as, besides their immediate use, may give pleasure or instruction, by conveying some elegance of language, or some precept of prudence or piety.”77 Certainly, ordinary users of the language, much less those in the process of learning it, cannot be expected to scour the history of authoritative usage for themselves in this way; they will need a trusted meta-authority to sift through it for them. Only a lexicographer can perform this labor. Whether in the realm of spelling, pronunciation, construction, or style, what constitutes “proper” English must be “learned from the dictionary.”78
In the realm of orthography, what the reader of Johnson’s dictionary will learn is that the spelling of a word bears the traces of its etymological origins, whether those origins be Saxon, French, Latin, or what have you. (“In the investigation both of the orthography and signification of words,” Johnson announces in the preface, “their Etymology was necessarily to be considered.”)79 This approach is meant to address an empirical problem: as Johnson looks around him at modern English usage, he sees countless words that “continue to be variously written, as authours differ in their care or skill.”80 To fix the spelling of those words once and for all, “it was proper to enquire the true orthography, which I have always considered as depending on their derivation, and have therefore referred them to their original languages.”81 In making the case for this approach in the preface, Johnson gives some choice examples of how etymological origin will help him settle some thorny spelling problems: “thus I write enchant, enchantment, enchanter, after the French, and incantation after the Latin; thus entire is chosen rather than intire, because it passed to us not from the Latin integer, but from the French entier.”82 For this reason, Johnson is often said to have “Latinized” or “Romanized” the English language—a charge to which I shall return below. But as this handful of examples also indicates, to determine “true” spelling by following etymology also means, crucially, not to derive it from the way that word is pronounced; to choose “entire” over “intire” is to side with derivation over pronunciation. Johnson’s orthographic philosophy is thus also generally understood to be linked to his privileging of writing over speech: “It has been demanded, on one hand, that men should write as they speak; but … it may be asked, with equal propriety, why men do not rather speak as they write.”83 This position would earn Johnson the contemptuous charge of pedantry—a barb Webster would aim more than once at his great predecessor.
Everything New Is Old Again
Based on the above account, we might be inclined to speculate that Webster zeroed in on the problem of spelling for tactical reasons: given its intricate lines of connection to so many aspects of Johnson’s project, orthography would be an effective thread to pull in order to unravel his lexical authority. This would be to presume, of course, that the assault on Johnson was Webster’s primary end. Webster’s polemic was broad and unmistakable, and I will explore its specifics below. But did the critique of Johnson determine Webster’s linguistic choices, or was it merely one of their effects? As I have already noted, part of the difficulty in sifting through the layers of Webster’s polemic against Johnson is our tendency to read it rather reflexively through a national political lens. Webster’s own manipulation of Revolutionary rhetoric seems to beckon us in that direction. That political context, of course, is relevant; but it only reveals part of the story. And to look at the language debate exclusively from that angle is to risk seriously misreading some of its most basic facets and missing vast aspects of its historical and cultural contexts.
One thing is indisputable: Webster famously chose the opposing side in Johnson’s “great orthographical contest.”84 He casts his lot with pronunciation rather than etymological derivation as the source of proper spelling, which is to say, he advocates for “a perfect correspondence between the spelling and pronunciation.”85 From a Johnsonian perspective, this would be rather like mooring a ship to a boat; it made just as little sense to try to fix spelling by tethering it an even more unstable realm of language. Webster was aware of this position, which he poses as the last of five “Objections” in a dialogical section of his appendix devoted to confronting potential counterarguments: “ ‘It is idle to conform the orthography of words to the pronunciation, because the latter is continually changing.’ ”86 Webster explicitly identifies this as “one of Dr. Johnson’s objections,” and pronounces it “very unworthy of his judgement.”87 He then proceeds to turn the argument exactly around: “So far is this circumstance from being a real objection,” he asserts, “that it is alone a sufficient reason for the change of spelling.”88 In fact, it is Johnson’s own position that is absurd: “On his principle of fixing the orthography, while the pronunciation is changing, any spoken language must, in time, lose all relation to the written language; that is, the sounds of words would have no affinity with the letters that compose them.”89 He gives a few examples from current usage (“no mortal would suspect from the spelling, that neighbour, wrought, are pronounced nabur, rawt”)90 and then delivers the coup de grace: “Admit Johnson’s principles, take his pedantic orthography for the standard, let it be closely adhered to in future, and the slow changes in the pronunciation of our national tongue, will in time make as great a difference between our written and spoken language, as there is between the pronunciation of the present English and German. The spelling will be no more a guide to the pronunciation, than the orthography of the German or Greek. This event is actually taking place, in consequence of the stupid opinion, advanced by Johnson and other writers, and generally embraced by the nation.”91
But in order to understand this dispute properly, it is crucial to recognize where the two lexicographers agree. To begin with, they were in total agreement on the nature of the problem: “It has been observed by all writers on the English language,” wrote Webster, “that the orthography or spelling of words is very irregular”; Johnson, of course, was the most famous of those “writers on the English language.”92 And they agreed on the source of this problem: apart from the more general fact of the “changes to which the pronunciation is liable” in any language, the principal cause in the case of English particularly, writes Webster, is its “mixture of different languages.”93 Johnson, as we have already seen, had acknowledged the same problem, but Webster put a much finer point on the various linguistic strains competing for dominance within English.
In a section of Dissertation I on “The History of the English Language,” Webster accounts for the hybridity of modern English by narrating its development.94 His linguistic history is an essentially agonistic one, moving from conquest to conquest in order to identify some of the key moments of linguistic incursion, incorporation, and transformation, including the Roman invasion of Britain around the beginning of the “Christian era,”95 which superimposed Latin on top of the “native Celtic language”96 that he calls the “primitive” language of Britain; the fifth-century invasion of Britain by Saxons from the North, whose dialect of the Teutonic language replaced the “jargon of Celtic and Roman”97 and formed the true basis of modern English; the Norman Conquest in 1066, which introduced Norman French into British culture, especially in polite society and at Court;98 and King Edward III’s 1362 Statute of Pleading, which ordered the English vernacular to be used to plead all cases in court, but establishing Latin (rather than French) as the official language for recording legal proceedings. For better or worse, “our present English” emerged from this history as essentially a mixture of “the Saxon, the Norman French and the Latin.”99 In the appendix to the Dissertations, Webster focuses on the orthographic chaos this polyglot composition has created: “when words have been introduced from a foreign language into the English, they have generally retained the orthography of the original, however ill adapted to express the English pronunciation.”100 Here of course, Webster’s account of the problem, which is substantially the same as Johnson’s, has already begun to make the case for his own solution, which famously departs from Johnsonian spellings by substituting more definite-sounding characters for less definite-sounding ones wherever possible, and eliminating unsounded letters entirely, in order
