American Independence

In the years leading up to the Declaration of Independence, there was little difference between the English used in America and in Britain. This did not stop many in the educated classes of England looking down on what they regarded as ugly new words emanating from America, and a sometimes apologetic tone from people such as Benjamin Franklin. But American confidence was growing, and by the middle of the 19th century there had evolved a distinctly transatlantic mode of expression, both in speech and in writing.

After the Declaration of Independence (1776) and the signing of the US Constitution (1787), America asserted its autonomy and selfhood in several ways, for example by the establishment of a federal government in the same year as the Constitution or by the creation of a navy in 1794. Linguistic independence was never seriously on the cards but there were ways in which the new nation would seek to proclaim its difference from the old country. One of them was to stop the constant over-the-shoulder glance for British approval. Another was to forge distinctive expressions and spellings.

The Mother Language?

The British had a proprietorial attitude towards English in the 18th century, by which period the language had evolved to the shape it still essentially has today. The attitude of some educated people towards the one-time colony on the other side of the Atlantic was a combination of snobbery and alarm, as if they were watching a giant playing with a valuable but fragile toy. Even in the 21st century it is not that unusual to hear complaints about the ‘Americanization’ of English. The danger of such prejudices – even their absurdity – is shown by the fact that people once objected to the words belittle and lengthy because they came from the USA. Interestingly, belittle was reputed to be the invention of the third president Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826). If so, it fits his belief in the need for coinages (see below).

Where the British were only too eager to criticize, the Americans responded with a mixture of defensiveness and self-assertion. John Witherspoon, a signatory to the Declaration of Independence, wrote articles attacking the bad language habits of his countrymen, such as using mad in the sense of ‘angry’ (although it had medieval roots and appears in that sense in one of the psalms in the King James Bible). Benjamin Franklin, taken to task for using the words colonize and unshakable, was quick to back down.

Paradoxically, alongside the defensiveness there was also an innate confidence and certainty that the future of the language lay in American hands. John Adams, another of the Independence signatories and the president who followed George Washington, foresaw the global advance of English. Equally presciently, he attributed this to the growing population and power of his own country, relegating England to second place. In a letter written in 1813 Thomas Jefferson, the man behind belittle, explained why the American branch of English had no choice but to invent and expand:

Certainly so great growing a population, spread over such an extent of country, with such a variety of climates, of productions, of arts, must enlarge their language, to make it answer its purpose of expressing all ideas, the new as well as the old. The new circumstances under which we are placed, call for new words, new phrases, and for the transfer of old words to new objects. An American dialect will therefore be formed . . .

In the same letter he refers to ‘judicious neology’ (i.e., the sensible creation of new terms) and sums up the situation:

Here, where all is new, no innovation is feared which offers good [. . .] necessity obliges us to neologize.

One of the earliest ways in which Jefferson’s ‘American dialect’ might be traced and celebrated was in the creation of a specifically American dictionary, one that would reflect American culture rather than being simply a product of the old colonial regime.

Nationalizing the Language?

The challenge of compiling a dictionary that would fix the language to American tastes rather than to British ones was taken up by Noah Webster (1758–1843), the Yale-educated son of a Connecticut farmer.

Brought up as a Calvinist, Noah Webster was an instinctive educator and a highly moral one at that. Not content with producing a spelling book which was outsold only by the Bible, he also edited the King James Bible itself both to clear up textual obscurities and to clean up those dubious words ‘such as cannot, with propriety, be uttered before a promiscuous [mixed] audience’. For the sake of clarity Webster made quite sensible changes in his version of the Bible, like substituting know or knew for wist, wit and wot, while to protect the sensibility of readers he altered stones (testicles) to male organs or turned a whore into a harlot.

The same evangelizing streak, the desire to clarify and correct, went into the compilation of the dictionary. Or rather dictionaries, since Webster produced two. The first, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language (1806), was built on an earlier spelling dictionary by an Englishman, but contained – so Webster claimed – 5000 new words that were specifically American.

With a combination of flag-waving and common sense, Webster also asserted American individuality and the difference from Britain by introducing spelling reforms. Some of these, like the French-looking medicin for medicine, didn’t catch on. But others did, and have been linguistic markers between the two countries ever since. Webster was responsible for such distinctively US forms as theater and center as well as check (instead of the British cheque), tire (tyre), defense (defence), and the dropping of the useless u in words like colo(u)r and hono(u)r. One of his motives was to encourage American printing and publishing businesses since, for both financial and cultural reasons, books with these spellings were not being produced in Britain.

More than 20 years passed between the Compendious and the reference work for which Webster is principally remembered, his two-volume American Dictionary of the English Language (published in 1828). The title is a declaration of national ownership. The English language is no longer the exclusive property of the British. Like any dictionary-maker, Webster had enormous confidence in himself. But he had an unbounded confidence too in the potential of American English and a belief, which turned out to be justified, that it would become the dominant form of the language across the globe.

The strength of Webster’s 1828 dictionary is generally reckoned to lie in its definitions. Take a seemingly simple word like net. In his 1755 dictionary Dr Johnson had made one of his rare slips and given a definition of net which was comically complicated (‘Anything reticulated or decussated at equal distances with interstices between the intersections.’). By contrast Webster’s explanation of the word was straightforward: ‘An instrument for catching fish and fowls, or wild beasts, formed with twine or thread interwoven with meshes.’

In his dictionary-making, Webster had a couple of axes to grind – and, incidentally, ‘having an axe to grind’ is an American expression which just pre-dates him. Many of the definitions and examples reflect Webster’s religious convictions, so that even the ‘neutral’ word parallel is illustrated with the example: ‘When honor runs parallel with the laws of God and our country, it cannot be too much cherished.’ But the other aspect of Webster’s motivation is hinted at in the same example. It consisted of respect and admiration for his relatively new country and its institutions.

Webster was a patriot who was determined to plough (or, in the US spelling, plow) an American furrow. His championing of simplified forms of spelling and of uniquely American terms like congress and caucus struck a chord in an ambitious and expanding republic. However little may survive of Noah Webster’s original work his name is synonymous with ‘dictionary’ in a way that Samuel Johnson’s is not. And one can safely say that it is the only work of its kind to be referred to in a song, specifically the Johnny Mercer lyrics for the Frank Sinatra/Ella Fitzgerald classic ‘Too Marvelous For Words’ (‘You’re much too much, and just too very, very/To ever be in Webster’s Dictionary’). It’s worth noting that marvelous is the spelling favoured by Webster in his reforms and the one used in his dictionary, while marvellous is standard in British English.

The Gettysburg Address

Evidence for the self-confidence of American English by the later part of the 19th century can be found everywhere in the words of two of the most famous citizens of the period, a president and a Mississippi steamboat pilot who became a writer. It is significant that neither of these figures, Abraham Lincoln (1809–65) and Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain;1835–1910), was born on the long-settled and culturally established eastern seaboard but in Illinois and Florida, respectively.

The most famous speech in American history, Abraham Lincoln’s address at the Gettysburg military cemetery in 1863, during the Civil War, contains little more than 250 words and took about two minutes to deliver. It followed another speech which lasted two hours, and the audience of thousands standing in the cold of a November day must have been grateful for the president’s brevity. But the listeners may not have responded with the kind of admiration, even reverence, which the speech has received since. It was only slowly that the Gettysburg Address acquired the iconic status it has today in the US and other parts of the world (the French constitution contains a direct translation of Lincoln’s closing words when it refers to its guiding principle as being ‘gouvernement du peuple . . .’).

The speech has been likened to poetry in its use of language and its rhythms. With a more objective eye, it has been criticized for its lack of logic since – in the middle of a civil war fought to prevent the Southern states from achieving self-determination – Lincoln is asserting the necessity of government by universal consent. For all that, its emotional appeal transcends the occasion and the Gettysburg Address comes to stand as a supreme statement of the validity of democratic rule and the honour which should be given to those who die in that cause:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate – we can not consecrate – we can not hallow – this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us – that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion – that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth.

How does the speech work? It has a biblical and religious resonance in expressions such as Four score and seven years ago, our fathers, fitting and proper, consecrate and hallow. It draws together various threads by verbal repetition: the lives of the fallen have been given so that the nation might live; the ceremonial dedication of the battlefield is less important than the moral dedication of those who fought and died there, which must be matched by the dedication of the living to continue the struggle. In the last paragraph dedication is transformed to devotion.

Lincoln employs the rhetorical device of varying and balancing weighty phrases: will little note . . . nor long remember . . . can never forget . . . of the people, by the people, for the people. He repeatedly draws the distinction between ‘we’ and ‘they’, the living and the dead, stressing the nobility of the fallen soldiers compared to the poor power of the survivors to enhance this occasion. He does this not to dishearten his listeners but to give them fresh hope and encouragement to go on with the fight, following in the footsteps of the illustrious dead. In other words, Lincoln is forging links rather than creating boundaries. Finally, the language is extremely simple, the words mostly monosyllables.

Mark Twain and Dialect

Although Samuel Clemens was born in Florida, he is forever associated with the town or state where he grew up (Hannibal, Missouri) and with the Mississippi River which flowed through it. Clemens’s early career was a kind of checklist of the opportunities available to an enterprising young man in a dynamic and expanding country. By his own account, he worked as a river-pilot on the Mississippi, a silver-miner in Nevada and a gold-miner in California, as well as a journalist in several places, before becoming an author. He adopted the name of Mark Twain from the cry of the riverboat crewman who took soundings with a lead plummet.

Twain’s best-known books are Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). While Tom Sawyer is, essentially, a children’s book that can be read with great pleasure by adults, Huckleberry Finn is the reverse, a profound and mature work masquerading as an adventure story. The book, mostly occupied with Huck’s escape on a raft down the Mississippi with the runaway black slave, Jim, is a eulogy to Twain’s childhood. But it is also a panorama of the often rough frontier spirit of an American society far removed from the niceties of New England, and a subtle treatment of the racial issues which have dogged the USA from its earliest days.

From the language point of view, Huckleberry Finn represents the appearance of a vigorous, vernacular voice, as Twain puts himself inside Huck’s head and heart. Huck has a buttonholing, ‘uneducated’ style but one which tells an American story in a uniquely American style, as in this excerpt where Huck and Jim’s raft is run down by a steamer:

We could hear her pounding along, but we didn’t see her good till she was close. She aimed right for us. Often they do that and try to see how close they can come without touching; sometimes the wheel bites off a sweep, and then the pilot sticks his head out and laughs, and thinks he’s mighty smart. Well, here she comes, and we said she was going to try and shave us; but she didn’t seem to be sheering off a bit. She was a big one, and she was coming in a hurry, too, looking like a black cloud with rows of glow-worms around it; but all of a sudden she bulged out, big and scary, with a long row of wide-open furnace doors shining like red-hot teeth, and her monstrous bows and guards hanging right over us. There was a yell at us, and a jingling of bells to stop the engines, a pow-wow of cussing, and whistling of steam – and as Jim went overboard on one side and I on the other, she come smashing straight through the raft.

But Twain wasn’t content simply with creating Huck’s voice. He explained that he had used a number of different dialects in the books, including ‘Missouri Negro . . . backwoods Southwestern dialect [and] ordinary “Pike County” dialect’. Dialects, as reproduced in literature, are not likely to be accurate in the way that a verbatim oral recording would be. The author may work them up for effect or fall back on old usages. Nevertheless, the very fact that a dialect is enshrined in print gives it status, as well as providing useful material for linguistic specialists. Twain knew what he was talking about or, rather, what his characters were talking about. He had grown up among the kind of figures who populate Huckleberry Finn. In particular he gave to the runaway Jim a distinctive speech, as here when Huck is reunited with him after capsizing on the river (the raft has also been saved):

It was Jim’s voice – nothing ever sounded so good before. I run along the bank a piece and got aboard, and Jim he grabbed me and hugged me, he was so glad to see me. He says: ‘Laws bless you, chile, I ‘uz right down sho’ you’s dead agin. Jack’s been heah; he say he reck’n you’s ben shot, kase you didn’ come home no mo’; so I’s jes’ dis minute a startin’ de raf’ down towards de mouf er de crick, so’s to be all ready for to shove out en leave soon as Jack comes agin en tells me for certain you IS dead. Lawsy, I’s mighty glad to git you back again, honey.’

Twain’s was, of course, a white voice reproducing black dialect speech. He was not doing it from the inside, but he was doing it from a sympathetic standpoint. There were other white writers doing the same, notably Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–96) in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and Joel Chandler Harris (1848–1908), creator of Brer Rabbit.

And there were black writers, producing material both in dialect and in standard English. This was not a straightforward choice. The poet Paul Dunbar (1872–1906), who won early praise for his verse, complained: ‘I am tired, so tired of dialect. I send out graceful little poems, suited for any of the magazines, but they are returned to me by editors who say, Dunbar, but we do not care for the language compositions.’ Dunbar could write lines like:

Look hyeah! What you axing’?
What meks me so merry?
’Spect to see me sighin’
W’en hit’s wa’m in Febawary?

Obviously his audience had grown used to such ‘colourful’ material. Dialect had become quaint. At other times, it could be a badge of identity and an assertion of difference from standard or conventional English.

The debate continued into the 20th century. The move northwards of large numbers of blacks who were looking for new opportunities in the cities as well as escaping from restrictive laws in the southern states led to a resurgence of black culture that became known as the Harlem Renaissance. One of the differences in the black linguistic debate of the 1920s was over the extent to which African Americans should be encouraged to discard their distinctive idiom and adopt the style of the white mainstream. An alternative view endorsed the black vernacular as perfectly valid.

It is ironic that black usages and slang terms – many of them dating from the 1920s and some from earlier (jive, chick, hype, jam, mellow, pad) – were eagerly taken up during the 1930s and the following decades by white speakers who wanted to appear ‘cool’, another quintessential black expression. Of course, the adoption of such terms could be seen as (another) act of appropriation, while the flattery implied by these early users’ imitation of black speech is double-edged. White speakers might have occasionally wanted to sound like blacks, but very few would have wanted to share their social and political disadvantages.

Yiddish

Another very significant component in the increasingly complex culture of the United States was European Jewish immigration. There were several waves, the largest of which took place in the decades before the First World War, when an estimated 3 million Jews from eastern and central Europe came to New York’s immigration centre on Ellis Island, escaping persecution or looking for a better life. Although among the poorest and least educated of new arrivals, this wave was to be the one that helped create the film and popular music businesses.

Along with energy and creativity, the immigrants brought with them their own language, Yiddish. Yiddish derives from the form of German that Jewish settlers picked up in the Rhineland a thousand years ago. Leo Rosten points out in The New Joys of Yiddish (2001) that since ‘Jewish women were not taught Hebrew, the “sacred tongue”, they spoke Yiddish to their children [. . .] So Yiddish became known as mameloshn, “mother tongue”.’ The heyday of Yiddish in America was probably in the first part of the 20th century when the culture of the immigrants was required to be at its most cohesive in a new country. As late as 1935 New Yorkers could choose between a dozen Yiddish newspapers.

Quite a few Yiddish expressions have found a place in mainstream English. Phrases like Don’t ask, Go figure or Enough already derive from Yiddish. While a handful of individual words are familiar – glitch, bagel – some retain a slightly exotic tinge and are not always easy to ‘translate’. Chutzpah, for example, is usually defined as ‘cheek’ or ‘impudence’ but carries overtones of brazenness with a hint of stylishness that leaves the onlooker gaping. Shtick has several definitions in Yiddish but is used in English only in the sense of ‘special routine’ or ‘gimmick’, and relates particularly to comics. Yet the true Yiddish shtick carries a predominant sense of disappointment, almost of dismissal on the part of the speaker.

Indeed, Yiddish is rich in terms combining amusement and disdain. The sound alone is enough to convey the meaning of schmuck, klutz and putz, although nebbish (hapless person), schlemiel (fool) or schnorrer (whingeing beggar) may need a word or two of explanation.

The impact of Yiddish on English outstrips the limited number of words it has brought. Many still sound ‘foreign’, at least to British ears, but they fill niches not occupied by ‘native’ words. A very small selection might include:

maven – an expert (but with the merest suggestion of ‘self-proclaimed’)

schlepp – move slowly, drag (almost onomatopoeic, surely)

schmaltz – sentimental stuff (to the point of being sickly; derives from German word for cooking fat)

schmooze – chatter (with networking implications)

shtum – silent, dumb (but you keep shtum only about things that it would be compromising or risky to reveal)

The Food Trail

Every immigrant community of any size brings its own style of food and cooking to its adoptive country. With the older, colonial countries, it is often a legacy of empire. Witness the popularity of Indian food in Britain or the plethora of Vietnamese restaurants in France. America has been the beneficiary of waves of immigration, and the result is a hotchpotch of ethnic and national eating places, particularly in cities like New York.

During the 19th century, people arrived in far greater numbers than before and the cooking lexicon expanded. Some terms, such as the Spanish/Mexican tortilla (first recorded in English in 1699), had been around for centuries. Other meaty foods, like the frankfurter, hamburger and wiener/weeny (from Wienerwurst = sausage from Vienna) did not emerge until the later 19th century, reflecting the sheer size of the German-speaking community.

The Italians, who came later, brought their varieties of pasta (literally ‘paste’) from cannelloni to lasagne to spaghetti, and the ubiquitous pizza.

Wild West Words

The expansion westwards brought a small horde of fresh words to American English. Cowboy had first been recorded in British English in the early 18th century (simply to define a boy who tends cows). The word took a detour during the War of Independence when it was applied, disparagingly, to crown loyalists before assuming its glamorous Wild West sense in the 1880s and spawning a couple of slangy off-shoots like cow-poke and cow-puncher.

Two individuals who kept cattle on a grand scale bequeathed their names to posterity. Joseph McCoy was shipping up to half a million head of cattle from Kansas to Chicago every year during the 1870s, and may be the origin of ‘the real McCoy’. If so, the phrase sounds like a slogan invented to distinguish his stock from his competitors’. Someone who didn’t bother to distinguish his property at all was a Texan called Samuel Maverick. He deliberately chose not to brand his own livestock and, on the assumption that everyone else did their branding, he was thus able to claim any unmarked cattle as his own. Therefore a ‘maverick’ comes to describe a person who is a free spirit, a non-conformist – and sometimes a pain in the neck.

A large number of terms that we asssociate with the West and Southwest of the USA came via Spanish. Some are topographical: canyon, mesa (table-land), sierra. Some impart a flavour of the frontier life: vigilante, bonanza (in Spanish the equivalent of ‘fair weather’ and so ‘prosperity’). But most are to do with animals and animal-handling: mustang (Spanish mestengo), bronco (bronco = rough/sturdy), stampede (estampida), lariat, rodeo. Curiously, posse, a word that has a faintly Spanish sound and inevitably conjures up images of the sheriff riding out with a party of gun-toting citizens, actually goes back to a much earlier period and another country. The posse comitatus was the body legally required to answer a sheriff’s summons not in the still-undiscovered USA but in the England of the Middle Ages.

KEYWORD
Senate

The term and the institution senate go back to ancient Rome (Latin senatus meaning ‘council of elders’, deriving from senex, ‘old man’). Though sometimes applied to the British parliament several centuries earlier, senate was officially adopted after the War of Independence as the name of the upper and smaller branch of the US legislature. The term is also used for the governments of the individual states as well as in countries such as France and Italy. The association between age (and presumably wisdom) is maintained in America, where the average age of the senators in Washington is at the time of writing over 60.