Literature, American Style. Ezra Tawil
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Webster’s departures from Johnson’s system of spelling, then, were not animated by political hostility to the English lexicon. Far from simply aiming to “make a difference” of any kind and at any cost, each of his innovations was in fact backed by a specific rationale, and all of his proposals were united by a coherent linguistic philosophy. The most fundamental issue was whether the spelling of a word ought to proceed in agreement with its etymological origins, as Johnson believed, or according to its pronunciation, as did Webster. Their divergent theoretical convictions on this point, in turn, directly reflected the different sociolinguistic problems each lexicographer had before him. Johnson was attempting to standardize a language that had long been in use by an already existing speech community; his emphasis was on shoring up the boundaries of this community and protecting its language from corruptions in usage. Webster, on the other hand, was attempting to call a unique speech community into being through language; he thus had to devise a linguistic system perfect enough in its structure to be able, all by itself, to turn a population into a people. These entirely different social objectives inevitably shaped their linguistic policies. With regard to orthography, for example, Johnson’s emphasis dictated that he find a way to stabilize spelling in the face of what he saw as imminent chaos—a tangle of variant spellings without any agreed-upon standard. The policy at which he arrived, for complex reasons I will detail in a moment, was to ground proper spelling on the authority of precedent: Johnson will choose what he considers the best spelling for each word, based on the prior usage of a writer of “classical reputation or acknowledged authority.”42 In turn, an ordinary user of the language would find out which spelling he ought to adopt by consulting—you guessed it—Johnson’s dictionary. But this kind of approach would have been entirely inappropriate to Webster’s purpose. Webster needed to fashion a systematic and rule-governed approach that would render the language system transparent, internally consistent, and therefore easy to acquire, since it must succeed insuturing former speakers of different national languages into a new national speech community.43 Someone new to the language would thus be able to derive proper forms for himself by deduction from universal laws of construction, rather than consulting a dictionary each time to arrive at each bit of proper usage. A word’s spelling, then, would not only be regular and easy to derive, but it would act as a guide to pronunciation and would in turn be guided by it. The spoken and written dimensions of the language would thus mutually support each other, and both would buttress the community of language users. In this way, “a regular national orthography”44 would not only maintain or preserve social stability; it would actively generate it.
This thumbnail sketch should give some initial sense of why a topic as dry as spelling would have become such a highly charged point of contention. But in order to see just how much of Johnson’s thinking Webster in fact adopted while adapting it to a different set of social conditions, we will first have to take a close look at Johnson’s dictionary.
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From Samuel Johnson’s first articulation of his project in the 1747 Plan of A Dictionary of the English Language to his description of it as ultimately realized in the first edition of his dictionary, he represented the “great end of this undertaking” quite simply: to “fix the English language.”45 This did not mean that English was damaged and in need of repair; to “fix” a language meant to stabilize it, to settle it (a related Johnsonian term was to “ascertain,” to render certain, from the Latin certus, settled). A language that remained unfixed and unsettled, by contrast, was in constant danger of being unmoored by the various forces of linguistic drift, which for Johnson was synonymous with corruption and degeneration. That was why one wrote a dictionary: not solely, as we might casually assume, to help the users of a language navigate its corridors, but to police those corridors—to serve and protect the language itself. “This, my Lord,” Johnson writes in his Plan, “is my idea of an English dictionary; a dictionary by which the pronunciation of our language may be fixed, and its attainment facilitated; by which its purity may be preserved, its use ascertained, and its duration lengthened.”46 Eight years later, in the preface to the dictionary itself, Johnson repeats his ambition to “fix our language, and put a stop to those alterations which time and chance have hitherto been suffered to make in it without opposition,” but here he adds a telling metaphor: the lexicographer attempts to “embalm his language, and secure it from corruption and decay.”47
The lexicographer’s ground zero is a deceptively simple problem: which words to put in his dictionary and which ones to leave out. “In the first attempt to methodise my ideas,” writes Johnson in the Plan, “I found a difficulty, which extended itself to the whole work. It was not easy to determine by what rule of distinction the words of this dictionary were to be chosen.” Decisions about lexical inclusion and exclusion were not merely a practical matter of limiting the extent and size of a finite volume. What is really at issue is nothing less than patrolling the borders of a national language. The “chief intent” of his dictionary, Johnson asserts, is “to preserve the purity, and ascertain the meaning of our English idiom; and this seems to require nothing more than that our language be considered, so far as it is our own.”48 The phrasing is deliberate and bears important conceptual weight. An idiom, here used in the sense of a regional dialect rather than a local figure of speech, is language which belongs to a unique speech community and to that community alone, as Johnson’s gloss—“our language … considered, so far as it is our own”—makes clear. It is telling, then, that Johnson must immediately qualify that objective: “This is, perhaps, the exact and pure idea of a grammatical dictionary, but in lexicography, as in other arts, naked science is too delicate for the purposes of life. The value of a work must be estimated by its use.”49 The context in which this qualification appears, we can assume, is highly significant: at this moment in the Plan, Johnson is confronting the problem of how to deal with words from other languages. “If [all] foreign words … were rejected, it could be little regarded, except by criticks”; but “it is not enough that a dictionary delights the critick, unless, at the same time, it instructs the learner.”50 Johnson must thus develop a system of inclusion that would determine when foreign words will be turned away from the national linguistic border, and when they must be, however reluctantly, admitted. Since this problem and the lexical policies that it generates in Johnson’s dictionary will be targets for Webster’s polemic—and since the issue of foreign languages will, for entirely different reasons, pose a serious challenge for Webster’s own national linguistic project—I will need to walk through the issue in some detail.
Johnson’s real problem, it turns out, is not so much what to do with foreign words but what to do about the fact that they are intrinsic to English itself. This is true not only in the quotidian sense that “the terms of particular professions” in circulation in modern English, along with “the arts to which they relate,” are “generally derived from other nations,” but also in a much more fundamental sense having to do with the origins of the language.51 “Our language is well known not to be primitive or self-originated,” says Johnson, “but to have adopted words of every generation, and, either for the supply of its necessities, or the increase