Made In America - Bill Bryson [36]
He did, it must be said, often improve on others’ maxims. He took the proverb ‘God restoreth health and the physician hath the thanks’, and made it into the pithier ‘God heals and the doctor takes the fee.‘12 More often than not, however, he merely embellished them with a reference to flatulence, incontinence, sexual intercourse or some other frailty. His remark above about friendship without power being ‘not worth a farto’ originated with Thomas Fuller as the rather more prim ‘A good friend is my nearest relation.’ James Howell’s ‘A Fort which begins to parley is half gotten’ he made into ‘Neither a fortress nor a Maidenhead will hold out long after they begin to parly.‘13
No discussion of Franklin and language would be complete without a mention of his Proposal for a Reformed Alphabet of 1768. Though much is sometimes made of Franklin’s tinkering with English spelling, and though he did offer occasional statements sympathetic to the cause of reform (namely, ‘if Amendments are never attempted and things continue to grow worse and worse they must come to be in a wretched Condition at last’), it is not clear whether he regarded it as a serious attempt at orthographic reform or merely as an amusing way of writing mildly flirtatious letters to a pretty young correspondent.
Certainly there is no persuasive evidence that he worked very hard at the matter. The alphabet he came up with is a clumsy, illogical affair. It contained six additional letters, so it offered no improvements in terms of simplicity. Moreover, it was arbitrary, whimsical, hopelessly bewildering to the untutored, and routinely resulted in spellings that were far longer and more complex than those they were intended to replace. Under Franklin’s reforms, for example, ‘changes’ became ‘tseendsez’ and ‘Chinese’ became ‘Tsuiniiz.’ His first letter in the new alphabet, dated July 20,1768, is replete with spellings that suggest Franklin either had a peculiar sense of pronunciation or, more likely, carelessly applied his own pronunciation guide. According to his letter, has would be pronounced ’haze’, people would be ‘pee-peel’, and Richmond would be ‘Reechmund’.14
So used are we to regarding Franklin as a sage and mentor that it can come as a small shock to realize that he was not much venerated in his own day. John Adams, for one, detested him.15 After Franklin’s death in 1790, so little was his loss felt that the first edition of his collected writings did not appear until twenty-eight years later. His Autobiography aroused less interest still and did not appear in an American edition until 1868 – seventy-eight years after he died and long after it had been published elsewhere.16 At the time of the Constitutional Convention Franklin was generally held to be at best of no real account, at worst little more than a doddering old fool. His infrequent proposals to the convention that the President of the United States not be paid a salary, that each session be started with a prayer – were always roundly defeated. (His prayer motion failed to carry not because the delegates were ungodly but, as they patiently explained to him, because they had no funds to pay a chaplain.)
Franklin was merely a visible, wheezing reminder that the business of America had passed in large part to a new generation. With the principal exception of the fifty-five-year-old General Washington (who in any case didn’t take part in the debates), the delegates were strikingly youthful. Five were in their twenties, and most of the rest were in their thirties or forties. James Madison was thirty-five, Alexander Hamilton thirty-two. South Carolina’s baby-faced Charles Pinckney was just twenty-nine, but to enhance his air of extreme youth-fulness he vociferously insisted he was but twenty-four.17 The oddest and least prepossessing figure of all was perhaps the most important: James Madison. Nothing about