A History of the American People

and amended entirely in standard English, if anything with a slight touch of archaism, though
spelling was already diverging.
In 1783-5 Noah Webster (1758-1843), a Yale-trained lexicographer and philologist from
Connecticut, produced A Grammatical Institute of the English Language, the first part of which
was extracted to form his Spelling Book, which gave standard American variations of English
spelling forms for use in schools. In 1790 he produced his Rudiments of English Grammar, the
first book to challenge the linguistic hegemony of Britain, in which he argued Now is the time, and this is the country, in which we may expect success, in attempting changes favorable to language, science and government.' But he discovered the hard way that it was easier to turn America from a monarchy into a republic than to force systematic language and spelling reform on a stubborn people who spoke as they felt. The same year he produced a volume of essays in his reformed spelling:essays and Fugitive Peeces ritten at various times ... as will appeer by
their dates and subjects.' Readers laughed at him. Another language reformer, William Thornton,
urged, in Cadmus, or a Treatise on the Elements of a Written Language (Philadelphia 1793),
addressed to the American people: You have corrected the dangerous doctrines of European powers, correct now the language you have imported ... The AMERICAN LANGUAGE will thus be as distinct as its government, free from all the follies of unphilosophical fashion and resting upon truth as its only regulator.' He then gave the text in his new spelling-system. Practical Americans dismissed it as gibberish and went on talking, and changing, the English language as they had learned it from their parents. Americans were immensely resourceful in making these changes, adapting, translating, inventing, and knocking about words to suit their needs and tastes. Some of these early neologisms were from the French, both from Canada and Louisiana: depot, rapids, prairie, shanty, chute, cache, crevasse. Some were from the Spanish of Florida and the Gulf: mustang (1808), ranch (1808), sombrero (1823), patio (1827), corral (1829), and lasso (1831). Americans resurrected obsolete English words like talented and invented ones like obligate. They adopted, for instance, the German words dumm, which became dumb, stupid. Words from their new political customs appeared: mass meeting, caucus, settlers' words like lot and squatter. The Lewis-Clark and other expeditions introduced a new crop: portage, raccoon, groundhog, grizzly, backtrack, medicine man, huckleberry, war party, running-time, overnight, overall, rattlesnake, bowery, and moose. Variant meanings were given to old English terms: snag, stone, suit, bar, brand, bluff, fix, hump, knob, creek, and settlement. Then there was the wonderful fertility of the Americans in coining new phrases and amalgams: keep a stiff upper lip (1815 ), fly off the handle (1825), get religion-an important one, that-in 1826, knockdown (1827), stay on the fence (1828), in cahoots (1829), horse-sense (1832), and barking up the wrong tree (1833), plus less datable novelties: take on, cave in, flunk out, stave off, let on, hold on. As early as the 1820s Americans were trying to get the hang of a thing and insisting there's no two ways about it. The American thirst added many terms: cocktail (1806), barroom (1807), mint julep (1809), a Kentucky Breakfast (1822), defined asthree
cocktails and a chaw of terbacka,' and a long drink (1828). At varying speeds most of these new
words and expressions crossed the Atlantic. By the time Webster came to produce his An
American Dictionary of the English Language in two thick volumes in 1828, he was able to list
5,000 words not hitherto included in English dictionaries, including many Americanisms, and
using definitions which Americans, rather than the British, recognized. He revised this standard
work in 1840 to include 70,000 words instead of the original 38,000 and, suitably amended from