly derived from the Latin, as we can prove from undoubted authority. By the way, there is a little corruption in the word as the Gazette uses it: absquatalized is the true reading.” Certainly a word worth quarreling about!4
“Are you cold, miss?” I said to a young lady, who pulled the shawl closet-over her shoulders. “Some” was the reply.1
The English what?, implying that you did not hear what was said to you, is changed in America to the word how?2
Like all the other English travelers of his time Marryat noted the large use of guess, reckon and calculate in America. “Each term,” he said, “is said to be peculiar to different States, but I found them used everywhere, one as often as the other.”3
He gave a dialogue showing how to guess was used, following the lines of that offered by Henry Bradshaw Fearon in 1818. He noted the tendency in America for technical words and phrases to enter into the general speech by metaphor. For example:
In the West, where steam navigation is so abundant, when they ask you to drink they say, “Stranger, will you take in wood?” — the vessels taking in wood to keep the steam up, and the person taking in spirits to keep his steam up.
The roads in the country being cut through woods, and the stumps of the trees left standing, the carriages are often brought up by them. Hence the expression, “Well, I am stumped this time.”1
I heard a young man, a farmer in Vermont, say, when talking about another having gained the heart of a pretty girl, “Well, how he contrived to fork into her young affections2 I can’t tell, but I’ve a mind to put my whole team on, and see if I can’t run him off the road.”
The old phrase of straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel3 is, in the Eastern States, rendered straining at a gate and swallowing a saw mill.
To strike means to attack. “The Indians have struck on the frontier.” “A rattlesnake struck at me.”4
To make tracks — to walk away. “Well, now, I shall make tracks” — from footprints in the snow.5
Clear out, quit and put — all mean be off. “Captain, now, you hush or put” — that is, “either hold your tongue or be off.” Also “Will you shut, mister?”, i.e., will you shut your mouth, i.e., hold your tongue?6
Curl up — to be angry — from the panther and other animals when angry raising their hair.7 “Raise my dander up,” from the human hair, and a nasty idea.8 Wrathy is another common expression.9 Also, “savage as a meat-ax.”10
Here are two real American words — sloping, for slinking away; splunging, like a porpoise.1
In the Western States, where the raccoon is plentiful, they use the abbreviation coon when speaking of people. When at New York I went into a hairdresser’s shop2 to have my hair cut, there were two young men from the West, one under the barber’s hands, the other standing by him. “I say,” said the one who was having his hair cut, “I hear Captain M—– is in the country.” “Yes,” replied the other, “so they said. I should like to see the coon.”
“I’m a gone coon” implies “I am distressed — or ruined — or lost.”3
But one of the strangest perversions of the meaning of a word which I ever heard of is in Kentucky, where sometimes the word nasty is used for nice. For instance, of a rustic dance in that State a Kentuckian said to an acquaintance of mine, in reply to his asking the name of a very fine girl, “That’s my sister, stranger; and I flatter myself that she shows the nastiest ankle in all Kentuck.” … From the constant rifle practice in that State a good shot or a pretty shot is termed also a nasty shot, because it would make a nasty wound: ergo, a nice or pretty ankle becomes a nasty one.4
The term for all baggage, especially in the South or West, is plunder. This has been derived from the buccaneers, who for so long a time infested the bayores,5 and creeks near the mouth of the Mississippi, and whose luggage was probably very correctly so designated.6 …
The gamblers on the Mississippi use a very refined phrase for cheating — playing the advantages over him. But, as may be supposed, the principal terms used are those which are borrowed from trade and commerce. The rest, or remainder, is usually termed the balance. “Put some of those apples into a dish, and the balance into the storeroom.”
When a person has made a mistake, or is out in his calculations, they say, “You missed a figure that time.” …
There is sometimes in American metaphors an energy which is very remarkable. “Well, I reckon that, from the teeth to the toenail, there’s not a human of a more conquering nature than General Jackson.” One gentleman said to me, “I wish I had all hell boiled down to a pint, just to pour down your throat.”1
27. [After 1850 the chief licks at the American dialect were delivered, not by English travelers, most of whom had begun by then to find it more amusing than indecent, but by English pedants who did not stir from their cloisters.] The first traveler to show a genuine liking for all things American seems to have been Lady Emmeline Stuart Wortley, who published “Travels in the United States” in 1851. She met many notables during her stay in 1850, including Agassiz, William H. Prescott the historian, N. P. Willis, and President Zachary Taylor, and gushed over all of them. She was naturally astonished to hear that Prescott, despite “The Conquest of Mexico” and “The Conquest of Peru,” had never visited either country, but insisted that he was nevertheless “one of the most agreeable people” she had ever encountered, and “as delightful as his own delightful books.” Taylor gave her a cordial reception at the White House, advised her to visit St. Louis, which he described as “altogether perhaps the most interesting town in the United States,” and bade her farewell in a manner which she thus recounted:
The President insisted most courteously on conducting us to our carriage, and bareheaded he handed us in, standing on the steps till we drove off, and cordially reiterating many kind and friendly wishes for our prosperous journey, and health, and safety.
Lady Emmeline not only refrained from denouncing the speech of Americans; she actually praised their habit, then in full tide, of giving grandiloquent sobriquets to their cities. New Bedford, Mass., she reported, was called the City of Palaces. She went on:
Philadelphia is the City of Brotherly Love, or the Iron City. Buffalo, the Queen City of the Lakes; New Haven, the City of Elms, &c. I think the American imagination is more florid than ours. I am afraid matter-of-fact John Bull, if he attempted such a fanciful classification, would make sad work of it. Perhaps we should have Birmingham the City of Buttons or Warming-pans; Nottingham, the City of Stockings; Sheffield, the City of Knives and Forks, and so forth.2
Lady Emmeline’s encomiums were so grateful to the fevered national gills that Harper’s Magazine gave over four pages in its issue for August, 1851, to extracts from her book. But in part, at least, that appreciation may have been inspired by the fact that Harper & Brothers had just brought out an American edition of it.
29. [Slanguage.] In AL4, on the strength of a suggestion in American Speech,1 I noted that this term was apparently “invented in 1925 or thereabout.” Dr. William R. Williams, of New York, tells me that it is really much older. He says that it occurred in Edward E. Rice’s “Evangeline,” a great stage success of the 80s. One of the characters in that piece was a young girl who made heavy use of the current slang in saucing her father. He turned to the audience and said sadly, “Such slanguage from a daughter!” Slanguage is not listed by Partridge, but it is used in England.2 The related slangwohanger and its congeners are Americanisms, traced by the DAE to 1807. Slangwhanger is defined as “a low, noisy, ranting talker or writer.” In his brief section on “American Dialects” in “The English Language,”3 William C. Fowler, professor of rhetoric at Amherst, put it among “very low expressions, mostly political.”
30. [The English war upon Americanisms is in progress all the time, but it naturally has its pitched battles and its rest-periods between.] The rest-periods, of course, tend to coincide with the times when it is politic, on grounds remote from the philological, to treat the Yankee barbarian with a certain amount of politeness. Such a time, as historians will recall, came in 1917, and lasted until the first mention of the repayment of war debts, when the genial if oafish Uncle Sam was supplanted by the horrendous Uncle Shylock. It came again in 1943, when American troops began pouring into England in large force, and the fear of invasion, so lively during the first years of World War II, was allayed at last. The Ministry of Information and the Board of Education celebrated this happy deliverance by bringing out jointly a pamphlet by Louis MacNeice, entitled “Meet the U. S. Army.” This pamphlet was circulated wholesale, not only among the English soldiery but also among school children. Its title showed a graceful concession to an American vulgarism that more than one English pedagogue had reviled in the past, and in the text there were many more. Thus its message in the department of speech, as summarized with approval by the London Times:
American speech, coinage, games and food are discussed in turn. If they seem strange to us, our own equivalents will look equally odd to Americans, and for just as good — or sometimes better — reasons. If some people in Britain consider American slang too flamboyant, to the ears of some of our visitors our own may be “flat, hackneyed, monotonous and colorless.”1
The Times, ordinarily, deals with American speechways much less blandly. In normal times, indeed, it seldom mentions them save to sneer at them, and in its Literary Supplement it adverts to the unpleasant subject frequently.2 “The very language of most American writers of imaginative literature,” it said on Jan. 3, 1929, “is fast approaching the stage of being only a form of English.” But in wartime this forthright attitude is considerably ameliorated, as it is in the other great organs of British opinion. Thus the somewhat malicious Baltimore Evening Sun was able to note in 19403 that all these organs, including the Times, had grown “a good deal cagier” than usual “about denouncing certain expressions as horrid Americanisms,” and that the Times itself had lately achieved the extraordinary feat of belaboring to check up on without “any mention of America.”4 Yet even in war-time it occasionally blurts out its low opinion of the American way of talking and writing, though usually with the addition of a disarming corollary. “To describe the language in which the American language is now written as almost a foreign language,” it said on April 5, 1941, “is to make no reference to slang. American slang — that amazing blend of flexibility and sense of absurdity — has always had as many admirers in England as it could desire and more unsuccessful imitation than it deserves.” The Edinburgh Scotsman, another ardent guardian of English linguistic purity, qualifies and abates its dudgeon, in times of national peril, in much the same way. Thus, when an anonymous reader took space in its columns on Nov. 6, 1941, to denounce by and large, to contact, to demote and O.K.,1 it printed an article the same day saying that “it can be argued that these expressions are useful currency; they present definite nuances and inflections and make possible a certain informality of mood or approach which is not otherwise attainable. And they have a certain historical significance and even dignity, in virtue of their association with a restless, changeable and disturbing age.” In this article there was no mention of their American origin. The same prudence is visible, when the Hun is at the gate, on lower levels. Thus when Commander Reginald Fletcher, M.P. (now Lord Winster), private secretary to the First Lord of the Admiralty, undertook in 1941 to confute and confuse “the people who say that Germany will be out of oil next week or will crack next month” by hurling at them a derisive “Oh, yeah!”, a columnist in the London Sunday Mercury2 backed into his denunciation of the infamy in the following very graceful manner:
I have every respect for most Americans; I think the graphic descriptive vigor of much American prose has an animating effect upon the English language; but the nasal American intonation — and “Oh, yeah!” is a typical example of it — is vile.
The same device was used by a writer signing himself Argus, in the Falkirk Herald five months later:1
The writer does not despise the American language (for it cannot be termed the King’s English). It has virility and vividness; it is easy to speak. But the writer does lament that there are Britons who taint our language with phraseology which belongs to another, the New World; that our boys no longer say “Stand and deliver!” but “Stick ’em up!”; that so long2 and O.K. have replaced the British cheerio and all right.… One charge against Americanism can be brought, maintained, and even proved.… The American has the greatest appreciation of the individual who is “different.” So they make their language different, distinct from our own by calling a waistcoat a vest, a lift an elevator, the pavement the sidewalk, and so on.
But in times of peace and security the British critics of American speech seldom condescend to pull their punches in this way; on the contrary, they lay about them in a berserk and all-out manner, and commonly couple flings at the American character with their revilings of the American language. “Every few years,” says D. W. Brogan,
someone sounds the clarion and fills the fife, calling us on to man the breaches and repel the assailing hordes of Americanisms that threaten the chastity of the pure well of English undefiled. Sometimes the invaders intend to clip off the strong verbs, sometimes they threaten to enrich our language with new and horrid words. Whatever they do, or threaten to do, it must be resisted.3
It is a pity that no literary pathologist has ever investigated and reported at length on the ebb and flow of this resistance during the past several generations, as Pickering, Cairns and Read have reported on its manifestations in the era between the Revolution and the Civil War.1 The material is rich and instructive, and my files bulge with it, but I have space here only for a few specimens. The first real blast of the modern era was probably that delivered by the Very Rev. Henry Alford, D.D., dean of Canterbury, in his “Plea for the Queen’s English” in 1863.2 Alford set the tone of nearly all the objurgations that have followed, for he began by describing American as a debased and barbaric form of English, and then proceeded to a denunciation of the “character and history” of the Republic — “its blunted sense of moral obligation and duty to man; its open disregard of conventional right when aggrandisement is to be obtained; and I may now say, its reckless and fruitless maintenance of the most cruel and unprincipled war in the history of the world.” This was before Gettysburg, and most Englishmen of the dean’s class were looking forward hopefully to the break-up and ruin of the United States, with certain pleasant benefits to British trade, not to mention what then appeared to be British military and naval security. That hope was soon to perish, and there ensued a period of uneasy politeness, but when the Alabama claims began to threaten the British treasury there was a sharp revival of moral indignation, and Punch expressed the prevailing English view when it said:
If the pure well of English is to remain undefiled no Yankee should be allowed henceforth to throw mud into it. It is a form of verbal expectoration that is most profane, most detestable.3
By 1870 the rage against the loutish and depraved Americano had gone so far that it was possible for the Medical Times and Gazette (London) to allege quite seriously that the medical journals of the United States were written in a slang so outlandish that no decent English medical man could be expected to understand it,1 and in 1871 it seemed quite rational to his English readers when John Ruskin let go with:
You have felt, doubtless, at least those of you who have been brought up in any habit of reverence, that every time I have used an American expression, or aught like one, there came upon you a sense of sudden wrong — the darting through you of acute cold. I meant you to feel that: for it is the essential function of America to make us feel like that.
Sharp-shooting went on through the 70s and 80s, culminating in a violent attack with all arms after Grover Cleveland’s Venezuela message of December 17, 1895, but when the possible effects thereof began to be pondered there appeared a more conciliatory spirit, and during the uneasy years before World War I the Americano began to be cherished as an Anglo-Saxon brother, and not much was heard about the villainousness of either his character or his speech.2 The war itself brought a return to Bach, and by two routes. First, the American and English troops, coming into contact in France, found that intercommunication was impeded by harsh differences in speech-ways, and, in the manner of simple-minded men at all times and everywhere, laid those differences to moral deficiencies. Second, the American movie, which began to invade England on a large scale at the end of the war, introduced so many Americanisms, especially on the level of slang, that the guardians of the King’s English were aroused to protest. But even more influential in reviving the old indignation against everything American was the sinister talk of war debts that began in 1920 and led up to Calvin Coolidge’s derisive, “Well, they hired the money, didn’t they?” in 1925. It was at this time that Uncle Sam became Uncle Shylock, and every fresh Americanism an insult to the English language. A climax was reached in 1927, when a group of American literati, traveling at the expense of the Commonwealth Fund and Thomas W. Lamont, went to London to confer with a similar committee of Britishers upon the present state and future prospects of the common tongue, with special reference to the unhappy differences between English and American usage.1 The English newspapers reported the deliberations of the conference in some detail, and it brought forth a good deal of editorial comment, some no worse than patronizing but the rest downright vitriolic. In AL4, p. 33, there are some extracts from an article in the New Statesman2 in which Americans were warned in no weasel terms to keep hands off the mother-tongue. “Why,” demanded the author, “should we offer to discuss the subject at all with America?… From time to time we may adopt this [American] word or that, or sometimes a whole vivid phrase. But for all serious lovers of the English language it is America that is the only dangerous enemy.” I add a few more strophes of this diatribe, not given in AL4:3
After sitting for two days the conference decided to form an International Council as “an investigating body which will consider facts as to disputed usage and other questions of language in the various English-speaking countries, and give the results of its investigations the widest publicity; in short, will maintain the traditions and foster the development of our common tongue. The Council is to consist of one hundred members — fifty from the United States and fifty from the British Empire.… Its proposed composition is palpably absurd. The English language proper belongs to the people who dwell south of Hadrian’s Wall, east of the Welsh hills and north of the English Channel.… We may do what we please with it, and we cannot submit to any sort of foreign dictation or even influence about it without destroying it. An authoritative Council to decide doubtful questions which must inevitably arise from time to time might be very useful indeed, but such a body ought not to include more than one Scotchman and one Irishman; and it should certainly not include even a single American.
In the course of the somewhat timorous deliberations of the conference Dr. Canby permitted himself the blasphemy of speaking of Anglicisms as well as of Americanisms. This slip was seized upon with ferocity by the New Statesman writer, and denounced as follows:
What Dr. Canby meant by it, presumably, was some usage which his own country had not adopted. His point of view, at any rate, was clear enough. He claimed for America a right equal to our own to decide what is English and what is not! That is a claim which we cannot too emphatically repudiate.… The English language is our own.… We cannot admit that it contains “Anglicisms” — because that admission would imply that it belongs to everybody who uses it — including Negroes and Middle-Westerners and Americanized Poles and Italians. That is the fundamental point. “Anglicisms” are English tout court. On the question of what words and idioms are to be used or to be forbidden we cannot afford any kind of compromise or even discussion with the semi-demi-English-speaking populations of overseas. Their choice is to accept our authority or else make their own language.
The other English commentators upon the conference were somewhat less violent than this New Statesman brother, but all of them, however polite, were more or less unfriendly, and all of them dealt with the American language as something strange and hostile. “The differences in vocabulary, the meanings attached to words, their spelling, and so on are always very great and are becoming so marked,” said a writer in the Nation and Athenaeum,1 “that the result promises or threatens to produce over there a new form of the language.” To which the London Times added:2 “Without offense it may be said that no greater assaults are made on the common language guage than in America.… The question is,… how far the disruptive process can be stayed.” Nor was there any more favorable response to the stated purpose of the conference from colonial newspapers and pedagogues. The Canadian and Australian commentators sneered at it, and the South-Africa-born Professor J. R. R. Tolkien of Oxford wrote in “The Year’s Work in English Studies”:1 “Whatever may be the special destiny and peculiar future splendor of the language of the United States, it is still possible to hope that our fate may be kept distinct.” Nothing more was ever heard of the proposed General Council on English, with its membership of fifty Britons and fifty Americans. The Commonwealth Fund withdrew its support, Lamont turned to forms of the uplift less loathsome, and the hundred immortals were never actually appointed.2
It was during this period that the English antipathy to American translations of foreign books broke forth into one of the fiercest of its recurring outbursts. The casus belli was a version of the Italian plays of Luigi Pirandello in two volumes, one being translated by Dr. Arthur Livingston, an American, and the other by Edward Storer, an Englishman. Dr. Livingston, professor of Romance languages at Columbia, was an Italian scholar of the highest eminence, and the qualifications of Mr. Storer were considerably less conspicuous, but the English reviewers, with few exceptions, denounced Livingston in their reviews and at the same time whooped up Storer. Their chief objection to Livingston was that, in cases where English and American usage differed, he preferred the forms and locutions of his own country, and did not try to write like an Englishman. Thus the uproar was summed up by Ernest Boyd, himself a translator of long experience:
In one London weekly a reviewer cites right away indignantly, and asks: “Why not at once?” The London correspondent of the New York Bookman declares that candies does not strike an English reader as Italian, but sweets does! Another critic wonders if the expression a man made over means anything to an American, doubts it, but concludes triumphantly that it is certainly meaningless to English ears. Nobody condescends to explain how it is closer to the original Italian, French, Polish, Russian, or whatever the text may be, to say: “Come off it, old bean!” rather than “Quit your kiddin’, buddy!”; top hole instead of O.K.; or “I shall let my flat in Gower Street this Autumn,” rather than “I shall rent my apartment on 12th Street this Fall.” An English locution is ipso facto not only more familiar to an English reader, but, it seems, also nearer the text. Yet, the fact actually is that more people from Continental Europe speak American than speak English!1
Boyd, in his article, hinted that business rivalry had something to do with the English antipathy to American translations — an ever-recurring leit motif in the symphony of moral indignation. He said:
Pirandello is not the only Continental author of importance whose existence in English is due to American enterprise. There are many others: André Gide, Pío Baroja, Pérez de Ayala, Henri Céard, Jacinto Benavente, Ladislas Reymont, Carl Spitteler, Hauptmann, Blasco Ibáñez, Azorín, Eça de Queiroz, Heinrich Mann, Thomas Mann, C. F. Ramuz, Jakob Wassermann. The list might be greatly extended, especially if one adds to it the writers such as Gobineau, Hamsun, Maupassant, Werner von Heidenstam, and Romain Rolland, who would have been abandoned after a volume or two had been tried, but for the support of American publishers and readers.
As the 20s faded there was an abatement of ardor in the English discovery and running down of American barbarisms. The passage of the Cinematograph Films Act in 1927, putting a high duty on American movie films and requiring every British exhibitor to show a certain number of English-made films after September 30, 1928, running up to 20% from 1935 onward, gave a considerable reassurance to the guardians of the national language, and they were unaware as yet that the American talkie would soon overwhelm them. But there was still some lust for battle left in them, and on occasion they performed in the traditionally hearty manner. When, early in 1930, I contributed an article on Americanisms to the London Daily Express2 and ventured in it to hint that the worst had already come, I was belabored right zealously in many newspapers, including the Express itself.3 Its chosen gladiator was James Douglas, then editor of its Sunday edition and later director of the London Express Newspapers, Ltd. He took the strange line of arguing that the talkies were having virtually no effect on English speech. “It is not true to say,” he said, “that ‘the Englishman is talking and writing more and more American.’ American dialects and slang find us curiously un-imitative.”1 But other contributors to the discussion were a good deal less complacent, and one of them said:
One must admit that we write and speak Americanisms. So long as Yankeeisms came to us insidiously we absorbed them carelessly. They have been a valuable addition to the language — as nimble coppers are a valuable addition to purer currency. But the talkies have presented the American language in one giant meal, and we are revolted.2
I was the unwitting cause of another uproar in 1936, when the Daily Express reprinted some long extracts from an article that I had written for the Yale Review.3 In that article I argued that the increasing adoption of American words and phrases in England was a natural and inevitable process, and that they got in simply because England had “nothing to offer in competition with them —that is, nothing so apt or pungent, nothing so good.” There was the usual flood of protests from indignant Englishmen, whereupon the Express fanned the flames by printing some more extracts from my article, including the following:
Confronted by novelty, whether in object or in situation, the Americans always manage to fetch up a name for it that not only describes it but also illuminates it, whereas the English, since the Elizabethan stimulant oozed out of them, have been content merely to catalogue it.4
Typical of the protests was a letter signed Hilda Coe,5 beginning as follows:
I began to read Mr. Mencken’s article in the hope that it would clear away some of my English dislike of Americanisms. But I found instead a school-masterly style, lamentably dull. Mr. Mencken gives the impression that he has revised his work until he has revised all the life out of it. He is even glad to make use of an old English cliché — to run the gauntlet. From him I learn only what I knew before, that we owe so America a few individual words, examples of which are gee, darn, nerts and oh, yeah. They have less liveliness and vigor than the rude remarks of a small boy, and America — still very young — has the small boy’s impudent pride in them.
“Most Americanisms,” said another correspondent, “are merely examples of bad grammar, like going some place else. Many others are vulgar and lazy misrepresentations of recognized English words.” This charge that Americanisms are largely only good old English terms, taken over either without any change at all or with debasements in form or meaning suggested by American uncouthness, is one that appears very often in English discourses on the repellant subject. In 1935, for example, a correspondent signing himself W. G. Bloom informed the London Daily Telegraph1 that “many so-called American colloquialisms” were “only emigrants returning to England.” Thus he specified:
Too true is to be found in Shakespeare, and so is to beat it. In Cowper tell the world appears, and Byron gives us and all that. Son-of-a-gun, while savouring of Arizona, is to be found in “The Ingoldsby Legends,” and to bite the dust is in “The Adventures of Gil Bias.”
A year later, when Sir George Philip Langton, a justice of the Probate, Divorce and Admiralty Division of the High Court, rebuked a lawyer for using the American to bluff in an argument,2 one of the London newspapers assured its readers that the verb was actually sound and old English, and went on to argue that the game of poker, from which it had been borrowed, was English too.1 Again, a contributor to the London Morning Post, in 1936, claimed bee-line and come-uppance for old England, and even questioned the American origin of cracker, in the sense of what the English call (or used to call) a biscuit.2 The recognized authorities, unhappily, do not agree with these patriots. Too true, of course, is not an Americanism at all, and neither is and all that. It is possible that to tell the world may be found in Cowper, but Partridge says that its latter-day vogue originated in the United States, and that it was not until 1930 or 1931 that it was “anglicized as a colloquialism.” Partridge says that to beat it is also of American origin, and he does not list to bite the dust as an English phrase. The NED gives the latter, but its first example is from William Cullen Bryant’s translation of the Iliad, 1870. The NED lists two English forerunners, to bite the sand, 1718, and to bite the ground, 1771, but both are obviously less picturesque than to bite the dust, which has about it a strong suggestion of the plainsman, and probably arose during the great movement into the West, though the DAE omits it. The history of son-of-a-gun, like that of the allied son-of-a-bitch, is obscure, and neither seems to be ancient.3 They are not listed in Grose, but Partridge says that son-of-a-bitch is to be found in “The Triumph of Wit,” 1712. Admiral W. H. Smyth, in “The Sailor’s Word-Book,”4 says that son-of-a-gun is a nautical term, and that it was “originally applied to boys born afloat, when women were permitted to accompany their husbands to sea”—that is, in the British Navy. “One admiral,” he adds, “declared that he literally was thus cradled, under the breast of a gun-carriage.” Partridge says that the term dates from the early Eighteenth Century, but gives no reference earlier than 1823, and Farmer and Henley’s earliest quotation is dated 1830. Bee-line and comeuppance seem to be indubitable Americanisms. The first is traced by the DAE to c. 1845, and the second to 1859. As for cracker in the sense of a small hard biscuit, e.g., a soda-cracker, it is traced to 1739 in America, but only to 1810 in England, and the NED marks it “now chiefly in U.S.” Grab am-cracker goes back to the early 80s and soda-cracker to 1863, and the DAE marks both Americanisms. It does not list animal-cracker, but that is probably one also.
The British discussions of the origin of such terms are seldom profitable, for they are carried on, in the main, by writers who are patriots rather than etymologists, and what they have to say often reduces itself to a feeble and ill-natured complaint against all things American.1 Those who avoid a show of bogus learning and devote themselves frankly and whole-heartedly to damning the abominable Yankee and his gibberish are much more amusing. They had a field-day in 1935 when the 100% British Cunard White Star Line, in its advertising (in London) of the first sailing of the Queen Mary, offered prospective passengers one-way and round-trip tickets instead of single and return tickets. The uproar over this ignominious concession to American terminology became so heated that news of it was cabled to the United States.2 “Is the Queen Mary,” asked the Manchester Guardian gravely, “to be a British or an American vessel?”3 There was another pother in 1938, when Sydney F. Markham, M.P.,4 in a speech in the House of Commons, expressed the waggish hope that King George and Queen Mary, then about to embark on their American tour, would not come home speaking American instead of English.5 The subject was tender at the time, for King Edward VIII, whom George had succeeded only two years before, had been more than once accused of a traitorous and unmanly liking for Americanisms. But the new king and queen somehow escaped contamination, and both still speak English, the latter with a touch of Scots accent. Such doubts and dubieties, before the outbreak of World War II and even down to the fateful event of Pearl Harbor, produced a great deal of indignant writing about the American language. In 1937 there was a heavy outbreak of it,1 with Cosmo Hamilton denouncing the “slick Americanisms … that belong to the worst illiteracy of a foreign tongue”; Lord Plender protesting against the Americanization of English newspaper headlines;2 William Powell damning “the gibberish of morons” produced by “immigrations of South Europeans, many of whom were backward and illiterate”;3 and Pamela Frankau taking space in the London Daily Sketch4 to arraign all “victims to the American craze” as enemies of the true, the good and the beautiful. Their enthusiasm for oke and scram, for “I’ll call you back” instead of “I’ll ring again,” and for various other such “nonsensical” Americanisms was plain evidence, to her mind, of spiritual collapse and deterioration. She continued:
It goes with the professed admiration of meaningless poetry, incomprehensible pictures, ugly fashions and uncomfortable furniture. It is the refuge of the intellectual coward who trumpets his affection for everything modern in case he be thought old-fashioned.… We have a perfectly good language of our own. We owe no syllable of it to America.5
At the time this moral rebellion against Americanisms was going on in England there were also repercussions in the colonies and dominions, and especially in Canada. In January, 1937, a learned Englishman by the name of C. Egerton Lowe, described as “of Trinity College, London,” turned up in Toronto with a warning that American influence was corrupting the pure English that the Canadians (at all events, in Ontario) formerly spoke. He was denounced with some asperity in the Detroit Free Press, just across the border,1 but he found a certain amount of support among those he was seeking to save, and soon he was joined in his crusade by Mr. Justice A. Rives Hall, of the Canadian Court of Appeal, who was heard from on the subject several times during the months following.2 The learned judge took the line of denouncing my AL4,3 and appeared to be convinced that my specimens of the American vulgar speech, presented in Chapter IX thereof, had been offered as examples of tony American usage, and even as goals for all aspiring Americanos to aim at. He said:
To support his argument Mencken has ransacked the Bowery and the haunts of Chicago gunmen, isolated valleys in the mountains of the South, mining camps and Western saloons, dives on the Mexican border, the training camps of pugilists, and the slums in which are congregated unassimilated foreigners for words and phrases never heard in England and seldom if ever used in polite or educated circles in the United States.
Mr. Justice Hall was still laboring the revolting subject so late as 1939,4 but whether or not his direful admonitions had any effect I do not know. In the Motherland, by that time, many erstwhile viewers with alarm had retreated into a sort of despair, for the flood of Americanisms pouring in through the talkies and the comic-strips had been reinforced by a fashion, suddenly raging among English columnists, for imitating Walter Winchell, and, among other journalists of low aesthetic visibility, for borrowing the iconoclastic jargons of Variety and Time. This new menace was attacked by J. B. Firth in the London Daily Telegraph, by A. E. Wilson in the London Star, by St. John Ervine in the London Observer, and by various other orthodox literati, most of them several cuts higher than the lady novelists, old subscribers and other such persons who had carried on the holy war of 1937. Thus Ervine described the English imitators of what he called American tabloids:
Bright young gents who cannot compose a grammatical sentence flourish on these shameless sheets, shameless not only for the way in which they are written, but for what is written in them; and they have the impertinence to claim that the style they inflict on their readers is the style we should all use.…
The American tabloid reporter has to communicate with an extraordinary diversity of alien readers, great numbers of whom can scarcely read their native language, and can only spell their way through the easiest English phrases. The paradoxical fact about American journalism of this sort is that in attempting to make their sentences as plain as possible, so that the most elementary alien reader shall understand them, the reporters have produced a hybrid language which is often incomprehensible to many Americans.1
But whether comprehensible to Americans or not, it was plainly having a considerable success in England, and many Englishmen, while still disliking it violently, apparently came to the dismayed conclusion that the time was too late for halting it. This defeatist faction, indeed, had been heard from off and on for some years past, and in 1932 Ellis Healey was reporting in the Birmingham Gazette2 that “a definitely American flavor” had already appeared in “the more progressive” English newspapers and even in “the more modern” English magazines; worse, he was playing with the resigned thought that “in about fifty years” England might be only “a moral colony of America.” A year or so later Lieut. R. N. Tripp, R.N., joined in the melancholy foreboding. “If the public would just listen, wonderingly, to the American language,” he said, “and refrain from speaking it or writing it, all would be well. Unfortunately, they will not.”3 Naturally enough, there was some effort to track down the agent or agencies chiefly responsible, and in 1935 a smart pedagogue, A. Noxon, headmaster of Highfield College, Leigh, found a convenient goat in the British Broadcasting Corporation. “It is high time,” he wrote to the Southend Standard,4 that protest was made against the increasingly wretched example set by the B.B.C. in broadcasting during the Children’s Hour the most horrible American slang for the benefit of children who, naturally imitative, quickly pick up all the atrocities which are broadcast for their benefit(?). Schoolmasters have a difficult enough job already to teach decent English to their pupils. What chance have they when every cinema fills their ears with ungrammatical Americanisms?
Nor was it only school children who picked up these barbaric Words and phrases, for in 1936 a writer signing himself Ochiltree was reporting in the Glasgow Evening Times:
Only those people who know the latest American slang are considered to be up-to-date and smart in some circles, just as in others the bright Mayfair wits are thought to be those who strain their brains to find successors to marvellous, darling, bogus, too utterly utter, shame-making, and the series of other idiotic words that are ridden to death rapidly.1
In 1938 Stephen Williams summed up the situation in the London Evening Standard.2 “I seldom hear English spoken,” he said, “in the streets of London. I hear constantly the kind of bastard American culled from the films.” To which Cecil G. Calvert, an actor, added a few days later:3 “What is the use of sending a boy or girl to one of our universities to learn English? When they come to make their way in the world they will find that it is obsolete. Children who are supposed to be taught the English language at our board schools4 go from them to the cinema, and the horrible distortion of our language that they hear there becomes their everyday speech.” A female contributor to the London Evening News presently confirmed all this with two anecdotes, as follows:
An American, coming over to England for the first time, was struck by the fact that English children in the streets of London and elsewhere talked exactly the same as children in the United States. An American impressario came to this country to make films. He was anxious to secure a crowd of English-speaking children, but he utterly failed to find English children who could talk English, and he had to abandon that part of his programme altogether.5
The objection here, of course, was primarily to American slang, though not many of the Britons who wrote to the newspapers on the subject differentiated clearly between it and more decorous American speech. Many of them, in fact, denounced sidewalk, elevator and candy-store quite as vigorously as they denounced sez you, nert and oh, yeah. The special case of slang will be discussed in Chapter XI of Volume II: here it is in order to remark that not all Englishmen, even at the height of one of the recurrent alarms, were unqualifiedly against all Americanisms. There were, in fact, not a few who rose to defend them, or, at all events, to explain and condone them, and among those defenders were men and women of authority, e.g., William Archer, Robert Bridges, Richard Aldington, G. K. Chesterton, Virginia Woolf and Sir John Foster Fraser. There is some account in AL41 of the earlier writings in that direction; there have been many reinforcements in later years. “We have to admit,” said a staff contributor to the Manchester Evening News in 1936,2 “the intense vitality and colorful expressiveness of the American tongue, no matter what the purists may say.… American makes plain English sound a tortuous and poverty-stricken language. It is no idle fancy of the younger generation which seizes on the American idiom to express something which would need a lot more words in English.” A few months later Wilfred R. Childe, lecturer in English at Leeds University, said much the same thing in an address to the Annual Army Educational Conference,3 and presently there was in progress an earnest if somewhat mild defense of certain Americanisms under fire from chauvinists. Even the Manchester Guardian, ordinarily at least 150% British, took a hand in this counter-attack when Dr. Henry Albert Wilson, Bishop of Chelmsford, denounced to release in his diocesan paper. “Why,” asked the Guardian, “is released, in the sense of a film’s being freed for general exhibition, ‘an abominable Americanism’? It seems to convey a perfectly plain meaning in a perfectly plain way.” His Lordship had hinted to his customers that they might be safer post-mortem if they used prepared instead, but the Guardian would have none of it. Released, it argued, “does not mean the same thing as prepared, for a film might be and sometimes is prepared long before it is released.”4 But this was a debate about a single word, and not altogether significant. The London Times, even more truculently British than the Guardian, went the whole hog (as Abraham Lincoln was fond of saying) in its obituary of John V. A. Weaver, the American poet, in 1938 His books in vulgar American—“In American,” “More American” and so on — offered proof, it allowed, that “the American language is a separate and living tongue, capable of beauty and poetry in itself. These vernacular American poems have something of the same freshness, robustness and beauty of ‘The Canterbury Tales.’ ”1 A few more specimens of English approval must content us. The first was by a Cambridge double-first2 in 1938:
Are there really people who think that English is still the exclusive property of those born (in comfortable circumstances) in these little islands? Surely we ought 10 regard the American influence of the films as a vitalizing power of enormous benefit to us all as Englishmen. America has given us, admittedly, a good deal of rubbishy slang through the medium of the talkies; but the rubbish perishes very rapidly, whether it be American or English; and the talking film has actually opened up for us an enormous range of neat phrasing, vivid simile and picturesque metaphor which every year tend to enrich our speech rather than impoverish it.3
Next came A. Witcomb Jenkins in Answers:
Americanisms are often extremely useful additions to our language. Many of them are clear, vivid, brief and picturesque. There’s imagination in them. They hit off a situation with uncanny accuracy.… There is no two-word phrase in English for “I commute,” which in the States means, “I live out of town and come in every day with a season-ticket.” And an American doesn’t waste his breath saying, “Second turning on the right after you get to the next corner.” He says, tersely, “Two blocks on.”4
Finally the Professor Brogan who was quoted some time back went overboard in the grand manner in 1943:
There is nothing surprising in the constant reinforcement, or, if you like, corruption of English by American. And there is every reason to believe that it has increased, is increasing and will not be diminished. If American could influence English a century ago, when the predominance of the Mother Country in wealth, population and prestige was secure, and when most educated Americans were reverentially colonial in their attitude to English culture, how can it be prevented from influencing English today, when every change has been a change of weight to the American side? That the balance of linguistic power is upset is hard to doubt. Of the 200,000,000 people speaking English, nearly seven-tenths live in the United States,5 and another tenth in the British Dominions are as much influenced by American as by English English. Nor is this all. As an international language, it is American that the world increasingly learns.…
To understand what is happening to the language in whose ownership and control we are now only minority shareholders is an object of curiosity worthy of serious persons. It is also an object worthy of less serious persons, for the study of American is rich in delights and surprises.1
Five months later the Times called for an armistice in the ancient war. “There is urgent need,” it said, “for surmounting what someone has called the almost insuperable barrier of a common language. It would never do for Great Britain and America to think they understand, yet miss, the point of each other’s remarks just now. Both versions of the common language must be correctly understood by both peoples.” It then went on to commend a school set up in London to teach Americanisms to British officers and Anglicisms to Americans, and paused to recall, perhaps with a touch of nostalgia, the ill humors of days now (perhaps only transiently) past:
“English as she is spoke” by foreigners has always been a popular touch in comedy. It was an old device when Shakespeare wrote the English of that fine theoretical and practical soldier, the Welsh Fluellen.2 By the time of the Restoration the Dutch were sharing the honors with the Irish, who lasted until the latter part of the Victorian era, when they yielded first place to the French. Then came the Americans. The Briton who could not raise a laugh by pretending to talk American was either a great fool or a very dull dog.3
34. [There has been a steady emission of English-American glossaries since the earliest days.… The first seems to have been that of the Rev. Jonathan Boucher, probably drawn up before 1800, but not published until 1832.… It was followed by that of David Humphreys, one of the Hartford Wits, printed as an appendix to his play, “The Yankey in England,” in 1815.] The Hartford Wits had an enormous reputation in their time, but survive today only as ghosts in treatises on American literature. Humphreys was one of the first of the long line of jobholding literati that was to reach its full effulgence in Henry Van Dyke and Robert Underwood Johnson. He was born at Derby, Conn., on July 10, 1752, and was the son of a clergyman named Daniel Humphrey; he himself added the final s to the family name. He was graduated from Yale in 1774, and after teaching school for two years entered the Revolutionary Army. He had a creditable record as a soldier, and in 1780 became military secretary to George Washington, with the rank of major. After the Revolution he went into politics and held various offices at home and abroad, both elective and appointive. When, in 1802, Jefferson retired him at last, he was minister to Spain. In 1797 he married the daughter of an English banker at Lisbon. On his return to private life he went into sheep-raising in Connecticut and set up a woolen mill. He died in 1818.1
His play, “The Yankey in England,” was one of two that he wrote, the other being “The Widow of Malabar.” It was apparently designed for an English audience, but there is no record that it was ever played in London. The glossary was added because Humphreys feared that the talk of Doolittle, the Yankey of his title, might be unintelligible without it.2 There are very few actual Americanisms in it. Indeed, among its 275 items, I can find but nineteen, to wit, to boost, 1815;3 breadstuffs, 1793; to calculate (in the sense of to suppose or expect), 1805; cent, 1783; cuss, 1775; cussed;4 darned, 1806;5 fortino or fortizno (for aught I know);6 forzino (far as I know), c. 1870;7 gal, 1795; to guess (in the sense of to think or suppose), 1732; gum (foolish talk, nonsense);8 to improve (to employ), 1640; lengthy, 1689; Sabbaday, c. 1772; slim (sick), 1815;9 to spark it (to engage in what is now called petting or necking), 1787; spook, 1801; to stump (to challenge or dare), 1766. Of these nearly half are now obsolete.
The rest of Humphreys’s list is a monument to his faulty observation and lack of common sense, though it seems to have been taken seriously in his day, and Bartlett was relying on it so late as 1848. Scores of the pronunciations he sets down were at least as common in England as in America, for example, ort for ought, biled for boiled, darter for daughter, hoss for horse, and kittle for kettle. Not a few were in perfectly good usage in both countries and remain so to this day, for example, pritty for pretty, strait for straight, vittles for victuals, dubble for double, blud for blood, cumfort for comfort, and fokes for folks. Even close for clothes was hardly peculiar to America, or to the class represented by Doolittle the Yankey. Finally, Humphreys was apparently unaware, despite his English wife, that such clipped forms as cute for acute and potecary for apothecary were common in England, and that to argufy for to argue was anything but a novelty. Worse, he failed to list certain actual Americanisms that occurred in his play, as Mathews notes, for example, to pluck up stakes, 1640 (later, to pull up stakes); as fine as a fiddle, 1811; and to rain pitchforks.1
To guess was not actually an Americanism, for Shakespeare, Chaucer, Wycliffe and Gower had used it, but it seems to have dropped out of use in England in the Eighteenth Century, and was either preserved or revived in America. Its constant use by Americans in the sense of to believe or suppose was remarked by nearly all the early English travelers. It was, at the start, confined to New England, and in 1815 the Massachusetts Spy alleged that a Southerner, though he made free with reckon and calculate, “would as soon … blaspheme as guess,” but it went along with the pioneers on the great movement into the West, and soon moved into the South. Some of the English travelers illustrated its use with dialogues, for example, Henry Bradshaw Fearon, who offered the following in his “Sketches of America”:2