Made In America - Bill Bryson [27]
Eighteenth-century users had a greater choice of contractions than now: as well as can’t, don’t, isn’t and so on, there was han’t (sometimes hain’t) for ‘have not’ and an’t for ‘are not’ and ‘am not’. An’t, first recorded in 1723 in print in America though probably older, evolved in two directions. Rhymed with ‘taunt,’ it took on the spelling aren’t (the r being silent, as it still is in British English). Rhymed with ‘taint,’ it took on the spelling ain’t. There was nothing intrinsically superior in one form or the other, but critics gradually developed a distaste for ain’t. By the nineteenth century it was widely, if unreasonably, condemned as vulgar, a position from which it shows no sign of advancing.24
Contemporary writings, particularly by the indifferently educated, offer good clues as to pronunciation. Paul Revere wrote ‘git’ (for get), ’imeaditly’ and ‘prittie’ and referred to blankets as being ‘woren out’. Elsewhere we can find ‘libity’ for liberty, ’patchis’ for purchase, ’ort’ for ought,25 ’weamin’ for women, ’through’ for throw, ’nater’ for nature,26 ’keer’ for care, ’jest’ for just; ’ole’ for old, ’pizen’ for poison, ’darter’ (or even ‘dafter’) for daughter. ’Chaw’ for chew, ’varmint’ for vermin, ’stomp’ for stamp, ’heist’ for hoist, ’rile’ for roil, ’hoss’ for horse, and ‘tetchy’ for touchy were commonly, if not invariably, heard among educated speakers on both sides of the Atlantic. All of this suggests that if we wished to find a modern-day model for British and American speech of the late eighteenth century, we could probably do no better than Yosemite Sam.
To this day it remains a commonplace in England that American English is a corrupted form of British speech, that the inhabitants of the New World display a kind of helpless, chronic ‘want of refinement’ (in the words of Frances Trollope) every time they open their mouths and attempt to issue sounds. In fact, in several significant ways it is British speech that has become corrupted – or, to put it in less reactionary terms, has quietly evolved. The tendency to pronounce fertile, mobile and other such words as if spelled ‘fertle’ and ‘moble’, to give a ŭ sound to hover, grovel and Coventry rather than the rounded o of hot, to pronounce schedule with an initial sk- rather than a sh-, all reflect British speech patterns up to the close of the eighteenth century.*12 Even the feature that Americans most closely associate with modern British speech, the practice of saying ‘bahth’, ‘cahn’t’ and ‘banahna’ for bath, can’t and banana, appears to have been unknown among educated British speakers at the time of the American Revolution. Pronunciation guides until as late as 1809 give no hint of the existence of such a pronunciation in British speech, although there is some evidence to suggest that it was used by London’s cockneys (which would make it one of the few instances in modern linguistics in which a manner of utterance travelled upward from the lower classes). Not only did English speakers of the day, Britons and Americans alike, say bath and path with a flat a, but even apparently such words as jaunt, hardly, palm and father. Two incidental relics of this old pattern of pronunciation are the general American pronunciation of aunt (i.e., ‘ant’) and sassy, which is simply how people once said saucy.
II
In the summer of 1776, when it occurred to the delegates assembled in Philadelphia that they needed a document to spell out the grounds of their dissatisfaction with Britain, the task was handed to Thomas Jefferson. To us, he seems the obvious choice. He was not.
In 1776 Thomas Jefferson was a fairly obscure figure, even in his own Virginia. Aged just thirty-three, he was the second youngest of the delegates and one of the least experienced. The second Continental Congress was in fact his first exposure to a wider world of affairs beyond those of his