Literature, American Style. Ezra Tawil
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 to bring orthography in line with pronunciation. Unless the language were to be allowed to remain in its current state of chaos, Webster wrote the following year (in a preface testing out his new spelling scheme), “there iz no alternativ.”101
But where Webster most profoundly departs from Johnson was not in the particulars of his orthographic solutions, but rather in his determination to “solve” the problem at all. Webster was completely committed to what he saw as the lexicographer’s responsibility to “remove causes of error,”102 not just to identify them. By contrast, what is most striking about Johnson is how little he actually attempted to do about the fundamental linguistic problems that both of them understood so similarly. “Our inflections,” writes Johnson at one point in the Plan, “are by no means constant, but admit of numberless irregularities, which in this Dictionary will be diligently noted.”103 Not corrected, mind you, but just “diligently noted.”104 And so when it comes to spelling, it can be surprising how much Johnson is willing to accommodate his dictionary to an orthographic status quo that he describes so pejoratively: “The present usage of spelling, where the present usage can be distinguished, will, therefore, in this work, be generally followed; yet there will be often occasion to observe, that it is in itself inaccurate, and tolerated rather than chosen.”105 From the perspective of a true language reformer like Webster, Johnson’s willingness to tolerate the intolerable must have seemed a scandalous abdication of lexicographical duty. Not content to say, as Johnson did, that English spelling “is too inconstant to be reduced to rules,” nor that it is simply “not in our power to have recourse to any established laws of speech,” Webster absolutely refuses the underlying assumption that comprehensive reform was impracticable or impossible. However variable they may seem, Webster insists, “it does not follow that pronunciation and orthography cannot be rendered in a great measure permanent.”106 It just “requires some labor to adjust the parts and reduce them to order.”107 Where Johnson saw it as his job to make a note of irregularities, Webster determines to regulate. Where Johnson proposed to “embalm”108 the language in order to arrest its decay, Webster believes he can actually revive the patient.
Johnson’s reluctance to take corrective linguistic action was a principled lexicographical philosophy he had first announced in his Plan: “The chief rule which I propose to follow is, to make no innovation without a reason sufficient to balance the inconvenience of change; and such reasons I do not expect often to find.”109 This conservative aversion to anything that smacks of reform is fueled by Johnson’s conviction that “all change is of itself an evil, which ought not to be hazarded but for evident advantage; and as inconstancy is in every case a mark of weakness, it will add nothing to the reputation of our tongue.”110 The irregularity of English, it is true, is a form of “inconstancy” intrinsic to the nature of the language; but to move too hastily to innovate would