The Mother Tongue

by Bill Bryson

  There were holes in Johnson’s erudition. He professed a preference for what he conceived to be Saxon spellings for words like music, critic, and prosaic, and thus spelled them with a final k, when in fact they were all borrowed from Latin. He was given to flights of editorializing, as when he defined a patron as “one who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery” or oats as a grain that sustained horses in England and people in Scotland. His etymologies, according to Baugh and Cable, were “often ludicrous” and his proofreading sometimes strikingly careless. He defined a garret as a “room on the highest floor in the house” and a cockloft as “the room over the garret.” Elsewhere, he gave identical definitions to leeward and windward, even though they are quite obviously opposites.

  Even allowing for the inflated prose of his day, he had a tendency to write passages of remarkable denseness, as here: “The proverbial oracles of our parsimonious ancestors have informed us, that the fatal waste of our fortune is by small expenses, by the profusion of sums too little singly to alarm our caution, and which we never suffer ourselves to consider together.” Too little singly? I would wager good money that that sentence was as puzzling to his contemporaries as it is to us. And yet at least it has the virtue of relative brevity. Often Johnson constructed sentences that ran to 250 words or more, which sound today uncomfortably like the ramblings of a man who has sat up far too late and drunk rather too much port.

  Yet for all that, his Dictionary of the English Language, published in two volumes in June 1755, is a masterpiece, one of the landmarks of English literature. Its definitions are supremely concise, its erudition magnificent, if not entirely flawless. Without a nearby library to draw on, and with appallingly little financial backing (his publisher paid him a grand total of just £1,575, less than £200 a year, from which he had to pay his assistants), Johnson worked from a garret room off Fleet Street, where he defined some 43,000 words, illustrated with more than 114,000 supporting quotations drawn from every area of literature. It is little wonder that he made some errors and occasionally indulged himself with barbed definitions.

  He had achieved in under nine years what the forty members of the Académie Française could not do in less than forty. He captured the majesty of the English language and gave it a dignity that was long overdue. It was a monumental accomplishment and he well deserved his fame.

  But its ambitious sweep was soon to be exceeded by a persnickety schoolteacher/lawyer half a world away in Connecticut. Noah Webster (1758–1843) was by all accounts a severe, correct, humorless, religious, temperate man who was not easy to like, even by other severe, religious, temperate, humorless people. A provincial schoolteacher and not-very-successful lawyer from Hartford, he was short, pale, smug, and boastful. (He held himself superior to Benjamin Franklin because he was a Yale man while Franklin was self-educated.) Where Samuel Johnson spent his free hours drinking and discoursing in the company of other great men, Webster was a charmless loner who criticized almost everyone but was himself not above stealing material from others, most notably from a spelling book called Aby-sel-pha by an Englishman named Thomas Dilworth. In the marvelously deadpan phrase of H. L. Mencken, Webster was “sufficiently convinced of its merits to imitate it, even to the extent of lifting whole passages.” He credited himself with coining many words, among them demoralize, appreciation, accompaniment, ascertainable, and expenditure, which in fact had been in the language for centuries. He was also inclined to boast of learning that he simply did not possess. He claimed to have mastered twenty-three languages, including Latin, Greek, all the Romance languages, Anglo-Saxon, Persian, Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, and a dozen more. Yet, as Thomas Pyles witheringly puts it, he showed “an ignorance of German which would disgrace a freshman,” and his grasp of other languages was equally tenuous. According to Charlton Laird, he knew far less Anglo-Saxon than Thomas Jefferson, who never pretended to be an expert at it. Pyles calls his Dissertations on the English Language “a fascinating farrago of the soundest linguistic common sense and the most egregious poppycock.” It is hard to find anyone saying a good word about him.

  Webster’s first work, A Grammatical Institute of the English Language—consisting of three books: a grammar, a reader, and a speller—appeared between 1783 and 1785, but he didn’t capture the public’s attention until the publication in 1788 of The American Spelling Book. This volume (later called the Elementary Spelling Book) went through so many editions and sold so many copies that historians appear to have lost track. But it seems safe to say that there were at least 300 editions between 1788 and 1829 and that by the end of the nineteenth century it had sold more than sixty million copies—though some sources put the figure as high as a hundred million. In either case, with the possible exception of the Bible, it is probably the best-selling book in American history.

  Webster is commonly credited with changing American spelling, but what is seldom realized is how wildly variable his own views on the matter were. Sometimes he was in favor of radical and far-reaching changes—insisting on such spellings as soop, bred, wimmen, groop, definit, fether, fugitiv, tuf, thum, hed, bilt, and tung—but at other times he acted the very soul of orthographic conservatism, going so far as to attack the useful American tendency to drop the u from colour, humour, and the like. The main book with which he is associated in the popular mind, his massive American Dictionary of the English Language of 1828, actually said in the preface that it was “desirable to perpetuate the sameness” of American and British spellings and usages.

  Many of the spellings that he insisted on in his Compendious Dictionary of the English Language (1806) and its later variants were simply ignored by his loyal readers. They overlooked them, as one might a tic or stammer, and continued to write group rather than groop, crowd rather than croud, medicine rather than medicin, phantom for fantom, and many hundreds of others. Such changes as Webster did manage to establish were relatively straightforward and often already well underway—for instance, the American tendency to transpose the British re in theatre, centre, and other such words. Yet even here Webster was by no means consistent. His dictionaries retained many irregular spellings, some of which have stuck in English to this day (acre, glamour) and some of which were corrected by the readers themselves (frolick, wimmen). Other of his ideas are of questionable benefit. His insistence on dropping one of the l’s in words such as traveller and jeweller (which way they are still spelled in England) was a useful shortcut, but it has left many of us unsure whether we should write excelling or exceling, or fulfilled, fullfilled, or fulfiled.

  Webster was responsible also for the American aluminum in favor of the British aluminium. His choice has the fractional advantage of brevity, but defaults in terms of consistency. Aluminium at least follows the pattern set by other chemical elements—potassium, radium, and the like.

  But for the most part the differences that distinguish American spelling from British spelling became common either late in his life or after his death, and would probably have happened anyway.

  In terms of pronunciation he appears to have left us with our pronunciation of schedule rather than the English “shedjulle” and with our standard pronunciation of lieutenant which was then widely pronounced “lefftenant” in America, as it still is in England today. But just as he sometimes pressed for odd spellings, so he called for many irregular pronunciations: “deef” for deaf, “nater” for nature, “heerd” for heard, “booty” for beauty, “voloom” for volume, and others too numerous (and, I am tempted to add, too laughable) to dwell on. He insisted that Greenwich and Thames be pronounced as spelled and favored giving quality and quantity the short “ă” of hat, while giving advance, clasp, and grant the broad “ah” sound of southern England. No less remarkably, Webster accepted a number of clearly ungrammatical usages, among them “it is me,” “we was,” and “them horses.” It is a wonder that anyone paid any attention to him at all. Often they didn’t.

  Nonetheless his dictionary was the most complete of its age
, with 70,000 words—far more than Johnson had covered—and its definitions were models of clarity and conciseness. It was an enormous achievement.

  All Webster’s work was informed by a passionate patriotism and the belief that American English was at least as good as British English. He worked tirelessly, churning out endless hectoring books and tracts, as well as working on the more or less constant revisions of his spellers and dictionaries. In between time he wrote impassioned letters to congressmen, dabbled in politics, proffered unwanted advice to presidents, led his church choir, lectured to large audiences, helped found Amherst College, and produced a sanitized version of the Bible, in which Onan doesn’t spill his seed but simply “frustrates his purpose,” in which men don’t have testicles but rather “peculiar members,” and in which women don’t have wombs (or evidently anything else with which to contribute to the reproductive process).

  Like Samuel Johnson, he was a better lexicographer than a businessman. Instead of insisting on royalties he sold the rights outright and never gained the sort of wealth that his tireless labors merited. After Webster’s death in 1843, two businessmen from Springfield, Massachusetts, Charles and George Merriam, bought the rights to his dictionaries and employed his son-in-law, the rather jauntily named Chauncey A. Goodrich, to prepare a new volume (and, not incidentally, expunge many of the more ridiculous spellings and far-fetched etymologies). This volume, the first Merriam-Webster dictionary, appeared in 1847 and was an instant success. Soon almost every home had one. There is a certain neat irony in the thought that the book with which Noah Webster is now most closely associated wasn’t really his work at all and certainly didn’t adhere to many of his most cherished precepts.

  In early February 1884, a slim paperback book bearing the title The New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, containing all the words in the language (obscenities apart) between A and ant was published in Britain at the steepish price of twelve shillings and six pence. This was the first of twelve volumes of the most masterly and ambitious philological exercise ever undertaken, eventually redubbed the Oxford English Dictionary. The intention was to record every word used in English since 1150 and to trace it back through all its shifting meanings, spellings, and uses to its earliest recorded appearance. There was to be at least one citation for each century of its existence and at least one for each slight change of meaning. To achieve this, almost every significant piece of English literature from the last 7½ centuries would have to be not so much read as scoured.

  The man chosen to guide this enterprise was James Augustus Henry Murray (1837–1915), a Scottish-born bank clerk, school-teacher, and self-taught philologist. He was an unlikely, and apparently somewhat reluctant, choice to take on such a daunting task. Murray, in the best tradition of British eccentrics, had a flowing white beard and liked to be photographed in a long black housecoat with a mortarboard on his head. He had eleven children, all of whom were, almost from the moment they learned the alphabet, roped into the endless business of helping to sift through and alphabetize the several million slips of paper on which were recorded every twitch and burble of the language over seven centuries.

  The ambition of the project was so staggering that one can’t help wondering if Murray really knew what he was taking on. In point of fact, it appears he didn’t. He thought the whole business would take a dozen years at most and that it would fill half a dozen volumes covering some 6,400 pages. In the event, the project took more than four decades and sprawled across 15,000 densely printed pages.

  Hundreds of volunteers helped with the research, sending in citations from all over the world. Many of them were, like Murray, amateur philologists and often they were as eccentric as he. One of the most prolific contributors was James Platt, who specialized in obscure words. He was said to speak a hundred languages and certainly knew as much about comparative linguistics as any man of his age, and yet he owned no books of his own. He worked for his father in the City of London and each lunchtime collected one book—never more—from the Reading Room of the British Museum, which he would take home, devour, and replace with another volume the next day. On weekends he haunted the opium dens and dockyards of Wapping and Whitechapel looking for native speakers of obscure tongues whom he would query on small points of semantics. He provided the histories of many thousands of words. But an even more prolific contributor was an American expatriate named Dr. W. C. Minor, a man of immense erudition who provided from his private library the etymologies of tens of thousands of words. When Murray invited him to a gathering of the dictionary’s contributors, he learned, to his considerable surprise, that Dr. Minor could not attend for the unfortunate reason that he was an inmate at Broadmoor, a hospital for the criminally insane, and not sufficiently in possession of his faculties to be allowed out. It appears that during the U.S. Civil War, having suffered an attack of sunstroke, Dr. Minor developed a persecution mania, believing he was being pursued by Irishmen. After a stay in an asylum he was considered cured and undertook, in 1871, a visit to England. But one night while walking in London his mania returned and he shot dead an innocent stranger whose misfortune it was to have been walking behind the crazed American. Clearly Dr. Minor’s madness was not incompatible with scholarship. In one year alone, he made 12,000 contributions to the OED from the private library he built up at Broadmoor.

  Murray worked ceaselessly on his dictionary for thirty-six years, from his appointment to the editorship in 1879 to his death at the age of seventy-eight in 1915. (He was knighted in 1908.) He was working on the letter u when he died, but his assistants carried on for another thirteen years until in 1928 the final volume, Wise to Wyzen, was issued. (For some reason, volume 12, XYZ, had appeared earlier.) Five years later, a corrected and slightly updated version of the entire set was reissued, under the name by which it has since been known: the Oxford English Dictionary. The completed dictionary contained 414,825 entries supported by 1,827,306 citations (out of 6 million collected) described in 44 million words of text spread over 15,487 pages. It is perhaps the greatest work of scholarship ever produced.

  The OED confirmed a paradox that Webster had brought to light decades earlier—namely, that although readers will appear to treat a dictionary with the utmost respect, they will generally ignore anything in it that doesn’t suit their tastes. The OED, for instance, has always insisted on -ize spellings for words such as characterize, itemize, and the like, and yet almost nowhere in England, apart from the pages of The Times newspaper (and not always there) are they observed. The British still spell almost all such words with -ise endings and thus enjoy a consistency with words such as advertise, merchandise, and surprise that we in America fail to achieve. But perhaps the most notable of all the OED’s minor quirks is its insistence that Shakespeare should be spelled Shakspere. After explaining at some length why this is the only correct spelling, it grudgingly acknowledges that the commonest spelling “is perh. Shakespeare.” (To which we might add, it cert. is.)

  In the spring of 1989, a second edition of the dictionary was issued, containing certain modifications, such as the use of the International Phonetic Alphabet instead of Murray’s own quirky system. It comprised the original twelve volumes, plus four vast supplements issued between 1972 and 1989. Now sprawling over twenty volumes, the updated dictionary is a third bigger than its predecessor, with 615,000 entries, 2,412,000 supporting quotations, almost 60 million words of exposition, and about 350 million keystrokes of text (or one for each native speaker of English in the world). No other language has anything even remotely approaching it in scope. Because of its existence, more is known about the history of English than any other language in the world.

  * One of which, incidentally, is said to be the longest word in the English language. It begins methianylglutaminyl and finishes 1,913 letters later as alynalalanylthreonilarginylserase. I don’t know what it is used for, though I daresay it would take some rubbing to get it out of the carpet.

  11.

  Old World,
New World

  The first American pilgrims happened to live in the midst of perhaps the most exciting period in the history of the English language—a time when 12,000 words were being added to the language and revolutionary activities were taking place in almost every realm of human endeavor. It was also a time of considerable change in the structure of the language. The 104 pilgrims who sailed from Plymouth in 1620 were among the first generation of people to use the s form on verbs, saying has rather than hath, runs rather than runneth. Similarly, thee and thou pronoun forms were dying out. Had the pilgrims come a quarter of a century earlier, we might well have preserved those forms, as we preserved other archaisms such as gotten.

  The new settlers in America obviously had to come up with new words to describe their New World, and this necessity naturally increased as they moved inland. Partly this was achieved by borrowing from others who inhabited or explored the untamed continent. From the Dutch we took landscape, cookie, and caboose. We may also have taken Yankee, as a corruption of the Dutch Jan Kees (“John Cheese”). The suggestion is that Jan Kees was a nonce name for a Dutchman in America, rather like John Bull for an Englishman, but the historical evidence is slight. Often the new immigrants borrowed Indian terms, though these could take some swallowing since the Indian languages, particularly those of the eastern part of the continent, were inordinately agglomerative. As Mary Helen Dohan notes in her excellent book on the rise of American English, Our Own Words, an early translator of the Bible into Iroquoian had to devise the word kummogkodonattootummooetiteaonganunnonash for the phrase “our question.” In Massachusetts there was a lake that the Indians called Chargoggagomanchaugagochaubunagungamaug, which is said to translate as “You fish on that side, we’ll fish on this side, and nobody will fish in the middle.” Not surprisingly, such words were usually shortened and modified. The English-sounding hickory was whittled out of the Indian pawcohiccora. Raugraoughcun was hacked into raccoon and isquonterquashes into squash. Hoochinoo, the name of an Indian tribe noted for its homemade liquor, produced hooch. Some idea of the bewilderments of Indian orthography is indicated by the fact that Chippewa and Ojibway are different names for the same tribe as interpreted by different people at different times. Sometimes words went through many transformations before they sat comfortably on the English-speaking tongue. Manhattan has been variously recorded as Manhates, Manthanes, Manhatones, Manhatesen, Manhattae, and at least half a dozen others. Even the simple word Iowa, according to Dohan, has been recorded with sixty-four spellings. Despite the difficulties of rendering them into English, Indian names were borrowed for the names of more than half our states and for countless thousands of rivers, lakes, and towns. Yet we borrowed no more than three or four dozen Indian words for everyday objects—among them canoe, raccoon, hammock, and tobacco.