Authors: H.L. Mencken
A capital advantage of this reform in these States would be that it would make a difference between the English orthography and the American. This will startle those who have not attended to the subject; but I am confident that such an event is an object of vast political consequence.
The alteration, however small, would encourage the publication of books in our own country. It would render it, in some measure, necessary that all books should be printed in America. The English would never copy our orthography for their own use; and consequently the same impressions of books would not answer for both countries. The inhabitants of the present generation would read the English impressions; but posterity, being taught a different spelling, would prefer the American orthography.
Besides this, a national language is a band of national union. Every engine should be employed to render the people of this country national; to call their attachments home to their own country; and to inspire them with the pride of national character. However they may boast of Independence, and the freedom of their government, yet their opinions are not sufficiently independent; an astonishing respect for the arts and literature of their parent country, and a blind imitation of its manners, are still prevalent among the Americans. Thus an habitual respect for another country, deserved indeed and once laudable, turns their attention from their own interests, and prevents their respecting themselves.
But, as Dr. George Philip Krapp points out in “The English Language in America,”
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Webster was “above all a practical, not a
theoretical reformer,” and in consequence he was slow himself to adopt the reforms he advocated. When in 1783, he republished the first part of his “Grammatical Institute” as the first edition of his famous “American Spelling Book,” he used the orthodox English spelling of the time, and not only gave the
-our
words their English ending, but even commended it. And so late as 1806, in the preface to his first Dictionary, he tried somewhat disingenuously to disassociate himself from Franklin’s scheme to reform the alphabet. Indeed, in all the editions of the Spelling Book printed before 1806 he avoided noticeable novelties in spelling, though after 1798 he noted, in his preface, his conviction that “common sense and convenience” would soon or late substitute
public, favor, nabor, bed, proov, flem, hiz, giv, det, ruf
and
wel
for
publick, favour, neighbour, head, prove, phlegm, his, give, debt, rough
and
well
. But in his Dictionary of 1806, despite his coolness to Franklin’s alphabet, he used Franklin’s saying that “those people spell best who do not know how to spell” —
i.e.
, who spell phonetically — as a springboard for a wholesale assault upon the authority of Johnson. He made an almost complete sweep of whole classes of silent letters — the
u
in the
-our
words, the final
e
in
determine
and
requisite
, the silent
a
in
thread, feather
and
steady
, the silent
b
in
thumb
, the
s
in
island
, the
o
in
leopard
, and the redundant consonants in
traveler, wagon, jeweler
, etc. (Eng.
traveller, waggon, jeweller
). He lopped the final
k
from
frolick, physick
and their analogues, and transposed the
e
and the
r
in many words ending in
re
, such as
theatre, lustre, centre
and
calibre
. More, he changed the
c
in all words of the
defence
class to
s
. Yet more, he changed
ph
to
f
in words of the
phantom
class,
ou
to
00
in words of the
group
class,
ow
to
ou
in
crowd, porpoise
to
porpess, acre
to
aker, sew
to
soe, woe
to
wo, soot
to
sut, gaol
to
jail
and
plough
to
plow
. Finally, he antedated the simplified spellers by inventing a long list of boldly phonetic spellings, ranging from
tung
for
tongue
to
wimmen
for
women
, and from
hainous
for
heinous
to
cag
for
keg
.
Some of these new spellings, of course, were not actually Webster’s inventions. For example, the change from
-our
to
-or
in words of the
honor
class was a mere echo of an earlier English uncertainty. In the first three folios of Shakespeare, 1623, 1632 and 1663–6,
honor
and
honour
were used indiscriminately and in almost equal proportions; English spelling, as we have seen, was then still fluid, and the
-our
-form was not used consistently until the Fourth Folio of 1685.
Moreover, John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, is authority for the statement that the -
or
-form was “a fashionable impropriety” in England in 1791. But the great authority of Johnson stood against it, and Webster was surely not one to imitate fashionable improprieties. He deleted the
u
for purely etymological reasons, going back to the Latin
honor, favor
and
odor
without taking account of the intermediate French
honneur, faveur
and
odeur
. And where no etymological reasons presented themselves, he made his changes by analogy and for the sake of uniformity, or for euphony or simplicity, or because it pleased him, one guesses, to stir up the academic animals. Webster, in fact, delighted in controversy, and was anything but free from the national yearning to make a sensation.
Many of his innovations, of course, failed to take root, and in the course of time he abandoned some of them himself. Among them were the dropping of the silent letter in such words as
head, give, built
and
realm
, making them
hed, giv, bilt
and
relm
; the substitution of doubled vowels for apparent diphthongs in such words as
mean, zeal
and
near
, making them
meen, zeel
and
neer
; and the substitution of
sh
for
ch
in such French loan-words as
machine
and
chevalier
, making them
masheen
and
shevaleer
. He had once declared for
stile
in place of
style
, and for many other such changes, but now quietly abandoned them. The successive editions of his Dictionary show still further concessions.
Croud, fether, groop, gil-lotin, iland, insted, leperd, soe, sut, steddy, thret, thred, thum
and
wimmen
appear only in the 1806 edition. In his “
American
Dictionary of the English Language” (1828), the father of all the Websters of today, he went back to
crowd, feather, group, island, instead, leopard, sew, soot, steady, thread, threat, thumb
and
women
, and changed
gillotin
to
guillotin
, and in addition, he restored the final
e
in
determine, discipline, requisite, imagine
, etc. In 1838, revising the “American Dictionary,” he abandoned a good many spellings that had appeared even in his 1828 edition,
e.g., maiz
for
maize, suveran
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for
sovereign
and
guillotin
for
guillotine
, but he stuck manfully to a number that were quite as revolutionary —
e.g., aker
for
acre, cag
for
keg, grotesk
for
grotesque, hainous
for
heinous, porpess
for
porpoise
and
tung
for
tongue —
and they did not begin to disappear until the edition of 1854, issued by other hands and eleven years after
his death. Three of his favorites,
chimist
for
chemist, neger
for
negro
and
zeber
for
zebra
, are incidentally interesting as showing changes in American pronunciation. He abandoned
zeber
in 1828, but remained faithful to
chimist
and
neger
to the last.
But though he was thus forced to give occasional ground, and in more than one case held out in vain, Webster lived to see many of his reforms adopted by his countrymen. The influence of his Spelling Book was really stupendous. It took the place in the schools of Dilworth’s “Aby-sel-pha,” the favorite of the Revolutionary generation, and maintained its authority for nearly a century. Until Lyman Cobb entered the lists with his “New Spelling Book,” its innumerable editions had no really formidable rivalry, and even then it held its own. I have a New York edition, dated 1848, which contains an advertisement stating that the annual sale at that time was more than a million copies, and that more than 30,000,000 copies had been sold since 1783. In the late 40’s the publishers, George F. Cooledge & Bro., devoted the whole capacity of the fastest steam press in the United States to the printing of it. This press turned out 525 copies an hour, or 5,250 a day. It was “constructed expressly for printing Webster’s ‘Elementary Spelling Book’ [the name had been changed in 1829] at an expense of $5,000.” Down to 1865, 42,000,000 copies had been sold, and down to 1889, 62,000,000. The appearance of Webster’s first Dictionary, in 1806, greatly strengthened his influence. Four other dictionaries had been published in the United States since 1798 — Samuel Johnson, Jr.’s, John Elliott’s, Caleb Alexander’s and William Woodridge’s — but Noah’s quickly dominated the popular field, and in those days dictionaries were accepted even more gravely than they are today.
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Thus he left
the ending in
-or
triumphant over the ending in
-our
, he shook the security of the ending in
-re
, he rid American spelling of a great many doubled consonants, he established the
s
in words of the
defense
group, and he gave currency to many characteristic American spellings, notably
jail, wagon, plow, mold
and
ax
. These spellings still survive, and are practically universal in the United States today; their use constitutes one of the most obvious differences between written English and written American. Moreover, they have founded a general tendency, the effects of which reach far beyond the field actually traversed by Webster himself. His reforms, of course, did not go unchallenged by the guardians of tradition. A glance at the literature of the first years of the Nineteenth Century shows that most of the more pretentious authors of the time ignored them, though they were quickly adopted by the newspapers. For example, the Rev. Aaron Bancroft’s “Life of Washington” (1807) contains
-our
endings in all such words as
honor, ardor
and
favor
. Washington Irving, who began to publish in the same year, also inclined toward them, and so did William Cullen Bryant, whose “Thanatopsis” came out in 1817, and most of the other literary bigwigs of the era followed suit. After the appearance of the “American Dictionary” in 1828 a formal battle was joined, with Lyman Cobb and Joseph E. Worcester as the chief formal opponents of the reformer. His inconsistencies gave them a handy weapon for use against him — until it began to be noticed that the orthodox English spelling was quite as inconsistent. He sought to change
acre
to
aker
, but left
lucre
unchanged. He removed the final
f
from
bailiff, mastiff, plaintiff
and
pontiff
, but left it in
distaff
. He changed
c
to
s
in words of the
offense
class, but left the
c
in
fence
. He changed the
ck
in
frolick, physick
, etc., into a simple
c
, but restored it in such derivatives as
frolicksome
. He deleted the silent
u
in
mould
, but left it in
court
. These slips were made the most of by Cobb in a furious pamphlet in excessively fine print, printed in 1831.
8
He also detected Webster in the frequent
faux pas
of using spellings in his definitions and explanations that conflicted with the spellings he advocated. Various other purists joined in the attack, and it was carried on with great fury on the appearance of Worcester’s Dictionary, in 1846, three years
after Webster’s death. The partisans of conformity rallied round Worcester, and for a while the controversy took on all the rancor of a personal quarrel. According to McKnight,
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Harvard University required candidates for matriculation to follow Worcester’s spellings “as late as the last decade of the Nineteenth Century.”
Both Cobb and Worcester, in the end, accepted the
-or
ending and so surrendered on what was really the main issue, but various other champions arose to carry on the war. Edward S. Gould, in a once famous essay,
10
denounced the whole Websterian orthography with the utmost fury, and Bryant, reprinting this philippic in the
Evening Post
, said that on account of Webster “the English language has been undergoing a process of corruption for the last quarter of a century,” and offered to contribute to a fund to have Gould’s denunciation “read twice a year in every school-house in the United States, until every trace of Websterian spelling disappears from the land.” But Bryant was forced to admit that, even in 1856, the chief novelties of the Connecticut schoolmaster “who taught millions to read but not one to sin” were “adopted and propagated by the largest publishing house, through the columns of the most widely circulated monthly magazine, and through one of the ablest and most widely circulated newspapers in the United States” — which is to say, the
Tribune
under Greeley. The last academic attack was delivered by Bishop A. C. Coxe in 1886, and he contented himself with the resigned statement that “Webster has corrupted our spelling sadly.” T. R. Lounsbury, with his active interest in spelling reform, ranged himself on the side of Webster, and effectively disposed of the controversy by showing that the great majority of his spellings were supported by precedents quite as respectable as those behind the fashionable English spellings. In Lounsbury’s opinion, a great deal of the opposition to them was no more than a symptom of antipathy to all things American among certain Englishmen and of subservience to all things English among certain Americans.
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