The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language

by Melvyn Bragg

What gave English primacy over the other languages of Britain besides that sense of mission was the force of numbers and the sense of occupation. What gave it a stronger presence than the other European languages, French and Spanish in particular, came through the ploughshare. On the whole the Spanish had sent armies and priests and taken gold. The French sent fur trappers and looked for trade. The English came to settle and that finally ensured that it was the language of Tyndale and Shakespeare which would be heard in the mid eighteenth century from the Atlantic coast to the Appalachian Mountains. As English spread, it began to chafe at the bonds and then to cut loose from the language spoken in England. In some cases meaning had shifted. The English “shop” became the American “store.” “Lumber” was rubbish in London; on the east coast it was and is “cut timber.” An English “biscuit” was an American “cracker.” An American “pond” could be as big as an English “lake”; an American “rock” could be as small as an English “pebble.” In America a piece of land became a “lot,” named after the method of drawing lots to determine which new owner received which new territory.

The blend of dialects started on the ships quickly came to mean that no single accent dominated. The accent today around the north-eastern corner of America is largely uniform and beguiling in its crisp distillation of dialects. And across America, to this day, there is a comparatively small variation of accents compared to the deep differences still rooted in Britain. English upper-class visitors to America noted the absence of regional pronunciation with approval. In 1764 Lord Gordon wrote: “The propriety of language here surprised me much, the English tongue being spoken by all ranks, in a degree of purity and perfection, surpassing any but the polite part of London.” Another visitor observed: “We hear nothing so bad in America as the Suffolk whine, the Yorkshire clipping or the Newcastle guttural. We never hear the letter ‘h’ aspirated improperly, nor omitted to be aspirated where propriety requires it. The common pronunciation approximates to that of the well-educated class in London and its vicinity.”

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.

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.

In 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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.”

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.”

It’s not my funeral if you fly off the handle because you have a chip on your shoulder and an axe to grind. I won’t sit on the fence or dodge the issue. I won’t fizzle out. I won’t crack up. No two ways about it, I’ll knuckle down and make the fur fly, I’ll go the whole hog and knock the spots off you and you’ll be a goner. You’ll kick the bucket. So face the music. You’re barking up the wrong tree. You won’t get the drop on me. I’m in cahoots with some people with the know-how. So keep a stiff upper lip and have the horse sense to pull up stakes. OK?

And there was Mr. Levi Strauss, who made his fortune providing hard-wearing clothes for the miners. He used a cloth called geane fustian, a three-hundred-year-old English name derived from its original manufacture in Genoa. “Levis” and “jeans” were born and show no signs of age or ageing as they stride into their third century. But Mr. Strauss’s products were distinguished by the modesty of their name. It was the time of Tall Talk and talking up, as if words could conjure reality into being. This became the particular fever of the “booster,” whose job was to talk up property, talk up prospects, talk up gold, talk up the west to whip on to fever the tens of thousands tumbling out of the settled cities of the east, headed for El Dorado. A single-room school might be called a college, a flea-pit could be called a hotel, and, in the spirit not of exaggeration but anticipation, a one-street town could be called a city. And what cities! Out in the west there is Rome, Cairo, Paris and Paradise City. Superior ghost towns in Kansas include Alexandria, Athens, Berlin, Calcutta, London, Moscow, Oxford and Sparta. Mining camps could get names like Bonanza, Wealthy City, Gold Hill or Rich Bar. The spirit of Davy Crockett would not be denied, and we have Dead Mule Canyon, Jackson’s Gulch, Hardscrabble, Poverty Hill, Hell-for-Noon City, Slumgullion, One Eye and Quack Hill. The vigour comes from speech, the speech of men on a high and in a hurry, loving to land a KO with words.