Everett was supported by a number of other authors of the time, including, as I have already noted, Paulding, Timothy Dwight, and J. Fenimore Cooper, whose early Anglomania was by then only a memory. In the second volume of his “Notions of the Americans,” printed anonymously in 1828, but quickly recognized as his and acknowledged by him, Cooper argued stoutly against the artificial English standards, mainly out of the Eighteenth Century, that the contemporary grammarians were trying to impose upon American, and contended that it should be left to its own devices, with due regard, of course, for reason, analogy, and any plausible indigenous authority that might develop. He went on:
This we are daily doing, and I think the consequence will be that in another generation or two far more reasonable English will be used in this country than exists here now.… I think it will be just as much the desire of England then to be in our fashion as it was our desire twenty years ago to be in hers.
In “The American Democrat,” published in 1838, Cooper set himself up as the indigenous authority he had anticipated ten years before. By this time the American language was far gone upon the grand bust that had begun with the Jackson uprising, and there was a tremendous flow of neologisms from the West. The “common faults” of the popular speech, according to Cooper, were “an ambition of eifect, a want of simplicity, and a turgid abuse of terms.” He denounced the democratic substitution of boss for master, and of help for servant, and preached a smug sermon upon the true meaning of lady and gentleman. “To call a laborer, one who has neither education, manners, accomplishments, tastes, associations, nor any one of the ordinary requisites, a gentleman,” he said,” is just as absurd as to call one who is thus qualified a fellow,… [A true gentleman] never calls his wife his lady, but his wife, and he is not afraid of lessening the dignity of the human race by styling the most elevated and refined of his fellow creatures men and women.” Waspish words, but they at least avoided the pedantry of the pedagogues, and yielded no more than its just due to English precedent.
The first really full-length defense of American by an American appeared in a volume of “Cambridge Essays, Contributed by Members of the University,” published in London in 1855. Its author was Charles Astor Bristed, a grandson of John Jacob Astor and one of the forgotten worthies of his era. He was graduated from Yale in 1839 and then went to Cambridge, where he took his degree in 1845. After that he devoted himself to literary endeavor, and during the next thirty years lived chiefly at Washington. There he gathered a small coterie of dilettanti about him, and became a sort of forerunner of Henry Adams. In 1852 he published “Five Years in an English University,” and three years later he was asked to contribute to the aforesaid volume of “Cambridge Essays.” His contribution bore the title of “The English Language in America”; it remains to this day, despite a few aberrations, the most intelligent brief discussion of the subject ever printed. He began by denouncing the notion, prevalent then as now, that the study of American was somehow undignified, and proceeded to argue that it was really worth any scholar’s while “to investigate the course of a great living language, transplanted from its primitive seat, brought into contact and rivalry with other civilized tongues, and exposed to various influences, all having a prima facie tendency to modify it.” He then proceeded to dispose of the familiar arguments against the existence of an American form of English, later to be reassembled and reinforced by Lounsbury — (1) that most Americanisms “can be traced to an English source,” (2) that “the number of actually new words invented in America is very small,” (3) that “the deviations from standard English which occur in America are fewer and less gross than those which may be found in England herself,” and so on. Here is a specimen passage from his caveat to the first two propositions, which he grouped together as embodying a single argument:
We admit this argument to be true, so far as it goes; but it does not go so far, by any means, as its supporters imagine. They seem to forget that there is such a thing as applying a new meaning to existing words, and of this novelty the examples in America are sufficiently numerous. Thus creek is a perfectly legitimate English word, but its legitimate English meaning is “a small arm of the sea,” whereas in America it is invariably used to designate a small river, except when it happens to be used to designate a large one. Draw is an old-established English verb, but the Americans have further employed it as a noun, and made it do duty for draw-bridge.
The third proposition Bristed answered thus:
This is the line of argument which sometimes develops itself into the amusingly paradoxical assertion that the Americans speak better English than the English themselves. But such reasoning is on a par with that of one who should consider himself to have demonstrated that the upper classes of America were richer than those of England by showing that the lower classes of England were poorer than those of America, or that the average wealth of the American population per head was greater than that of the English. There is no inconsistency in admitting that the worst English patois may be less intelligible than the worst American, and yet maintaining that the best currently spoken American contains appreciable deviations from the true English standard. The English provincialisms keep their place; they are confined to their own particular localities, and do not encroach on the metropolitan model. The American provincialisms are most equally distributed through all classes and localities, and though some of them may not rise above a certain level of society, others are heard everywhere. The senate or the boudoir is no more sacred from their intrusions than the farm-house or the tavern.
Bristed argued boldly that in many ways American usage was already superior to English. He defended, for example, the American use of sick, and the American practise, borrowed from the Northern British dialects, of sounding the h in such words as which and wheel. In any case, he said, the Americans were perfectly free to modify their language as they pleased, and no conceivable pressure could dissuade them. Many American inventions had already “settled down into and become established in the language. Talented is a familiar example. It is of little use to inveigh against such words — there they are in full possession, and cannot be turned out.” In conclusion he thus philosophized:
Possibly, some of the American expressions are in themselves, abstracdy and philosophically considered, better than the English; but this is not all that the jus et norma loquendi demands. Every language contains idioms and phrases philosophically reprehensible, as is clearly shown by the fact that the most ordinary phrases of one language become unmeaning or ludicrous absurdities when translated literally into another. All languages contain terms which have nothing but usage to plead in their favor. In English conversation, the panegyrical adjective of all-work is nice, in America it is fine. Both people often use their pet adjective inappropriately; perhaps the Americans do so in fewer cases than the English.
It was naturally the humorous writers who first began to turn Americanisms to literary uses, for many of the new locutions that came in between the War of 1812 and the Civil War showed a grotesque fancy. As Will D. Howe says in “The Cambridge History of American Literature,”91 there were two streams of American humor from the beginnings of the national letters — “the one following closely English models, especially Addison, Steele, Defoe, and Goldsmith in the Eighteenth Century, and Lamb, Hood, Jerrold, and Dickens in the Nineteenth Century; the other springing from American soil and the new conditions of American life, and assuming a character as new to the world as the country that produced it.” To the first stream belonged the writings of Franklin, the Hartford Wits, Paulding, Irving and Holmes; to the second that of Seba Smith, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Joseph G. Bailey, Mrs. Frances M. Whicher, Charles G. Halpine, George H. Derby, Henry Wheeler Shaw, David R. Locke, Charles Farrar Browne, and Samuel L. Clemens (Mark Twain). The pioneers of a really indigenous humor were mainly dialect writers. Smith discovered the riches of the New England dialect (“The Life and Writings of Major Jack Downing”) in 1830; he was followed by Thomas
C. Haliburton (“The Clockmaker, or The Sayings and Doings of Samuel Slick”) in 1837, and by James Russell Lowell (“The Biglow Papers”) in 1848. The Negro dialect, as we know it today, seems to have been formulated by the song-writers for minstrel shows; it did not appear in literature until the time of the Civil War; before that, as George Philip Krapp shows in “The English Language in America,”92 it was a vague and artificial lingo which had little relation to the actual speech of the Southern blacks. The Civil War period also saw the rise of the Irish dialect, which seems to have been invented (or discovered) by Halpine, whose Miles O’Reilly sketches began to appear in 1862, and of the German dialect, which first took form in Charles Leland’s “Hans Breitmann’s Ballads” a year or two later. The dialect of the frontier was foreshadowed in Longstreet’s “Georgia Scenes” in 1835, and in Baldwin’s “Flush Times in Alabama and Mississippi” in 1853, but it did not displace the Yankee dialect as the typical American patois until Clemens published “The Jumping Frog” in 1867, and John Hay followed with “Pike County Ballads” in 1871.
These humorists, and their successors after them, were keenly conscious of the rich treasures lying in American speech, and whenever they discussed it seriously they argued for its autonomy. Clemens, who employed Americanisms with great freedom, even when he was attempting elegant writing, hailed “the vigorous new vernacular of the occidental plains and mountains” in “Roughing It” in 1872, and ten years later he printed an essay, “Concerning the American Language,” in “The Stolen White Elephant,” with a footnote describing it as “part of a chapter crowded out of ‘A Tramp Abroad’ ” (1880). It is in the form of a dialogue with an Englishman met on a train. “The languages,” says Mark, “were identical several generations ago, but our changed conditions and the spread of our people far to the South and far to the West have made many alterations in our pronunciation, and have introduced new words among us and changed the meaning of many old ones.… A nation’s language is a very large matter. It is not simply a manner of speech obtaining among the educated handful; the manner obtaining among the vast uneducated multitude must be considered also.… I could pile up differences until I not only convinced you that English and American are separate languages, but that when I speak my native tongue in its utmost purity an Englishman can’t understand me at all.” Another American humorist, George Ade, came to the same conclusion a quarter of a century later. “The American,” he said in his book of travel, “Pastures New,” in 1906, “must go to England in order to learn for a dead certainty that he does not speak the English language.… This pitiful fact comes home to every American when he arrives in London — that there are two languages, the English and the American. One is correct; the other is incorrect. One is a pure and limpid stream; the other is a stagnant pool, swarming with bacilli.”
Of the more serious American writers, the first to explore the literary possibilities of the national language was Walt Whitman. Once, in conversation with his fidus Achates, Horace Traubel, he described his “Leaves of Grass” as “only a language experiment — an attempt to give the spirit, the body, the man, new words, new potentialities of speech — an American … range of self-expression. The new world, the new times, the new peoples, the new vistas,” he went on, “need a tongue according — yes, what is more, will have such a tongue — will not be satisfied until it is evolved.”93 During the early 50’s, before the first publication of the “Leaves,” Whitman began the preparation of a lecture entitled “An American Primer,” the burden of which is indicated by an alternative title that he toyed with but finally rejected: “The Primer of Words, For American Young Men and Women, For Literati, Orators, Teachers, Musicians, Judges, Presidents, &c.” This lecture was apparently never delivered, and the manuscript remained unpublished at Whitman’s death in 1892. Twelve years later, in April, 1904, it was printed in the Atlantic Monthly, with a prefatory note by Traubel. It was an eloquent plea for national independence in language, and in particular for the development of an American style, firmly grounded upon the speech of everyday. “The Americans,” said Whitman, “are going to be the most fluent and melodious voiced people in the world — and the most perfect users of words.”
I see that the time is nigh when the etiquette of salons is to be discharged from that great thing, the renovated English speech in America. The occasions of the English speech in America are immense, profound — stretch over ten thousand vast cities, over through thousands of years, millions of miles of meadows, farms, mountains, men. The occasions of salons are for a coterie, a bon soir or two — involve waiters standing behind chairs, silent, obedient, with backs that can bend and must often bend.… Ten thousand native idiomatic words are growing, or are today already grown, out of which vast numbers could be used by American writers, with meaning and effect — words that would be welcomed by the nation, being of the national blood, — words that would give that taste of identity and locality which is so dear in literature.
Whitman ranged himself squarely against the pedagogues who, then as now, were trying to police American English, and bring it into accord with literary English. “Nobody ever actually talks,” he said, “as books and plays talk.” He argued that there should be a dictionary of the common speech, and that some attempt should be made to ascertain its grammar.
The Real Dictionary will give all the words that exist in use, the bad words as well as any. The Real Grammar will be that which declares itself a nucleus of the spirit of the laws, with liberty to all to carry out the spirit of the laws, even by violating them, if necessary.… These States are rapidly supplying themselves with new words, called for by new occasions, new facts, new politics, new combinations. Far plentier additions will be needed, and, of course, will be supplied.… Many of the slang words are our best; slang words among fighting men, gamblers, thieves, are powerful words.… The appetite of the people of These States, in popular speeches and writings, is for unhemmed latitude, coarseness, directness, live epithets, expletives, words of opprobrium, resistance. This I understand because I have the taste myself as large, as largely, as any one. I have pleasure in the use, on fit occasions, of — traitor, coward, liar, shyster, skulk, doughface, trickster, mean cuss, backslider, thief, impotent, lickspittle.… I like limber, lasting, fierce words. I like them applied to myself — and I like them in newspapers, courts, debates, Congress. Do you suppose the liberties and the brawn of These States have to do only with delicate lady-words? with gloved gentleman words? Bad Presidents, bad judges, bad clients, bad editors, owners of slaves, and the long ranks of Northern political suckers (robbers, traitors, suborned), monopolists, infidels,… shaved persons, supplejacks, ecclesiastics, men not fond of women, women not fond of men, cry down the use of strong, cutting, beautiful, rude words. To the manly instincts of the People they will be forever welcome.
At a time, says Louis Untermeyer, “when the rest of literary America was still indulging in the polite language of pulpits and the lifeless rhetoric of its libraries, Whitman not only sensed the richness and vigor of the casual word, the colloquial phrase — he championed the vitality of slang, and freshness of our quickly assimilated jargons, the indigenous beauty of vulgarisms. He even predicted that no future native literature could exist that neglected this racy speech, that the vernacular of people as opposed to the language of literati would form the living accents of the best poets to come. One has only to observe the contemporary works of Carl Sandburg, Robert Frost, Edgar Lee Masters, Vachel Lindsay and a dozen others to see how his prophecy has been fulfilled. Words, especially the neglected words regarded as too crude and literal for literature, fascinated Whitman. The idea of an enriched language was scarcely ever out of his mind.… This interest … grew to great proportions; it became almost an obsession.”94 As everyone knows, Whitman was an assiduous word-coiner himself, and many of his inventions will be recalled — for example, the verbs to promulge, to eclaircise, to diminute, to imperturbe, to effuse, and to inure, the adjectives ostent, omnigenous, and
adamic, the adverb affetuoso, and the nouns presidentiad, deliveress, civilizee, literat, acceptress, yawp, and partiolist. A large number of his coinages were in foreign, and especially in Romance metal; he believed that American should not be restricted to the materials of English, and he made frequent use of such French terms as allons, feuillage, habitan, savant, ma femme, mon cher, militaire, rapport and éclaircissement, and of such Spanish and pseudo-Spanish terms as libertad, camerado, vaquero and Americano.95 I have heard it argued that he introduced finale into common American usage; the evidence is dubious, but certainly the word is much oftener employed in the United States than in England. Most of his coinages, alas, died with him, but yawp and These States have survived. Among his literary remains were many notes upon American speechways, and he often discussed the subject with Traubel. In November, 1885, he printed an article on “Slang in America” in the North American Review, and afterward included it in “November Boughs” (1888).96
Whitman got support in his time from James Russell Lowell and John Fiske, and a little later from William Dean Howells. Lowell undertook the defense of Americanisms in his preface to the first series of “The Biglow Papers” (1848). “The English,” he said, “have complained of us for coining new words. Many of those so stigmatized were old ones by them forgotten, and all make now an unquestioned part of the currency, wherever English is spoken. Undoubtedly, we have a right to make new words as they are needed by the fresh aspects under which life presents itself here in the New World; and, indeed, wherever a language is alive, it grows. It might be questioned whether we could not establish a stronger title to the ownership of the English tongue than the mother-islanders themselves. Here, past all question, is to be its great home and center. And not only is it already spoken here in greater numbers, but with a far higher popular average of correctness than in Britain.” Fiske, writing home from England in 1873, reported that the English pronunciation grated upon his sensibilities. “The English,” he said, “talk just like Germans. So much guttural is very unpleasant, especially as half the time I can’t understand them, and have to say, ‘ I beg your pardon? ’ Our American enunciation is much pleasanter to the ear.”97
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