Made In America - Bill Bryson [50]
The British appeared unaware that their mockery had the capacity to make them look priggish and obtuse. Dickens, in his American Notes, professed to have been utterly baffled when a waiter asked him if he wanted his food served ‘right away’. As Dillard points out, even if he had never heard the expression, he must have been a very dim traveller indeed to fail to grasp its meaning.18
Always there was a presumption that Americans should speak as Britons. In 1827 Frances Trollope, mother of the novelist Anthony Trollope, came to America at the rather advanced age of forty-seven to found a department store in Cincinnati. The enterprise failed and she lost everything, down to her household effects, but the experience gave her ample fodder for her enormously successful Domestic Manners of the Americans, published in 1832. Among her criticisms of American behaviour, she was struck again and again by how rarely during her time in the country she had heard a sentence ‘correctly pronounced’. It appears never to have occurred to her that Americans had a perfect right, and sometimes possibly even a sound reason, to pronounce words in their own way.
All this would have been fractionally more bearable had the commentators not so often been given to blithe generalizations and careless reporting. Emerson noted with more than a hint of exasperation that most Americans didn’t speak in anything like the manner that Dickens suggested. ‘He has picked up and noted with eagerness each odd local phrase that he met with, and when he had a story to relate, has joined them together, so that the result is the broadest caricature.‘19 And all the while they were making capital out of America’s foibles, the British observers were unwittingly picking up American habits. It was, ironically, Dickens’s use of many Americanisms, notably talented, lengthy, reliable and influential, which he had absorbed on his travels and unthinkingly employed in American Notes, that at last brought them a measure of respectability in his homeland.20
For their part, Americans showed a streak of masochism as wide as the Mississippi. When American Notes was published it was such a sensation that people lined up fifty deep to acquire a copy. In Philadelphia it sold out in thirty-five minutes. Mrs Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans was even more successful, going through four editions in a year and so capturing America’s attention that a British visitor was astonished to discover that her barbed observations on American social habits had almost entirely displaced a raging cholera epidemic as the principal topic of news in the papers and conversation in the taverns.
The attacks came from within as well as from without. In 1781 the eminent president of Princeton, John Witherspoon, a Scot by birth but one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence – indeed a fierce proponent of American independence from Britain in all things but language – wrote a series of articles for the Pennsylvania Journal and Weekly Advertiser in which he attacked the lax linguistic habits that predominated in his adopted country even among educated speakers: using notify for inform, mad for angry, clever for good, and other such ‘improprieties and vulgarisms which hardly any person in the same class in point of rank and literature would have fallen into in Great Britain’.21 In the course of these writings he became the first to use Americanism in a linguistic sense, but by no means the last to use it pejoratively.
There was, it must be said, more than a dollop of toadying to be found among many Americans. When the Scottish philosopher David Hume criticized Franklin for employing colonize and other such New World novelties in his correspondence, Franklin contritely apologized and promised to abandon the practice at once. John Russell Bartlett compiled a Dictionary of Americanisms, but far from being a celebration of the inventive nature of American speech, the book dismissed Americanisms as ‘perversions