Made In America (16 page)

The attacks came from within as well as from without. In 1781 the eminent president of Princeton, John Witherspoon, a Scot by birth but one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence – indeed a fierce proponent of American independence from Britain in all things but language – wrote a series of articles for the
Pennsylvania Journal and Weekly Advertiser
in which he attacked the lax linguistic habits that
predominated in his adopted country even among educated speakers: using
notify
for
inform, mad
for
angry, clever
for
good,
and other such ‘improprieties and vulgarisms which hardly any person in the same class in point of rank and literature would have fallen into in Great Britain'.
²¹
In the course of these writings he became the first to use
Americanism
in a linguistic sense, but by no means the last to use it pejoratively.

There was, it must be said, more than a dollop of toadying to be found among many Americans. When the Scottish philosopher David Hume criticized Franklin for employing
colonize
and other such New World novelties in his correspondence, Franklin contritely apologized and promised to abandon the practice at once. John Russell Bartlett compiled a
Dictionary of Americanisms,
but far from being a celebration of the inventive nature of American speech, the book dismissed Americanisms as ‘perversions'. James Fenimore Cooper, in
The American Democrat,
opined: ‘The common faults of American language are an ambition of effect, a want of simplicity and a turgid abuse of terms.‘
²²
Henry James, meanwhile, complained about the ‘helpless slobber of disconnected vowel noises' that characterized American speech.

Many sincerely believed that America would cut itself off from its linguistic and cultural database (as it were) by forming an effectively separate dialect. Linguistic isolation was not a sensible or desirable goal for a small, young nation if it wished to be heard in the wider world of commerce, law and science. The
Knickerbocker Magazine
saw the ‘greatest danger' in America's tendency towards linguistic innovation, and urged its readers to adhere to British precepts.

A few pointed out that the American continent required a more expansive vocabulary, like the anonymous essayist in the
North American Review
who plaintively noted: ‘How tame will his language sound, who would describe Niagara in language fitted for the falls at London bridge, or attempt the
majesty of the Mississippi in that which was made for the Thames?‘
²³
Or as Jefferson put it with somewhat greater simplicity: ‘The new circumstances under which we are placed, call for new words, new phrases, and for the transfer of old words to new objects.'

Others saw Britain's linguistic hegemony as presumptuous and imperious. ‘Our honour requires us to have a system of our own, in language as well as government,' argued Noah Webster in 1789. Echoing his sentiment, Rupert Hughes asked: ‘Why should we permit the survival of the curious notion that our language is a mere loan from England, like a copper kettle that we must keep scoured and return without a dent?‘
²⁴

Still others tried the defence – accurate if somewhat feeble – that many of the objectionable words were not Americanisms at all. Chaucer, it was pointed out, had used
gab;
Johnson had included
influential
in his dictionary;
afeared
had existed in English since Saxon times.
Son of a gun, bite the dust, beat it, I guess
and scores of other detestable ‘Americanisms' all existed in England, it was explained, long before there were any American colonies. As the poet James Russell Lowell drily put it, Americans ‘unhappily could bring over no English better than Shakespeare's'.
²⁵
One dedicated scribbler named Alfred Elwyn compiled a
Glossary of Supposed Americanisms
in which he asserted passionately, but wrongly: ‘The simple truth is, that almost without exception all those words or phrases that we have been ridiculed for using, are good old English; many of them are Anglo-Saxon in origin, and nearly all to be heard at this day in England.'

This tack struck many as more than a little pathetic. Lowell acidly observed: ‘Surely we may sleep in peace now, and our English cousins will forgive us, since we have cleared ourselves from any suspicion of being original in the matter.‘
²⁶

Lowell had a particular reason for feeling protective about
the American dialect. His fame rested almost entirely on the creation of a fictional New England rustic, Hosea Biglow, whose comically quaint speech formed the basis of the hugely popular
Biglow Papers.
Unfortunately, Lowell's effectiveness as a defender of American speech was somewhat diminished by his growing antipathy for his own creation. When the reading public continually ignored his more earnest poetical compositions (and rightly; they were unceasingly mediocre) he went so far as to preface a volume of Biglow poems with a veiled insult to the reader: ‘Margaritas, munde porcine, calcâsti: en, siliquas accipe', which translates as ‘Oh, swinish world, you have trampled pearls; so take the husks.‘
²⁷

None the less, he left behind an invaluable mass of material recording the habits of New England speech in the first half of the nineteenth century. As an extract shows, it was very different from that of today:

But this, it must be remembered, was the speech of an uneducated New Englander. Someone from a more refined background, like John Quincy Adams, say, would have sounded as different again. One of the paradoxes of the day was that as America was becoming more politically unified it was in danger of becoming linguistically fractured. Class differences and regional differences alike were acutely felt
and remarked upon. The relative few who lived out along the frontier were not only cut off from changes in fashion but also changes in language. So when, for instance, Britons and eastern Americans began to change the diphthong in words like
boil
and
join
from
bile
and
jine,
or to insert a voiced r in some words while removing it from others, the frontier people were less likely to adopt the new trends. They continued for much longer (and in some cases continue yet) to say
bar
for
bear, consarn
for
concern, varmint
for
vermin, virtoo
for
virtue, fortin
for
fortune, enjine
for
engine, cattel
or
kittle
for
kettle, cuss
for
curse, thrash
for
thresh, tetchy
for
touchy, wrastle
for
wrestle, chaw
for
chew, gal
for
girl, riled
for
roiled, critter
for
creature
and so on. The further west one went the more pronounced the variations were, so that by mid-century when the English traveller Richard Francis Burton reached Salt Lake City he found the language scarcely recognizable as English.
²⁸

As the new breed of frontier people like Andrew Jackson, Davy Crockett and Abraham Lincoln brought their regional habits of speech to Washington, their distinctive turns of phrase and raw pronunciations increasingly grated on the sensibilities of their eastern colleagues and underlined the linguistic variability of the sprawling nation. Something of the flavour and pronunciation of frontier life is conveyed by a speech attributed to Davy Crockett (though in fact it was concocted in his behalf by a ghost-writer). ‘We are called upon to show our grit like a chain lightning agin a pine log, to extarminate, mollify and calumniate the foe like a niggar put into a holler log ... Cram his pesky carcass full of thunder and lightning like a stuffed sassidge and turtle him off with a red hot poker ... Split his countenance with a live airthquake, and tarrify him with a rale Injun yell ...' Though the words are not Crockett's there is no reason to suppose that the spellings are unfaithful to his pronunciations.
²⁹

Much the same country air applied to Lincoln, if at slightly less than gale force. However sophisticated his prose style,
Lincoln's spoken English always had a whiff of the backwoods about it. His invariable greeting was ‘Howdy' and his conversation was sprinkled with folksy colloquialisms like ‘out yonder' and ‘stay a spell', which must have caused at least some of Washington's more sophisticated politicos to cringe.
³⁰
Though we cannot be sure in each case, he very probably pronounced more than a few of his words in the antiquated frontier style. Certainly we know that he enjoyed an earthy story and took delight in showing his associates a letter he received from a disgruntled citizen in 1860. It read: ‘God damn your god damned old hell fired god damned soul to hell god damn you and goddam your god damned family's god damned hellfired god damned soul to hell and god damnation god damn them and god damn your god damn friends to hell.‘
³¹
The letter came, it hardly needs saying, from the frontier.

The friction between the direct, colourful, independent language of the West and the more reserved and bookish diction of the East was a constant leitmotif of American speech throughout the nineteenth century. And nowhere was it made more arrestingly manifest than at the commemoration of a cemetery for Civil War soldiers in the little Pennsylvania town of Gettysburg on 19 November 1863.

The main speaker of the day was not Lincoln, but the orator Edward Everett – an easterner, naturally. Everett droned on for two hours. As was the custom of the day, his speech was full of literary allusions, Ciceronian pomp and obscure historical references that bore only the scantest significance to the occasion. The syntax was high-flown and decked out with phalanxes of subordinate clauses, convoluted constructions, and parenthetical excursions. Almost every sentence had an acre of flowery verbiage between the subject and predicate. A single sentence gives some hint of its denseness:

And this was just one of some 1,500 equally windy sentences. At 2 p.m., two long, cold hours after starting, Everett concluded his speech to thunderous applause – motivated, one is bound to suspect, more by the joy of realizing it was over than by any message derived from the content – and turned the dais over to President Lincoln. The audience of perhaps 15,000 people had been standing for four hours, and was tired, cold and hungry. Lincoln rose awkwardly, ‘like a telescope drawing out', as one contemporary put it, adjusted his glasses, held the paper directly in front of his face and in a high, reedy voice delivered his address. ‘He barely took his eyes off the manuscript,' according to one witness, as he intoned those famous words:

Though Lincoln was never intended to provide anything other than some concluding remarks, this was breathtakingly brief. The Gettysburg address contained just 268 words, two-thirds of them of only one syllable, in ten mostly short, direct and memorably crystalline sentences. It took only a fraction over two minutes to deliver – so little, according to several contemporary accounts, that the official photographer was still making preliminary adjustments to his camera when the President sat down.

Far from taking the listener on a discursive trip through the majesties of imperial Rome or the glory that was Greece, the address contained no proper nouns at all. As Wills notes, it doesn't mention Gettysburg or slavery or even the Union.
³²
Lincoln thought it a failure. ‘I failed: I failed: and that is about all that can be said about it,' he remarked forlornly to Everett. Many agreed with him. The
Chicago Times
wrote: ‘The cheek of every American must tingle with shame as he reads the silly, flat and dishwatery utterances of the man who has to be
pointed out to intelligent foreigners as the President of the United States.' Even those newspapers sympathetic to Lincoln scarcely noted his address. Not until considerably later was it perceived as perhaps the greatest of American speeches.