Made In America - Bill Bryson [52]
An’ you’ve gut to git up airly
Ef you want to take in God.
But this, it must be remembered, was the speech of an uneducated New Englander. Someone from a more refined background, like John Quincy Adams, say, would have sounded as different again. One of the paradoxes of the day was that as America was becoming more politically unified it was in danger of becoming linguistically fractured. Class differences and regional differences alike were acutely felt and remarked upon. The relative few who lived out along the frontier were not only cut off from changes in fashion but also changes in language. So when, for instance, Britons and eastern Americans began to change the diphthong in words like boil and join from bile and jine, or to insert a voiced r in some words while removing it from others, the frontier people were less likely to adopt the new trends. They continued for much longer (and in some cases continue yet) to say bar for bear, consarn for concern, varmint for vermin, virtoo for virtue, fortin for fortune, enjine for engine, cattel or kittle for kettle, cuss for curse, thrash for thresh, tetchy for touchy, wrastle for wrestle, chaw for chew, gal for girl, riled for roiled, critter for creature and so on. The further west one went the more pronounced the variations were, so that by mid-century when the English traveller Richard Francis Burton reached Salt Lake City he found the language scarcely recognizable as English.28
As the new breed of frontier people like Andrew Jackson, Davy Crockett and Abraham Lincoln brought their regional habits of speech to Washington, their distinctive turns of phrase and raw pronunciations increasingly grated on the sensibilities of their eastern colleagues and underlined the linguistic variability of the sprawling nation. Something of the flavour and pronunciation of frontier life is conveyed by a speech attributed to Davy Crockett (though in fact it was concocted in his behalf by a ghost-writer). ‘We are called upon to show our grit like a chain lightning agin a pine log, to extarminate, mollify and calumniate the foe like a niggar put into a holler log ... Cram his pesky carcass full of thunder and lightning like a stuffed sassidge and turtle him off with a red hot poker ... Split his countenance with a live airthquake, and tarrify him with a rale Injun yell ...’ Though the words are not Crockett’s there is no reason to suppose that the spellings are unfaithful to his pronunciations.29
Much the same country air applied to Lincoln, if at slightly less than gale force. However sophisticated his prose style, Lincoln’s spoken English always had a whiff of the backwoods about it. His invariable greeting was ‘Howdy’ and his conversation was sprinkled with folksy colloquialisms like ‘out yonder’ and ‘stay a spell’, which must have caused at least some of Washington’s more sophisticated politicos to cringe.30 Though we cannot be sure in each case, he very probably pronounced more than a few of his words in the antiquated frontier style. Certainly we know that he enjoyed an earthy story and took delight in showing his associates a letter he received from a disgruntled citizen in 1860. It read: ‘God damn your god damned old hell fired god damned soul to hell god damn you and goddam your god damned family’s god damned hellfired god damned soul to hell and god damnation god damn them and god damn your god damn friends to hell.‘31 The letter came, it hardly needs saying, from the frontier.
The friction between the direct, colourful, independent language of the West and the more reserved and bookish diction of the East was a constant leitmotif of American speech throughout the nineteenth century. And nowhere was it made more arrestingly manifest than at the commemoration of a cemetery for Civil War soldiers in the little Pennsylvania town of Gettysburg on 19 November 1863.
The main speaker of the day was not Lincoln, but the orator Edward Everett – an easterner, naturally. Everett droned on for two hours. As was the custom of the day, his speech was full of literary