American Language (15 page)

1
British Recognition of American Speech in the Eighteenth Century, by Allen Walker Read,
Dialect Notes
, Vol. VI, Pt. VI, 1933, p. 313.

2
A Voyage to Georgia, Begun in the Year 1735; London, 1744, p. 24. Moore was something of an adventurer. He went to West Africa for the Royal Africa Company in 1730, and got into obscure difficulties on the river Gambia. But when he came to Georgia in 1735 it was in the prosaic character of storekeeper to the colony. He arrived late in the year and remained until July, 1736. In 1738 he was back, staying this time until 1743. His subsequent career is unknown.

3
In the
World
, No. 102, Dec. 12, 1754. Quoted by Read.

4
The
Literary Magazine
, Sept.–Oct., 1756. Evans’s book was published in Philadelphia in 1755 by Benjamin Franklin and D. Hall. It was accompanied by the author’s General Map of the Middle British Colonies in America.

5
Secret Journals of the Continental Congress, Vol. II, p. 95. In the earlier editions of the present book I said that these instructions were issued to Franklin on his appointment as Minister to France. Where I picked up the error I don’t recall. It was corrected by the late Fred Newton Scott in the
Saturday Review of Literature
, Oct. 11, 1924. The instructions to Franklin, dated Oct. 12, 1778, contained no mention of language.

6
Witherspoon’s papers appeared under the heading of The Druid. This list and the foregoing quotation are from No. V, printed on May 9, 1781. The subject was continued in No. VI on May 16, and in No. VII (in two parts) on May 23 and 30. All the papers are reprinted in The Beginnings of American English, edited by M. M. Mathews; Chicago, 1931. They are also to be found in Witherspoon’s Collected Works, edited by Ashbel Green, Vol. IV; New York, 1800–01.

7
The Oxford Dictionary’s first example is dated 1440. After 1652 all the examples cited are American, until 1843, when the usage reappears in England.

8
The letter is reprinted in full in The Beginnings of American English, before cited, pp. 41–43.

9
The full text is in The Beginnings of American English, just cited.

10
For this letter I am indebted to George Philip Krapp: The English Language in America, Vol. I, p. 7.

11
His reference, of course, was to Johnson’s Dictionary, first published in 1755.

12
His Compendious Dictionary of the English Language, a sort of trial balloon, was published in 1806. There is a brief but good account of his dictionary-making in A Survey of English Dictionaries, by M. M. Mathews; London, 1933, pp. 37–45.

13
Published in 1783. There was no national copyright until 1790.

14
Later on in the same essay Webster sought to support this doctrine by undertaking an examination of Johnson, Gibbon, Hume, Robertson, Home, Kaims and Blair. Of Johnson he said: “His style is a mixture of Latin and English; an intolerable composition of Latinity, affected smoothness, scholastic accuracy, and roundness of periods.” And of Gibbon: “It is difficult to comprehend his meaning and the chain of his ‘ideas, as fast as we naturally read.… The mind of the reader is constantly dazzled by a glare of ornament, or charmed from the subject by the music of the language.”

15
The successive parts of the quotation are from pp. 20, 22, 22–3, and 36.

16
The members of the Philological Society of New York, organized in 1788, were for him, but they were young men of little influence, and their society lasted only a year or so. Webster became a member on March 17, 1788, but on Dec. 20 he left New York. The president was Josiah O. Hoffman and among the members were William Dunlap, the painter and dramatist, and Samuel L. Mitchell. On Aug. 27 Ebenezer Hazard, then Postmaster-General of the Confederation, wrote to a friend in Boston that Webster was “the monarch” of the society. In April, 1788 Webster printed in his
American Magazine
a notice saying that its purpose was that of “ascertaining and improving the American tongue.” On July 4, 1788 the society passed a resolution approving the first part of his Grammatical Institute. See The Philological Society of New York, by Allen Walker Read,
American Speech
, April, 1934.

17
Contributed to the
American Museum
for 1788. Under the heading of Philology he said: “Instruction in this branch of literature will become the more necessary in America as our intercourse must soon cease with the bar, the stage and the pulpit of Great Britain, from whence [
sic
] we received our knowledge of the pronunciation of the English language. Even modern English books should cease to be the models of style in the United States. The present is the age of simplicity of writing in America. The turgid style of Johnson, the purple glare of Gibbon, and even the studied and thick-set metaphors of Junius are all equally unnatural and should not be admitted into our country.”

18
In a letter from Monticello, August 16, to John Waldo, author of Rudiments of English Grammar. On August 12, 1801 Jefferson wrote to James Madison: “I view Webster as a mere pedagogue, of very limited understanding and very strong prejudices and party passion,” but this was with reference to a political matter. In his letter to Waldo, Jefferson adopted Webster’s ideas categorically, and professed to believe that “an American dialect will be formed.”

19
See Towards a Historical Aspect of American Speech Consciousness, by Leon Howard,
American Speech
, April, 1930.

20
Published in two volumes; Philadelphia and London, 1912. Thornton, who died in 1925, left a large amount of additional material, and its publication was begun in
Dialect Notes
, Vol. VI, Pt. III, 1931.

21
“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 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.” All this was a part of a review of Adam Seybert’s Statistical Annals of the United States,
Edinburgh Review
, Jan.–May, 1820.

22
University of Wisconsin Studies in Language and Literature
, No. 1; Madison, Wis., 1918.

23
See A Historical Note on American English, by Leon Howard,
American Speech
, Sept., 1927.

24
Cairns says that the
Edinburgh
, the
Anti-Jacobin
, the
Quarterly
, and the
European Magazine and London
Review were especially virulent. He says that the
Monthly
, despite my quotations, was always “kindly toward America” and that the
Eclectic
was, “on the whole, fair.” The
Literary Magazine and British Review
he describes as enthusiastically pro-American, but it lived only a short time.

25
November, 1796. I take what follows from Cairns.

26
Salisbury, 1796. Wansey stayed but two months, and his journey was confined to the region between Boston and Philadelphia.

27
Published in Edinburgh in 1833, and reprinted in Philadelphia the same year. The book did not bear Hamilton’s name, but was ascribed on the title page to “the author of ‘Cyril Thornton.’ ” Hamilton was a younger brother to Sir William Hamilton, the metaphysician, and a friend to Sir Walter Scott. He was himself a frequent contributor to
Blackwood’s
. “Cyril Thornton,” published in 1827, was a successful novel, and remained in favor for many years. Hamilton died in 1842. “Men and Manners in America” was translated into French and twice into German.

28
Gifford was a killer in general practise, and his onslaughts on Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats are still remembered. He retired from the
Quarterly
in 1824 with a fortune of
£
25,000 — the first magazine editor in history to make it pay. On his death in 1826 he was solemnly buried in Westminster Abbey. The
Quarterly
, despite its anti-American ferocity, was regularly reprinted in Boston. But when its issue for July, 1823 appeared with an extraordinarily malignant review of William Faux’s Memorable Days in America (London, 1823) the American publishers were warned that it contained a libel on “a distinguished individual at Washington,” and accordingly withheld it.

29
See also The Cambridge History of American Literature, Vol. I; New York, 1917, pp. 205–8; As Others See Us, by John Graham Brooks; New York, 1909, Ch. VII; James Kirke Paulding, by Amos L. Her-old; New York, 1926, Ch. IV; American Social History as Recorded by British Travellers, by Allan Nevins; New York, 1923, pp. 3–26 and pp. 111–138; One Hundred Years of Peace, by Henry Cabot Lodge: New York, 1913, pp. 41–55; and The English Traveller in America, 1785–1835, by Jane Louise Mesick; New York, 1922, pp. 241–45. There is a brief but comprehensive view of the earlier period in British Recognition of American Speech in the Eighteenth Century, by Allen Walker Read,
Dialect Notes
, Vol. VI, Pt. VI, 1933. A bibliography of British books of American travel is in The Cambridge History of American Literature, Vol. I, pp. 468–90, and another, annotated, in Nevins, pp. 555–68.

30
American Social History as Recorded by British Travelers; New York, 1923, p. 3.

31
In his essay, Colonialism in America, in Studies in History; Boston, 1884.

32
At that time both words were neologisms. The Oxford Dictionary’s first example of
gullibility
is dated 1793. So late as 1818 it was denounced by the Rev. H. J. Todd, one of the improvers of Johnson’s Dictionary, as “a low expression, sometimes used for
cullibility
.” The Oxford’s first example of
to diddle
is dated 1806.

33
This book, like John Bull and Brother Jonathan, seems to have had readers for a generation or more. So late as 1867 the Scribners brought out a new edition of the two in a single volume, under the title of The Bulls and Jonathans, with a preface by William I. Paulding. It still makes amusing reading.

34
The quotations are from pp. 127–9.

35
The letter appears in John Forster’s Life of Charles Dickens; London, 1872–74; Book III, Chapter V. It is reprinted in Allan Nevins’s American Social History as Recorded by British Travelers; New York, 1923, p. 268. It was written on a canal-boat nearing Pittsburgh, and dated March 28, 1842.

36
Journal, Nov. 25, 1842.

37
A second edition followed in 1864, and an eighth was reached by 1880. There was also an American edition. In October, 1864, an American resident in England, G. Washington Moon by name, brought out a counterblast, The Dean’s English. This reached a seventh edition by 1884. Moon employed the ingenious device of turning Alford’s pedantries upon him. He showed that the dean was a very loose and careless writer, and often violated his own rules. Another American, Edward S. Gould, bombarded him from the same ground in Good English, or Popular Errors in Language; New York, 1867. Alford was a favorite scholar of the time. He wrote Latin odes and a history of the Jews before he was ten years old, and in later life was the first editor of the
Contemporary Review
and brought out a monumental edition of the New Testament in Greek. He was born in 1810, served as dean of Canterbury from 1857 to 1871, and died in the latter year.

38
Letters, Conversations and Recollections of S. T. Coleridge, edited by Thomas Allsop; London, 1836.

39
“This dichotomy,” says Allen Walker Read in British Recognition of American Speech in the Eighteenth Century,
Dialect Notes
, Vol. VI, Pt. VI, 1933, p. 331, “runs through most British writing on American speech … : on the one hand the Americans are denounced for introducing corruptions into the language, and on the other hand those very expressions are eagerly claimed as of British origin to show that the British deserve the credit for them.”

40
According to
American Speech
(Feb. 1930, p. 250) this term was invented in 1925 or thereabout. At that time the English war debt to the United States was under acrimonious discussion, and Uncle Sam became Uncle Shylock.

41
Aug. 29, 1929. The passage is perhaps worth quoting in full: “The literary style of the articles is, in most instances, suitable to their purpose. Some of them afford obvious indications of their country of origin, as when we read that Bishop Asbury was at no time a
well man
, or that Chester A. Arthur’s chief did not uphold the power of the Conkling
crowd
, or that Robert Bacon announced his
candidacy
for the Senate, or that Governor Altgeld
protested
the action of President Cleveland, or that Dr. W. Beaumont, when a doctor’s apprentice, learned to
fill
prescriptions, or that J. G. Blaine
raised
a family of seven children, or that Prof. B. P. Bowne tested the progress of his pupils by a written
quiz
. The article on Blaine contains a curious illustration of the peculiar American use of the word
politician
. We read that ‘however much Blaine was a politician, it seems to be the fact that from 1876 he was the choice of the majority, or of the largest faction, of Republicans.’ One naturally wonders why it should be thought surprising for a politician to win popular support within his own party. The explanation is that
politician
is here very nearly a synonym for
wire-puller
or
intriguer
, and the point the writer wishes to make is that Blaine’s influence was not wholly due to his adroit manipulation of the political machine.” The following is from the
Times
’ review of Hervey Allen’s Toward the Flame (
Literary Supplement
, June 7, 1934): “Mr. Allen may or not feel complimented by the statement that, apart from military terms which appear strange to us, there is not an Americanism in his strong and supple prose; but the fact adds to an English reader’s pleasure. Yet one would like to know what were the functions of the individual called the colonel’s
striker.
” The English term for
striker
, as the reviewer might have discovered by consulting the Oxford Dictionary, is
batman
. Both signify a military servant.