Made In America (68 page)

A word that imparts no overt sense of gender – that doesn’t say, ‘Look, this is a word for guys only’ – is effectively neuter. Words after all have only the meanings we give them.
Piss
is infra dig in polite company not because there is something intrinsically shocking in that particular arrangement of letters but because of the associations with which we have endowed the word. Surely it is excessive to regard a word as
ipso facto
objectionable because of the historical background of a syllable embedded in it, particularly when that word does not fire gender-sensitive synapses in most people’s minds.

My point becomes somewhat clearer, I hope, when we look at what I think is the greatest weakness of the bias-free usage movement – namely, that often it doesn’t know where
to stop. The admirable urge to rid the language of its capacity to harm can lead to a zealousness that is little short of patronizing. Maggio, for instance, cautions us not to ‘use lefthanded metaphorically; it perpetuates subtle but age-old negative associations for those who are physically left-handed’. I would submit that a left-handed person (and I speak as one myself) would have to be sensitive to the point of neurosis to feel personally demeaned by a term like ‘left-handed compliment’.

Similarly she cautions against using
black
in a general sense –
black humour, black eye, black mark, blacksmith
(though not, oddly,
blackout
)
– on the grounds that most
black
words have a negative connotation that subtly reinforces prejudice. Or as she puts it: ‘Avoiding words that reinforce negative connotations of black will not do away with racism, but it can lessen the everyday pain these expressions cause readers.’ I cannot pretend to speak for black people, but it seems to me unlikely that many can have experienced much ‘everyday pain’ from knowing that the person who shoes horses is called a blacksmith.

Even ‘violent expressions and metaphors’ –
to kill two birds with one stone, how does that strike you, to knock someone dead, smash hit, one thing triggers another, to kick around an idea
– are to be excluded from our speech on the grounds that they help to perpetuate a culture sympathetic to violence.

Such assertions, I would submit, are not only an excessive distraction from the main issues, but dangerously counterproductive. They invite ridicule, and, as we have seen, there is no shortage of people who ache to provide it.

A final charge often laid against the bias-free speech movement – that it promotes a bias of its own – is also not always easy to refute. Maggio outlaws many expressions like
a man’s home is his castle
(and rightly in my view) but defends a
woman’s work is never done
on the grounds that ‘this is particularly true and usually more true than of a man with a
paid job and a family’. Just because a sentiment is true doesn’t make it non-sexist. (And anyway it isn’t true.) Others take matters much further. When the University of Hawaii proposed a speech code for students and staff, Mari Matsuda, a professor of law, endorsed the idea but added the truly arresting belief that ‘Hateful verbal attacks upon dominant group members by victims is permissible.’
²¹

With respect, I would suggest that consideration, reasonableness and a sense of fairness are qualities that apply to all members of a speech community, not just to those who hold the reins.

So where now for America and its distinctive strain of English? One of the few certainties about the future for America is that it will continue to become, far more than any other developed nation, a multiracial society. By the end of this decade, only about half of Americans entering the workforce will be native born and of European stock. By 2020, if present trends continue, the proportion of non-white and Hispanic Americans will have doubled, while the white population will have remained almost unchanged. By 2050 the number of Asian Americans will have quintupled.

Many Americans see this as a threat. They note uneasily that already the most popular radio station in Los Angeles is a Spanish-language one, that Spanish is the mother tongue of about half of the two million inhabitants of greater Miami, that 11 per cent of Americans speak a language other than English at home. Some have even seen in this a kind of conspiracy. The late Senator S. I. Hayakawa expressed his belief in 1987 that ‘a very real move is afoot to split the US into a bilingual and bicultural society’.
²²
Though he never explained what sinister parties were behind this move, or
what they could possibly hope to gain from it, his views found widespread support, and led to the formation of US English, a pressure group dedicated to the notion that English should be the sole official language of the United States.

In fact, there is no reason to suppose that America is any more threatened by immigration today than it was a century ago. To begin with, only 6 per cent of Americans are foreign born, a considerably smaller proportion than in Britain, France, Germany or most other developed countries. Immigration is for the most part concentrated in a few urban centres. Though some residents in those cities may find it vexing that their waitress or taxi-driver does not always speak colloquial English with the assurance of a native-born American, it is also no accident that those cities where immigration is most profound – Miami, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco – are almost always far more vibrant than those places like Detroit, St Louis and Philadelphia where it is not.

Nor is it any accident that immigrants are a disproportionate presence in many of those industries – pharmaceuticals, medical research, entertainment, the computer industry – that are most vital to America’s continued prosperity. A third of the engineers in California’s silicon valley, for instance, were born in Asia. As one observer has put it: ‘America will win because our Asians will beat their Asians.’
²³

Quite apart from the argument that foreign cultures introduce a welcome measure of diversity into American life, no evidence has ever been adduced to show that immigrants today, any more than in the past, persist with their native tongues. A study by the Rand Corporation in 1985 found that 95 per cent of the children of Mexican immigrants in America spoke English, and that half of these spoke only English. According to another survey, more than 90 per cent of Hispanics, citizens and non-citizens alike, believe
that residents of the United States should learn English.
²⁴

If history is anything to go by, then three things about America’s immigrants are as certain today as they ever were: that they will learn English, that they will become Americans, and that the country will be richer for it. And if that is not a good thing, I don’t know what is.

1: The
Mayflower
and Before

1
American Heritage,
October 1962, pp. 49–55.

2
Flexner,
I Hear America Talking,
p. 271

3
Heaton,
The Mayflower,
p. 80.

4
Wagenknecht,
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,
p. 105.

5
Caffrey,
The Mayflower,
p. 141.

6
Blow (ed.),
Abroad in America,
p. 79.

7
Morison,
The Oxford History of the American People,
p. 19

8
Enterline,
Viking America,
p. 10.

9
Morison, op. cit., p. 20.

10
National Geographic,
November 1964, p. 721.

11
Enterline, op. cit., p. 136.

12
The Economist,
29 June 1991, p. 100.

13
Sydney Morning Herald,
16 September 1992, p. 8.

14
The Economist,
24 October 1991, p. 136.

15
National Geographic,
June 1979, p. 744.

16
Stewart,
Names on the Land,
p. 23.

17
American Heritage,
October 1962, p. 50.

18
Caffrey, op. cit., pp. 70–3.

2: Becoming Americans

1
Mencken,
The American Language,
4th edn., p. 434.

2
Ibid., p. 431.

3
Vallins,
Spelling,
pp. 79–85

4
Krapp,
The English Language in America,
vol. 1, p. 201.

5
Baugh and Cable,
A History of the English Language,
p. 248.

6
Dohan,
Our Own Words,
p. 69.

7
Mencken, op. cit., p. 288.

8
Holt,
Phrase and Word Origins,
p. 55.

9
Fischer,
Albion’s Seed,
p. 261.

10
Flexner,
I Hear America Talking,
p. 63, and Mencken, op. cit., p.139.

11
American Heritage,
February 1963, pp. 90–6.

12
Craigie,
The Growth of American English,
pp. 209–11.

13
Laird,
Language in America,
pp. 25–6.

14
R. Bailey,
Images of English,
pp. 68–9, and Mencken, op. cit., p.111.

15
Stewart,
Names on the Land,
p. 63.

16
Holt, op. cit., pp. 49–50.

17
Carver,
A History of English in Its Own Words,
p. 182.

18
R. Bailey, op. cit., p. 67.

19
Krapp, op. cit., p. 175.

20
Quoted in Marckwardt,
American English,
p. 28.

21
American Heritage,
December 1983, p. 85.

22
Zinn,
A People’s History of the United States,
p. 15.

23
American Heritage,
April 1963, p. 69.

24
National Geographic,
June 1979, p. 735.

25
Ibid., p. 764.

26
Morison,
The Oxford History of the American People,
p. 41.

27
Lacey,
Sir Walter Ralegh,
p. 90.

28
Jones,
American Immigration,
p. 18.

29
Ibid., p. 22.

30
Morison, op. cit., p. 82.

3: A ‘Democratical Phrenzy’: America in the Age of Revolution

1
Morison,
The Oxford History of the American People,
p. 172.

2
Fischer,
Albion’s Seed,
p. 30.

3
American Heritage,
June 1970, pp. 54–9.

4
Stephen T. Olsen, ‘Patrick Henry’s “Liberty or Death” Speech: A
Study in Disputed Authorship’, in Benson (ed.),
American Rhetoric,
pp. 19–27.

5
Quoted in Cmiel,
Democratic Eloquence,
p. 56.

6
Boorstin,
The Americans: The National Experience,
p. 374.

7
American Heritage,
December 1973, p. 37.

8
Quoted in Cmiel, op. cit., p. 54.

9
P. Smith,
A People’s History of the United States,
vol. 1, p. 271.

10
Letter to William Randolph, June 1776, in Boy (ed.),
The Papers of Thomas Jefferson,
vol. 1, p. 409.

11
P. Srnith, op. cit., p. 223.

12
Wills,
Inventing America,
p. 45.

13
Ibid., p. 35.

14
Brodie,
Thomas Jefferson,
p. 103.

15
Fischer, op. cit., p. 6.

16
Ibid., p. 471.

17
Ibid., p. 259.

18
Dillard,
All-American English,
p. 55.

19
Wills, op. cit., p. 36.

20
Quoted in Krapp,
The English Language in America,
vol. 1, p. 46.

21
Flexner,
I Hear America Talking,
p. 7.

22
Cmiel, op. cit., p. 45.

23
Krapp, op. cit., p. 44.

24
Mencken,
The American Language,
4th edn., p. 539.

25
Dillard, op. cit., p. 53.

26
Hibbert,
Redcoats and Rebels,
pp. 31–5.

27
Stephen E. Lucas, ‘Justifying America: The Declaration of Independence as a Rhetorical Document’, in Benson (ed.), op. cit., p71.

28
Letter to Henry Lee, 8 May 1825.

29
Wills, op. cit., p. xxi.

30
Cmiel, op. cit., p. 83.

31
Boyd (ed.), op. cit., vol. 1, p. 423.

32
Lucas, op. cit., pp. 67–119.

33
Hibbert, op. cit., p. 117.

34
Ibid., p. 117.

35
Safire,
Coming to Terms,
p. 140.

36
Simpson,
The Politics of American English,
p. 23.

37
Boyd (ed.), op. cit., vol. 1, p. 404.

38
Mencken, op. cit., p. 502.

39
Flexner, op. cit., p. 7.

40
Flexner,
Listening to America,
p. 328.

41
Boorstin, op. cit, p. 381.

4: Making a Nation

1
Mee,
The Genius of the People,
p. 30.

2
P. Smith,
A People’s History of the United States,
vol. 3, p. ix.

3
Schwarz,
George Washington,
p. 47.

4
Mee, op. cit., p. 143.

5
Flexner,
Listening to America,
p. 281.

6
P. Smith, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 78.

7
Aldridge,
Benjamin Franklin and Nature’s God,
p. 22.

8
P. Smith, op. cit., vol. 3, p. 397.

9
Morison,
The Oxford History of the American People,
pp. 308–9.

10
Seavey,
Becoming Benjamin Franklin,
p. 150.

11
E. Wright,
Franklin of Philadelphia,
p. 53.

12
Ibid., p. 54.

13
Granger,
Benjamin Franklin,
p. 66.

14
Willcox (ed.),
The Papers of Benjamin Franklin,
vol. 15, p. 174.