Made In America - Bill Bryson [51]
Many sincerely believed that America would cut itself off from its linguistic and cultural database (as it were) by forming an effectively separate dialect. Linguistic isolation was not a sensible or desirable goal for a small, young nation if it wished to be heard in the wider world of commerce, law and science. The Knickerbocker Magazine saw the ‘greatest danger’ in America’s tendency towards linguistic innovation, and urged its readers to adhere to British precepts.
A few pointed out that the American continent required a more expansive vocabulary, like the anonymous essayist in the North American Review who plaintively noted: ‘How tame will his language sound, who would describe Niagara in language fitted for the falls at London bridge, or attempt the majesty of the Mississippi in that which was made for the Thames?‘23 Or as Jefferson put it with somewhat greater simplicity: ‘The new circumstances under which we are placed, call for new words, new phrases, and for the transfer of old words to new objects.’
Others saw Britain’s linguistic hegemony as presumptuous and imperious. ‘Our honour requires us to have a system of our own, in language as well as government,’ argued Noah Webster in 1789. Echoing his sentiment, Rupert Hughes asked: ‘Why should we permit the survival of the curious notion that our language is a mere loan from England, like a copper kettle that we must keep scoured and return without a dent?‘24
Still others tried the defence – accurate if somewhat feeble – that many of the objectionable words were not Americanisms at all. Chaucer, it was pointed out, had used gab; Johnson had included influential in his dictionary; afeared had existed in English since Saxon times. Son of a gun, bite the dust, beat it, I guess and scores of other detestable ‘Americanisms’ all existed in England, it was explained, long before there were any American colonies. As the poet James Russell Lowell drily put it, Americans ‘unhappily could bring over no English better than Shakespeare’s’.25 One dedicated scribbler named Alfred Elwyn compiled a Glossary of Supposed Americanisms in which he asserted passionately, but wrongly: ‘The simple truth is, that almost without exception all those words or phrases that we have been ridiculed for using, are good old English; many of them are Anglo-Saxon in origin, and nearly all to be heard at this day in England.’
This tack struck many as more than a little pathetic. Lowell acidly observed: ‘Surely we may sleep in peace now, and our English cousins will forgive us, since we have cleared ourselves from any suspicion of being original in the matter.‘26
Lowell had a particular reason for feeling protective about the American dialect. His fame rested almost entirely on the creation of a fictional New England rustic, Hosea Biglow, whose comically quaint speech formed the basis of the hugely popular Biglow Papers. Unfortunately, Lowell’s effectiveness as a defender of American speech was somewhat diminished by his growing antipathy for his own creation. When the reading public continually ignored his more earnest poetical compositions (and rightly; they were unceasingly mediocre) he went so far as to preface a volume of Biglow poems with a veiled insult to the reader: ‘Margaritas, munde porcine, calcâsti: en, siliquas accipe’, which translates as ‘Oh, swinish world, you have trampled pearls; so take the husks.‘27
None the less, he left behind an invaluable mass of material recording the habits of New England speech in the first half of the nineteenth century. As an extract shows, it was very different from that of today:
Ez fer war, I call it murder, –
There you hev it plain an’ flat:
I don’t want to go no furder
Than my Testyment fer that;
God hez sed so plump an’ fairly
It’s ez