|
|
 |
|
|
We will celebrate Noah Webster's 250th birthday on October 16, 2008, but just who was this guy? Webster Dictionary - 200 Years Old From the New York Times
Published: February 12, 2006 By ADAM COHEN |
|
|
|
When Noah Webster published "A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language," purists were
horrified. Webster Americanized the British spellings in Samuel Johnson's famous dictionary, turning "defence" and "honour" into "defense" and "honor," and dropping
the "k" from "musick." Webster included new American words like "subsidize" and "caucus," and left out hoary Britishisms like "fishefy." John Quincy Adams,
the future president, was shocked by the "local vulgarisms,"and doubted that Harvard, of which he was a trustee, would ever endorse such a radical "departure from the English language."
|
|
|
|
|
|
Webster's "Compendious Dictionary," which was published 200 years ago this month, defied the skeptics to become
a success, and it was the forerunner to his much larger, and classic, 1828 "American Dictionary of the English Language." Webster is remembered today almost exclusively as America's great lexicographer, but he
was also a founding father of the first rank. The dictionaries he wrote were actually an attempt to help shape the kind of nation America would become. |
|
|
|
|
|
Webster was a brilliant polymath, in the style of Ben Franklin. He is called "the father of American
copyright law" for his successful campaign to win protection for his writings; "the first historian of epidemic disease" for his pioneering research on yellow fever; and "schoolmaster to
America" — the title of a 1936 biography — for his enormously influential spelling and reading books.His great passion, though, was politics, and he held many views that now seem surprisingly modern.
He kept religion and God out of his spelling books. He argued that the Constitution should include universal compulsory education and abolish slavery. And he helped create, in Connecticut, one of the
earliest worker's compensation systems. |
|
|
|
|
When the new nation formed, British culture was still dominant, and it was not yet clear what it meant to be American.
Webster thought it was vital to shake off "foreign manners" and build an independent national culture. "Nothing can be more ridiculous," he wrote, "than a servile imitation of the manners, the
language and the vices of foreigners." He believed that his dictionaries could contribute to this homegrown culture by reflecting the language that Americans were actually speaking. It was especially important, he
thought, for America to define its own institutions. "No person in this country will be satisfied with the English definitions of the words congress, senate and assembly, court, &c," he wrote in the
preface to the 1828 dictionary.Webster's other political purpose in writing his dictionaries was promoting national unity. He was disturbed to find, in his travels, that Southern whites, blacks, old-line
Yankees and newly arrived immigrants were in many cases literally unable to talk to each other. He believed a "federal language" could be a "band of national union." But he also knew that
linguistic efforts would not be enough. He was troubled by the sharp political divisions he saw: North vs. South, rural areas vs. cities and, above all, his Federalist Party vs. Thomas Jefferson's
Democratic-Republicans. During the bitter battles over the Embargo Act of 1807, Webster called on the parties to "renounce their present warfare, and unite on some general points of policy." The United
States has more than achieved the cultural independence Webster dreamed of. He would be amazed to see that it now not only controls its own culture, but also exports it to the world — including Britain His hopes for
national unity have proven more elusive, even though America now has the "federal language" that his dictionaries played such a large role in creating. Today's red-state-blue-state divide, and Washington's
vicious partisan battles, are an uncanny parallel of the war over the 1807 embargo. If Webster were here, he would be clamoring, as many Americans now are, for leaders willing to look beyond party affiliation. The
great wordsmith was never more eloquent than in his screeds against excessive partisanship. "The party which, while in a minority, will lick the dust to gain the ascendancy," he warned, "becomes, in
power, insolvent, vindictive and tyrannical." |
|
