The American Language
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
usage, or, more accurately, 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 was still fluid, and [Pg251] the /-our/-form was not
consistently adopted 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.
A great many of his innovations, of course, failed to take root, and in
the course of time he abandoned some of them himself. In his early
"Essay on the Necessity, Advantage and Practicability of Reforming the
Mode of Spelling" he advocated reforms which were already discarded by
the time he published the first edition of his dictionary. 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 decayed 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 also declared
for /stile/ in place of /style/, and for many other such changes, and
then quietly abandoned them. The successive editions of his dictionary
show still further concessions. /Croud/, /fether/, /groop/, /gillotin/,
/iland/, /insted/, /leperd/, /soe/, /sut/, /steddy/, /thret/, /thred/,
/thum/ and /wimmen/ appear only in the 1806 edition. In 1828 he went
back to /crowd/, /feather/, /group/, /island/, /instead/, /leopard/,
/sew/, /soot/, /steady/, /thread/, /threat/, /thumb/ and /women/, and
changed /gillotin/ to /guillotin/. In addition, he restored the final
/e/ in /determine/, /discipline/, /requisite/, /imagine/, etc. In 1838,
revising his dictionary, he abandoned a good many spellings that had
appeared in either the 1806 or the 1828 edition, notably /maiz/ for
/maize/, [Pg252] /suveran/ for /sovereign/ and /guillotin/ for
/guillotine/. But he stuck manfully to a number that were quite as
revolutionary--for example, /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 the majority of
his reforms adopted by his countrymen. 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. New words, and
particularly loan-words, are simplified, and hence naturalized in
American much more quickly than in English. /Employé/ has long since
become /employee/ in our newspapers, and /asphalte/ has lost its final
/e/, and /manoeuvre/ has become /maneuver/, and /pyjamas/ has become
/pajamas/. Even the terminology of science is simplified and
Americanized. In medicine, for example, the highest American usage
countenances many forms which would seem barbarisms to an English
medical man if he encountered them in the /Lancet/. In derivatives of
the Greek /haima/ it is the almost invariable American custom to spell
the root syllable /hem/, but the more conservative English make it
/haem/--/e. g./, in /haemorrhage/ and /haemiplegia/. In an exhaustive
list of diseases issued by the United States Public Health [Pg253]
Service[7] the /haem/-form does not appear once. In the same way
American usage prefers /esophagus/, /diarrhea/ and /gonorrhea/ to the
English /oesophagus/, /diarrhoea/ and /gonorrhoea/. In the style-book
of the /Journal/ of the American Medical Association[8] I find many
other spellings that would shock an English medical author, among them
/curet/ for /curette/, /cocain/ for /cocaine/, /gage/ for /gauge/,
/intern/ for /interne/, /lacrimal/ for /lachrymal/, and a whole group
of words ending in /-er/ instead of in /-re/.
Webster's reforms, it goes without saying, have not passed
unchallenged by the guardians of tradition. A glance at the literature
of the first years of the nineteenth century shows that most of the
serious authors of the time ignored his new spellings, though they
were quickly adopted by the newspapers. Bancroft's "Life of
Washington" contains /-our/ endings in all such words as /honor/,
/ardor/ and /favor/. Washington Irving also threw his influence
against the /-or/ ending, and so did Bryant and most of the other
literary big-wigs of that day. After the appearance of "An American
Dictionary of the English Language," in 1828, a formal battle was
joined, with Lyman Cobb and Joseph E. Worcester as the chief opponents
of the reformer. Cobb and Worcester, in the end, accepted the /-or/
ending and so surrendered on the main issue, but various other
champions arose to carry on the war. Edward S. Gould, in a once famous
essay,[9] 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 school-master "who taught millions to read but not one to
sin" were [Pg254] "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 Coxe in
1886, and he contented himself with the resigned statement that
"Webster has corrupted our spelling sadly." 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 good 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.[10]
Webster's inconsistency gave his opponents a formidable 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 pamphlet
printed in 1831.[11] 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 renewed with great fury after the
appearance of Worcester's dictionary, in 1846. Worcester, who had
begun his lexicographical labors by editing Johnson's dictionary, was
a good deal more conservative than Webster, and so the partisans of
conformity rallied around him, and for [Pg255] a while the
controversy took on all the rancor of a personal quarrel. Even the
editions of Webster printed after his death, though they gave way on
many points, were violently arraigned. Gould, in 1867, belabored the
editions of 1854 and 1866,[12] and complained that "for the past
twenty-five years the Websterian replies have uniformly been bitter in
tone, and very free in the imputation of personal motives, or
interested or improper motives, on the part of opposing critics." At
this time Webster himself had been dead for twenty-two years. Schele
de Vere, during the same year, denounced the publishers of the Webster
dictionaries for applying "immense capital and a large stock of energy
and perseverance" to the propagation of his "new and arbitrarily
imposed orthography."[13]
§ 4
/Exchanges/--As in vocabulary and in idiom, there are constant
exchanges between English and American in the department of
orthography. Here the influence of English usage is almost uniformly
toward conservatism, and that of American usage is as steadily in the
other direction. The logical superiority of American spelling is well
exhibited by its persistent advance in the face of the utmost
hostility. The English objection to our simplifications, as Brander
Matthews points out, is not wholly or even chiefly etymological; its
roots lie, to borrow James Russell Lowell's phrase, in an esthetic
hatred burning "with as fierce a flame as ever did theological
hatred." There is something inordinately offensive to English purists
in the very thought of taking lessons from this side of the water,
particularly in the mother tongue. The opposition, transcending the
academic, takes on the character of the patriotic. "Any American,"
continues Matthews, "who chances to note the force and the fervor and
the frequency of the objurgations against American spelling in the
columns of the /Saturday Review/, for example, and of the /Athenaeum/,
may find himself wondering as to the date of the [Pg256] papal bull
which declared the infallibility of contemporary British orthography,
and as to the place where the council of the Church was held at which
it was made an article of faith."[14] This was written more than a
quarter of a century ago. Since then there has been a lessening of
violence, but the opposition still continues. No self-respecting
English author would yield up the /-our/ ending for an instant, or