The Language Wars

by Henry Hitchings

  The distinct characters of the dictionaries compiled by Johnson and Webster were discussed in a work that encapsulated the period’s mania for grammatical wrangling. This was The Grammar of English Grammars, published in 1851 by Goold Brown, a native of Rhode Island. Its title is a clue to its scale and density: 1,028 closely printed pages, the fruits of three decades spent immersed in grammatical exercises. Brown is the sort of writer who takes acid pleasure in pointing out the grammatical lapses in Shakespeare. He condemned Webster as a friend of illiteracy, and claimed that Webster’s notions of grammar were fit only to be despised. He is also responsible for the enduring notion – discussed by Dr Johnson, though not observed by him in practice – that one shares something between two people, but among more than two.

  If Webster embodies what we might call the schoolmasterly tradition in American English, and if Goold Brown is the king of the fault-finders, Walt Whitman is the most eloquent advocate of a more fluid, experimental approach. This is nicely exemplified in his poetry by an apparent addiction to the present participle – a ‘springboard’ he uses to enable ‘physical and intellectual mobility’.21 Many of his poems begin in this way, with a word such as ‘starting’, ‘chanting’, ‘singing’ or ‘facing’. As a poet Whitman is orator, actor, egotist, egalitarian – flush with himself, flush with his Americanness. Yet when he writes explicitly about the language which he uses to dramatize his thoughts, he reveals a tension with which we are all too familiar: on the one hand he is keen to celebrate the elasticity of English, yet on the other he wishes to reform the language and render it more precise. Sumptuously unsystematic, Whitman relishes the freedoms of language but proposes to circumscribe them.

  Starting around 1856, Whitman kept a scrapbook of jottings about English and other languages. This included words he relished or found intriguing (monolith, centurion, vendetta), morsels of history, observations on pronunciation, and a dig at Webster’s ‘stiff-necked obstinacy’.22 At one point he writes, ‘Johnson’s Dictionary First pub. 1755 (was this first good dictionary of English?).’ He later answers the question: ‘O no.’23 He criticizes Lindley Murray, too. These men’s apparently narrow views of the language left little room for the vitality and voluntariness of imaginative writing.

  Between 1855 and 1860 Whitman collected notes for a lecture he never in fact gave, the subject of which was ‘the growth of an American English enjoying a distinct identity’. An essay on American slang, published in 1885, continued his interest in how ‘words become vitaliz’d’. Slang, he thought, was ‘the lawless … element … behind all poetry’ and also ‘an attempt of common humanity to escape from bald literalism’. Whitman wished to bring into literature a previously undocumented language of everyday life and labour, for ‘around the markets, among the fish-smacks, along the wharves, you hear a thousand words, never yet printed in the repertoire of any lexicon.’ The result, as we already begin to see in this sentence, is an affection for lists. Whitman’s writing suggests their musical quality, breaking the boundary between prose and poetry, and he saw lists as a tribute to something he believed essentially American – the honour of hard work and practical labour.24 Whitman’s vision of American English is of a language incorporating many voices, many idioms and many images of his country.

  This is most fully articulated in An American Primer, which Whitman wrote in the 1850s. There he asserted that ‘The Americans are going to be the most fluent and melodious voiced people in the world – the most perfect users of words’. As if to prove this, he wrote fluently and melodiously of how ‘In America an immense number of new words are needed, to embody the new political facts … stating all that is to be said in modes that fit the life and experience of the Indianian, the Michiganian, the Vermonter, the men of Maine – also words to answer the modern, rapidly spreading, faith, of the vital equality of women with men … Words are wanted to supply the copious trains of facts, and flanges of facts, arguments, and adjectival facts, growing out of all new knowledges.’ He promised, ‘Never will I allude to the English Language or tongue without exultation. This is the tongue that spurns laws.’25

  In their different ways, Whitman and Webster were groping towards a national language. American English and the debates surrounding it proved a meeting place for expressions of democracy, pragmatism and poetry. Whitman approves the copiousness of American English – its breadth and inclusiveness, its expansion, its fecundity. When he looks to the future he sees the rottenness of political language giving way to a choir of different voices, many of them emerging from hitherto neglected places. He says that ‘The nigger dialect furnishes hundreds of outré words, many of them adopted into the common speech of the mass of the people’ and ‘The nigger dialect has hints of the future theory of the modification of all the words of the English language, for musical purposes, for a native grand opera in America.’26 His use of the now odious word nigger should not distract us from his prescience in seeing the important role of black Americans in shaping American English.

  Whitman was in fact a favourite author in the lyceums where elocution and rhetorical instruction helped increase black literacy. The first African-American society for self-improvement was probably the African Union Society at Newport, Rhode Island, founded in 1780. Similar societies in New York and Philadelphia organized circulating libraries, concerts and scientific lectures. Their membership was in some cases exclusively male, but Philadelphia’s Gilbert Lyceum was the first of many societies to admit both men and women. On the plantations, among black slaves, there was what Ralph Ellison would later call ‘free-floating literacy’, aided by preachers and Christian missionaries. During the Civil War of 1861–5, camp life fostered the art of debating and communal education. There were newspapers specifically aimed at the black troops, and after the Civil War ended some black workers in factories were able to hear newspapers and novels performed by lectors. Towards the end of the century there was a flowering of black self-help literature, with titles such as Sparkling Gems of Race Knowledge Worth Reading, and there was also a vibrant African-American press, inspired by the example of Frederick Douglass and the abolitionist newspapers he produced in the 1840s.27

  Where Whitman sought to see all the voices of America as part of a single opera, where Douglass argued that the abolition of slavery could be achieved by working within the existing political system and using strong language rather than new language, and where Alexis de Tocqueville in his Democracy in America (1838) simply played down the idea that American speech contained great variety, the distinct strands of American English were exaggerated in the arguments that led up to the Civil War. This was a conflict in which notions of the American national character were at stake, and the two sides highlighted their linguistic differences. Both professed to be fighting for freedom, but each mocked the other’s idea of what this meant. Significantly, the very name of the conflict was contentious, and remains so. The Civil War is still known to some Southerners as the War of Northern Aggression, and less provocatively as the War for Southern Independence. The War Between the States has also achieved some currency. Most of the names for the conflict manifest a clear point of view: Southerners have referred to it as the Defence of Virginia, Northerners as the War of the Rebellion. Moreover, the two forces were known by many different names – the Northerners were the Union, Yankees, the National Armies and Federals, while the Southerners were Rebels, Dixie and the Confederacy; in epitome, Billy Yank and Johnny Reb – and they gave different names to the battles they fought.

  At the same time, as in any war, there developed a vibrant military slang. Soldiers ‘amused the enemy’ – that is, kept them occupied without going so far as to provoke a full-blooded battle – and ‘saw the elephant’ – in other words, gained experience of combat. Spies were euphemistically known as ‘guides’, lice as ‘crumbs’, inexperienced soldiers as ‘veal’. A man described as ‘going down the line’ had actually slunk off to a brothel (where he risked picking up what were known as ‘diseases o
f indulgence’), while ‘to fire and fall back’ was slang for vomiting. A significant part of Civil War slang had to do not with fighting, but with avoiding it. Many soldiers ‘played off’ – pretended to be sick, feigned tactical confusion, or simply deserted – when there was a strong chance of physical confrontation. There were numerous words for the shirkers: they were ‘stragglers’, ‘skulkers’, ‘sneaks’, ‘coffee-coolers’, ‘bummers’, ‘whimperers’. Very few of the combatants had previous experience of war. They entered it light-heartedly, flourishing their good humour, yet with a sense of duty. Soon their attitudes changed. The linguistic legacy of the Civil War includes the words carpetbagger, bull-doze, ante-bellum, double-quick and reconstruction, as well as some striking euphemisms – the war was known as ‘the late unpleasantness’, and slavery as a ‘peculiar institution’.

  In the period leading up to the Civil War, the word disunion had conjured up nightmares of factionalism. It was brandished threateningly – and accusingly. After the war, America was described in new terms. The word union was tarnished by its association with disunion, by its heavy use in the rhetoric of the North, and by its implication of a voluntary organization rather than something perpetual and indissoluble. As a result, nation replaced it. The shift was clear in the speeches of Abraham Lincoln; in his inaugural address in March 1861 he repeatedly invoked the Union and did not speak of the nation at all, whereas by the Gettysburg Address in November 1863 the position had reversed.28 An attractive story, popularized by the historian Shelby Foote, is that before the Civil War one said, ‘The United States are flourishing’, whereas after it this changed to ‘The United States is flourishing’. The reality is a little less neat. Only in 1902 did the House of Representatives’ commission looking into legal revisions assert that in all official documentation the United States should be treated as singular. But the story nicely presents the role of language in reintegration. Grammar, as well as vocabulary, can mark changes in ideology.

  One of the main changes that followed the Civil War was America’s development into an urban society. Of course, this did not happen rapidly. But by the time of the 1920 census the United States was officially urban; the majority of its citizens lived in towns and cities. Between 1880 and 1920 the percentage of Americans living in cities nearly doubled.29 As America celebrated its progress in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, political advances were less highly extolled than those in education, manufacturing and the exploitation of the country’s natural resources. Chicago, rapidly emerging as the second largest American city, seemed to embody the new spirit. In his novel Sister Carrie (1900), Theodore Dreiser likened Chicago to ‘a giant magnet, drawing to itself … the hopeful and the hopeless’. The city’s magnetism, and the country’s, was dramatized by the World’s Columbian Exposition, staged in Chicago in 1893. This set out the wares of American prosperity: besides a hugely impressive display of electrical exhibits, visitors were introduced to Shredded Wheat, Juicy Fruit gum and Quaker Oats, as well as the first Ferris wheel and, thanks to Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope, moving pictures. The Columbian Exposition proved that the city was the new ‘frontier’. Its motto, ‘I will’, hinted at an American future that would be deeply concerned with globalizing the nation’s good image.

  This good image has managed to travel widely: many have pictured – and still do picture – America as a land of opportunities and discoveries, enthusiasms and inventions, in love with success and endlessly supportive of aspiration, with a coolly and deliberately formed constitution that provides for equality, liberty and that most seductive of possibilities, the pursuit of happiness; a land of skyscrapers and wildernesses, jazz and rock music, cheerleaders and marching bands, blue jeans, soft drinks and dusty old baseball mitts. But it is matched by a bad image: of America as a land of rampant gun culture, hyperbole, synthetic pleasure, flag-waving militarism, obese donut-munchers, candyfloss sentimentality and religious fundamentalism, besotted with the idea of itself, and determined to foist its goods and its values on the whole of the rest of the world.

  American English is treated as a repository of these attributes. It is stereotyped by speakers of British English as twangy and slangy; British English by Americans as cold and emasculated. The distinctive characters of the two forms are easily felt but hard to describe. There are differences in some spellings, pronunciations, everyday metaphors, greetings and the way people are addressed, the past tense of ‘to get’, the use of certain adverbs such as directly and immediately, the acceptability of particular exclamations and expletives, the preferred interjections (compare ‘bloody hell’, ‘crikey’, ‘bugger me’, ‘not a bit of it’ and ‘hear, hear’ – all British in flavour – with the palpably American ‘uh huh’), and so on.30 No one reading this book will be oblivious to this.

  For all the obvious continuities between British and American Englishes, it is, unsurprisingly, the divergences that are remarked on. H. G. Wells wrote in Mankind in the Making (1903), ‘People come upon ideas that they know no English to express, and strike out the new phrase in a fine burst of ignorant discovery. There are Americans in particular who are amazingly apt at this sort of thing. They take an enormous pride in the jargon they are perpetually increasing – they boast of it, they give exhibition performances in it, they seem to regard it as the culminating flower of their continental Republic – as though the Old World had never heard of shoddy.’ Lest anyone think his hostility is directed mainly at Americans, Wells says, ‘Let me assure them that, in our heavier way, we in this island are just as busy defiling our common inheritance. We can send a team of linguists to America, who will murder and misunderstand the language against any eleven the Americans may select.’31

  One modern study of American English, by Zoltán Kövecses, suggests specific properties that make it noticeably different from British English: it is economical, regular, direct, democratic, tolerant, informal, prudish, inflated, inventive, imaginative and ‘success-and action-oriented’.32 While it probably can’t be all these things at once, we can see here the legacy of Webster among others. More fundamentally, we can see the effects of a people forging for themselves a new world.

  10

  The long shadow of Lindley Murray

  The ‘positive beauty’ of pedantry … and of slang

  Noah Webster’s influence in America was matched in Britain by that of Lindley Murray, a key figure so far mentioned only in passing. Murray was an American, who arrived in Britain under strange circumstances. From inauspicious beginnings, his writings rose to a position of almost freakish importance. Charles Monaghan, who has looked closely at Murray’s sales figures, reports that his books shifted around 14 million copies in the first half of the nineteenth century. Only Webster sold more – and that by a margin of a few per cent. Murray’s English Reader, a selection of prose and poetry, sold more than 6 million copies in America in the period up to 1850, despite containing not a single passage by an American author.1 Yet whereas Murray was challenged in America by Webster, in Britain for a time he had no serious rival as a grammarian.

  Lindley Murray’s most significant work was his English Grammar, published in 1795. During the 1790s the production of grammar books reached industrial proportions. The market was crowded, yet each new volume was presented with a flourish of self-promotion. Writers tackling grammar, though they tended to insist on their ability to remedy old misunderstandings, were in fact comically obsessed with spotting one another’s tiny errors, and often appeared torn between nostalgia for a more elegant Classical past and a desire to push forward into a brave new world of cool enquiry.2

  Murray was not the only writer on language to enjoy great success in Britain at this time. John Walker’s A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary went through more than a hundred editions between 1791 and 1904; its 547 ‘principles of English pronunciation’ – for instance, that ‘Gigantic has the i in the first syllable always long’ and ‘S is sharp and hissing at the end of the monosyllables yes, this, us, thus, g
as’ – were a triumph of scrupulous dogmatism, which led to his being canonized in the popular imagination as ‘Elocution Walker’.3 But Walker’s subject matter was different from Murray’s; the two men were not in direct competition. Most other books about language faded into oblivion: of Thomas Spence’s The Grand Repository of the English Language (1775), a highly original guide to the language aimed at ‘the laborious part of the people’, only two copies survive. And there are other works of the period that look, to the modern eye, utterly bizarre: a representative example is The Way to Things by Words, and to Words by Things (1766), an attempt by John Cleland, better known to posterity as the author of the erotic novel Fanny Hill, to retrieve the ancient Celtic language.

  The success of Lindley Murray, unlike that of Robert Lowth, had little to do with socially advantageous connections. Murray was born in Swatara, Pennsylvania, of mixed Irish and Quaker stock, and served an apprenticeship to a Philadelphia merchant, before practising law in New York and experimenting with the production of salt on a farm in Long Island. In 1784, shortly before he turned forty, he moved to Britain. He was familiar with life there, having spent some time in London in the late 1760s and early 1770s; his family had at that time been developing a business partnership with a London trader, Philip Sansom. Now, though, he relocated for good. Murray later alleged that he made the move for the sake of his health. However, it seems that the real reasons he left America were grubbier. In 1775 the family business was guilty of illegally importing goods – including eighty-four bolts of Russia duck, a sailcloth – into New York, and an attempted cover-up turned public opinion against the Murrays. Over the next few years, during the American War of Independence, their London connections made them targets for patriot intimidation, and Lindley Murray became the scapegoat for their shadier transactions. This was a calculated move to deflect attention from their main agent, his father Robert; Lindley’s removal to Britain probably helped quell accusations that the whole Murray family was irrevocably loyalist in its sympathies, enabling them to hold on to their business interests at a time when many loyalists’ properties were being confiscated. A reluctant exile, Murray settled in Holdgate, near York, where there was a community of Quakers. He would later claim in his memoirs that Yorkshire had been recommended by his doctor. This is doubtful, and, rather than enjoying improved health in his new home, he gradually succumbed to a number of ailments, including severe rheumatism.4 For the remaining forty-two years of his life, he led a sedentary existence, cultivating some of the habits of an English gentleman.