The Adventure of English (20 page)

What they did do, though, the grand old men of the new country, was to decide to attempt to make their English the best in the world. They would both separate from England and in the process take over its greatest achievement. They were quite clear and determined about this.

John Adams, who would become the second President of the United States, wrote a letter in 1780:

It may have read then, and read now, as an exuberant boast: but he was right. And he liked to rub it in to the former masters. “England,” he wrote, “will never have any more honour, excepting now and then imitating American.” About that he was wrong.

Adams took the English language into the destiny of America not unlike Henry V and Elizabeth I had done in England itself. He wrote of a future in which no one would be excluded because of the way they spoke. The plain speaking of English would underpin the American democratic ideal. It was no longer the King's English, it was the people's English. He even attempted to set up the first public academy for refining and improving English, but it never got going.

Liberated Americans were enthralled by what their new country could and would do with what they now saw as “their” language. Noah Webster wrote: “North America will be peopled with a hundred millions of men, all speaking the same language . . . the people of one quarter of the world will be able to associate and converse together like children of the same family.”

This visionary, Noah Webster, was a schoolteacher who wrote a little book, known as the
American Spelling Book
or the
Blue Backed Speller.
It sold in general stores at fourteen cents a copy and in its first hundred years it sold sixty million copies, more than any book in America with the exception of the Bible. It is one of the most influential books in the development of English.

Spelling began early, simply, at school, through Noah Webster. Monosyllables were easy. Polysyllables were made to appear easy by breaking them down and also by emphasising all the syllables:

It's still in use and that chanting of syllables by millions of children in tens of thousands of schools over two centuries changed and set the sound of much of American English. Americans pronounce polysyllables with a far more even emphasis than the English. Webster was not an admirer of the English aristocratic clipped vowel and his classroom drill could have been especially designed to oppose it. Where the English say “cemet'ry,” Americans have “cemetery,” English “laborat'ry,” American “laboratory.”

Webster had other ambitions. He wanted to teach America to spell. Correct spelling came to be seen as the standard of a good education throughout America and the famous American spelling bee was born and became part of the social and self-improvement life of every town and village in the land.

This nationwide embrace of spelling as a way to have a night out is remarkable. It shows Americans at their self-help best. It shows that they treat their language with care and seriousness. It continues the John Adams notion that correct speech and spelling is all the vital equipment an American needs to achieve great things. And it was fun; Americans to this day enjoy it. It could also be very serious indeed — shoot-outs are recorded over disagreements down at the local spelling bee.

Like most reformers, Webster appealed to “logic.” “Colour” and “honour” had to get rid of that illogical “u,” and they did. “Waggon” could roll just as easily with one “g,” so one “g” went. “Traveller” lost an “l,” “plough” became “plow,” “theatre” and “center” were turned into “theater” and “center” and so it went on for scores of similar words. “Cheque” became “check,” “masque” became “mask,” “music,” “physic” and “logic” lost the final “k” that English gave them. A great number of these made good sense, though like some others I'm always a bit nervous about tinkering with what has worked well enough. But Webster would not be diverted by any anxieties or nostalgia. He cleaned up the spelling and he set out how to speak the words and he carried most of his countrymen, women and children with him.

America became very confident in its own English language. A witty resolution was proposed in the House of Representatives in 1820 suggesting they educate the English in their own language:

It could have been instructive.

Every man of intellect, it seemed, was obsessed by the English language. Benjamin Franklin, who by the age of seventeen had become a printer and is known as one of the fathers of the new nation, spent a good deal of his time concerned with American spelling. He read the essays of Thomas Addison in the English
Spectator
to improve his style. Though he was a great defender of American English, when David Hume, the philosopher, criticised his use of “colonise” and “unshakable,” he withdrew them. Yet he had a radical view of the language and wanted to get rid of letters he thought unnecessary — c, w, y and j — and add six others. He wanted to remove silent letters and reform the whole business. He sent his scheme to his friend May Stevenson in a letter beginning: “Diir Frind” but May replied that she could “si meni inkanviiniensis az vel az difikylties.” That stopped it.

By the 1820s, Americans felt that not only did they have the future of English in their hands, not only were they refining and embellishing it, they were also keeping it pure, still using words the former owners had dropped, words like “burly,” “greenhorn,” “deft,” “scant,” “talented,” and “likely.” And Americans still say “sick” to mean ill, not just nauseous. They say “fall” meaning autumn, just as the English once did. Americans pronounced the old flat “a” in “path” and “fast” — both abandoned in southern England in the late eighteenth century. They use the old “gotten,” not “got.” They say “eether,” we say “eye-ther” — America's is the old form. They use “I guess” as Chaucer did.

Yet there was still a wariness about pressing too hard. Franklin had backed down over the perfectly good and as it turned out long-lived words “colonise” and “unshakable.” When Webster published his great dictionary in 1828, for all his anti-Old Englishness, he was quick to protest that the dictionary contained fewer than fifty terms that were new to the country. The east coast still saw itself in the same orbit as Old England.

But the west was different. In the west, English went wild.

I
n the west, American English escaped the control of the east coast Pilgrim Fathers and their highly educated, competitive, controlling and linguistically accomplished heirs and successors along the Atlantic seaboard. It had a continent to conquer and name, plains and mountain ranges, deserts and forests untouched by its restless adventuring spirit. English would not be confined, not even when it was cosseted and groomed by the formidable progeny of the
Mayflower
and those that sailed in its wake.

Who could have predicted that it would be the French who would have given the opening English needed to flood over North America? But it was the Louisiana Purchase that did it. In 1804, President Jefferson, on behalf of the United States, bought what was then called Louisiana from the French for three cents an acre. It cost them about fifteen million dollars. It more than doubled the size of the country. If ever proof were needed of the difference between the French and the English in North America — that the one came to trade, the other to settle — this was it.

The French grip on the massif central of America had effectively blocked the exploration of the west. The Great Plains were there, endless lands drained by the Mississippi and its tributaries the Missouri, Ohio and Tennessee. It stretched from New Orleans in the south to the Rocky Mountains and what is today the Canadian border in the north.

In its early years on the stage as an independent country the United States was lucky in many of its leading men. President Jefferson, who had not only bought Louisiana, which must be a contender for the bargain of all time, immediately set up an expedition of forty-five men under the leadership of Captain Meriwether Lewis and William Clark (two more English names are hard to imagine). They were to find a navigable river route to the west coast. The Louisiana Purchase was itself enough to put Jefferson in the chronicles of fame in his new country; the immediate setting up of the expedition was a seizing of the day which only the finest politicians seem able to do. But for this story, for the adventure of English, Jefferson's genius was to insist that the explorers wrote daily journals. They kept their word. The result is a glorious introduction to the often fantastical new worlds which English discovered. To meet these new experiences English invented and stole wholesale.

Lewis and Clark were army-trained frontiersmen, and backwoods specialists. The pure English dreams of John Adams and the proprietorial revisions of Webster and Franklin, the whole Puritan propriety, went out of the window in the west when they sat down to compose their journal.

By comparison with the whirlwind that was soon to be reaped in the west, this reads rather tamely. Even so, it is a clear signal that the language of the east and therefore the language of London is not sufficient. In England “creek” is a tidal inlet, in America it covers all manner of streams. An adjective is turned into a noun — “rapid” into “rapids.” “Bluff ” is an American coinage to describe broadfaced cliffs. “Rattle snake” and “cottonwood” are examples of the way two English words could combine forces in the face of new material. “Elk” is one of the words imported from England but applied to a different beast. “Buffalo,” oddly, had been an English word for two hundred years, imported from a Portuguese book about China. And American buffaloes are bison.

Webster in his dictionary had said that it contained not fifty words peculiar to America. In the untutored journals of the two frontiersmen, Clark and Lewis, we discover many hundreds of new words which can claim to be peculiarly American English.

It is significant that these frontiersmen and those who followed their trail were much more open to Native American words. Partly because there was so much to describe and the native word was the handiest. But partly I guess because the men were far less engaged in the battle to beat London polite society at its own game or remodel English as a classical language to match Latin, and construct an imperial language to out-Rome Rome.

And perhaps the men on the frontier had a finer democratic instinct when it came to culture. Five hundred Native American words are recorded in those journals for the first time. Not an overwhelming number, but many more than before. Some fell away, some have been mentioned, but words derived from native languages include: “hickory,” “hominy,” “maize,” “moccasin,” “moose,” “opossum,” “pecan,” “persimmon,” “squaw,” “toboggan,” “powwow” and “totem,” as well as more obscure words such as “kinnikinnic,” a mixture of leaves for smoking; “pemmican,” a preserved mixture of meat, fat and berries; and “tamarack,” a kind of larch. As previously mentioned, of the first thirteen states, only Massachusetts and Connecticut are from native words. As the country went west, more Native American words were used for the states. For example: Dakota (from Santee “allies”); Wyoming (Algonquin “place of the big flats”); Utah (Navaho “upper land” or “land of the Uti”); Mississippi (Chippewa “big river”) and Kentucky (Iroquois “meadow land”).

There are often grey areas. Does the “whippoorwill” bird derive from Native American or is it an English coinage coming from the sound the bird makes? “Mocking bird” is definitely an English word coined, or invented, because of the bird's habit of imitating other birds' songs.

These dawn-of-the-nineteenth-century journals also give us, sometimes for the first time in print, names and phrases usually made by combining Old English words, most often by jamming together two syllables: “black track,” “black bear,” “blue grass,” “box alder,” “brown thrush,” “buck-eye,” “bull-frog,” “blue jay,” “bull snake” and through the alphabet to “night-hawk,” “sage brush,” “snow-shoe,” “war-party” and “wood duck.”

Some English words recorded here can be seen to have taken on new meanings: “braid,” “crab apple,” “dollar,” “fork,” “gang,” “grouse,” “meal,” “mammoth,” “hump” and “rush.” “Boil” and “lick” became nouns; “snag” and “scalp” became verbs.

On that expedition English went word-drunk and it was to stay intoxicated out west for decades to come. Lewis and Clark and their men became dab hands at naming: they used physical characteristics — “Crooked Falls” and “Diamond Island”; incidents — “Colt-Killed Creek”; names of members of the expedition — “Floyd's River,” “Reuben's Creek”; ladies back home were toasted in geography — “Fanny's Island,” “Judith's Creek.” And Jefferson himself, as was fitting, got a place — “Jefferson's River.”

One thing this shows, I think, at its simplest, is that language is no respecter of persons in that it will find birth wherever and whenever it can. There is very often something wonderfully anonymous about the whole process: a pimp can coin a word as lasting as that of a poet, a street hawker as a statesman, a farmer as a scholar, a foul mouth as a Latinist, vulgar as refined, illiterate as schooled. Language leaps out of mouths regardless of class, sex, age, or education: it sees something that needs to be said or saved in a word and it pounces. In the American west it pounced for more than fifty years.

This was partly perhaps because people were coming into a new land, full of fear and excitement and hope — all stimulants; determined to make their mark, often finding energy in joining ranks with a language they needed to master in order fully to be part of their new society. Immigrants. The word “immigrant” is an American invention. Migration of people had occurred in the Old World but in the New it was the single common defining experience.

New settlers brought new linguistic resources, as they still do today. The Pilgrim Fathers had come primarily from the south and east of England. Two hundred years later, new Americans from Britain were more likely to come from Scotland or from Ulster, where they felt driven out by a combination of natural disasters, high rents and religious intolerance. There were also among the Scots and Irish many who came, as others did, in search of a better life and with hope to make one. It has been claimed that half the population of Ulster left for America.

They found the land on the eastern seaboard and the land nearest to it already occupied and staked out. They moved west. They were regarded as good fighters and encouraged to go to the frontier and face the greatest risks. The Ulstermen were unjustly regarded and written about as uncouth, and they pushed on from where they were not welcome to the wilder, emptier places they made their own. Their older accents can still be heard among the hillbillies of the Appalachians and in the music that evolved into country western.

The Scots and the Irish brought their own words with them and saw them turn into American English. “Scon,” the Scottish verb meaning skim over the water, became “schooner.” And you can still hear old Scots dialect words and pronunciations: “ingine” for “engine,” “brickle” for “brittle,” “donsie” for “sickly,” “poke” for “boy” — all eighteenth-century survivals. The Irish were to bring “speakeasy,” “smithereens,” “shillelagh” — not many actual words but they influenced speech habits: “shall” for “will,” “ag'in” for “against,” “ketch” for “catch,” “drownded” for “drowned,” “yes indeedy” and “yes sirree.”

Lewis and Clark had opened up the west. It was an immense effort and yet they are probably less well remembered for it today than for the journals they had to scribble every night, descriptions and words which have gained for them a sort of immortality. It was the great rivers that became the superhighways, and a place like St. Louis, the gateway to the west, would be the site of scores of paddle-steamers carrying, as well as everything else, cargoes of words.

The old French presence came into its own along the Mississippi. It's in the place names, New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Lafayette in the south and up north in St. Louis, Cape Girardeau and French “villes” everywhere — Belleville, Abbeville, Centreville, Pineville, Jacksonville. “Shanty,” “sashay,” “chute,” all come in from the French, as does one of the great meeting places in the west, the “hotel.”

In France, a hotel was a grand private house or a municipal building. In America it became — at its best — a palace for the people, meant to be a cut above the taverns and inns of old England, meant to offer style and a secure lodging place in a shifting, growing, booming busty world, offering the best to anyone who could rake up the modest charges. The word can be found in Smollett in 1765, but “hotel” is a good example of a word that not only changed its meaning but was to take off, first in America and then elsewhere, into a host of other meanings, nuanced, varied, rich, bare: the hotels of Raymond Chandler in downtown Los Angeles, the hotels of Scott Fitzgerald in the 1920s, the rich glitz of Truman Capote in the mid century, places open to all who could pay, an oasis, and in some cases a shot at paradise. In the early days there were some who did indeed refer to hotels as “People's Palaces.”

Many of the clients at these hotels were businessmen. In eighteenth-century England merchants had been described as businessmen, but once again, in going across to America, the word took on new meanings, from the princes of finance who set up Wall Street and brunched in the Plaza Hotel to the small businessmen whose salesmen came to epitomise the longing to catch the American dream. Later, the progeny of businessmen was to include “executive,” “well heeled,” “fat cat,” “gogetter,” “yes-man,” “assembly line” and “closed shop.”

“Rednecks” got the name because of the way their necks were burned in the sun as they bent to work in the fields. The poor travelled on rafts which they steered with oars called “riffs” — the “riff-raff ” (although a similar phrase, “rif et raf,” had been recorded in France in 1470, meaning “nothing whatever”). On board the bigger boats the richer travellers were called “highfalutin” because of the high fluted smokestacks that carried the soot and cinders well away from the passengers. And they gambled.

Paddle-steamers, river boats, the Mississippi and other swathes of slow-moving water shifting traffic around territories brand new to the immigrants: what better stage for gambling? It became the favourite activity among river-boat passengers. Some travelled only to gamble. Some never got off. English was on the cards.

“Pass the buck” and “the buck stops here” both come from card games. The “buck” was originally a buckhorn-handled knife passed round to show who was dealing. Gamblers put many fine phrases into the word-kitty. “Deal” itself became the power behind phrases such as “new deal,” “square deal,” “fair deal,” “raw deal,” “big deal”; “you bet!,” “put up or shut up!,” “I'll call your bluff,” which were first heard around the American card table, perhaps on a river boat gliding down to New Orleans. Thanks to these dedicated gambling men you can today have “an ace up your sleeve” so you put “up the ante” and when someone “throws in his hand” you keep a “poker face.” Even when the “chips are down” and “the cards are stacked against you” you can play a “wild card” and “scoop the jackpot.”