American Language Read Online Free

that a few Americanisms were logical and necessary — for example,
Congress, president
and
capitol
—, he dismissed all the rest as “manifest corruptions.” A year later, a savant using the
nom de plume
of Aristarcus delivered a similar attack on Webster in a series of articles contributed to the
New England Palladium
and reprinted in the
Port Folio
of Philadelphia, the latter “a notoriouslyFederalistic and pro-British organ.” “If the Connecticut lexicographer,” he said, “considers the retaining of the English language as a badge of slavery, let him not give us a Babylonish dialect in its stead, but adopt, at once, the language of the aborigines.” 19
    But if the illuminati were thus chilly, the plain people supported Webster’s scheme for the emancipation of American English heartily enough, though very few of them could have heard of it. The period from the gathering of the Revolution to the turn of the century was one of immense activity in the concoction and launching of new Americanisms, and more of them came into the language than at any time between the earliest colonial days and the rush to the West. Webster himself lists some of these novelties in his “Dissertations,” and a great many more are to be found in Richard H. Thornton’s “American Glossary” 20 — for example,
black-eye
(in the sense of defeat),
block
(of houses),
bobolink, bookstore, bootee
(now obsolete),
breadstuffs, buckeye, buckwheat-cake, bull-snake, bundling
and
buttonnjoood
, to go no further than the
b’s
. It was during this period, too, that the American meanings of such words as
shoe, corn, bug, bureau, mad, sick, creek, barn
and
lumber
were finally differentiated from the English meanings, and that American peculiarities in pronunciation began to make themselves felt. Despite the economic difficulties which followed the Revolution, the general feeling was that the new Republic was a success, and that it was destined to rise in the world as England declined. There was a widespread contempt for everything English, and that contempt extended to the canons of the mother-tongue.
2. THE ENGLISH ATTACK
    But the Jay Treaty of 1794 gave notice that there was still some life left in the British lion, and during the following years the troubles of the Americans, both at home and abroad, mounted at so appalling a rate that their confidence and elation gradually oozed out of them. Simultaneously, their pretensions began to be attackedwith pious vigor by patriotic Britishers, and in no field was the fervor of these brethren more marked than in those of literature and language. To be sure, there were Englishmen, then as now, who had a friendly and understanding interest in all things American, including even American books, and some of them took the trouble to show it, but they were not many. The general tone of English criticism, from the end of the Eighteenth Century to the present day, has been one of suspicion, and not infrequently it has been extremely hostile. The periods of remission, as often as not, have been no more than evidences of adroit politicking, as when Oxford, in 1907, helped along the graceful liquidation of the Venezuelan unpleasantness of 1895 by giving Mark Twain an honorary D.C.L. In England all branches of human endeavor are alike bent to the service of the state, and there is an alliance between society and politics, science and literature, that is unmatched anywhere else on earth. But though this alliance, on occasion, may find it profitable to be polite to the Yankee, and even to conciliate him, there remains an active aversion under the surface, born of the incurable rivalry between the two countries, and accentuated perhaps by their common tradition and their similar speech. Americanisms are forcing their way into English all the time, and of late they have been entering at a truly dizzy pace, but they seldom get anything properly describable as a welcome, save from small sects of iconoclasts, and every