Spelling 9/11

Spelling 9/11

Webster's two-volume American Dictionary was published in 1828.

Webster considered that British English, with its weird constructions and bizarre spellings, reflected a country strangled by tradition, pedantry and privilege.

By Citizen Correspondent Bernie Griffiths , U.K.

Date Posted: 09/11/06

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This is a season of American anniversaries. The most poignant and immediate of them came today, exactly five years since that terrible morning when hijacked aircrafts smashed into the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon and the Department of Defense building in Washington. The attacks were the deadliest on US soil since Japan's assault on Pearl Harbor.
But another anniversary is also with us.

If UK and the US are two nations divided by a common language, as Shaw said, then Noah Webster is to blame.

Consider the paragraph in italics.

Should I have written World Trade Centre, not Center, and Department of Defence, not Defense? And should we be talking about Pearl Harbour, rather than Pearl Harbor? The confusion, for an English writer, may be laid at the door of one man: Noah Webster, lexicographer, teacher, journalist and patriot. He was America's equivalent of Samuel Johnson - and much else beside.

Exactly two centuries ago, in 1806, Webster published his Compendious Dictionary of the English Language. These days, we think of compendious as meaning embracing and comprehensive. But his definition was "brief, concise and summary," and his dictionary lived up to that. It measured barely six inches by four in its original edition and contained a modest 37,000 entries.

For the first time, however, it set out a specifically American version of English, even listing some 5,000 words not found in dictionaries of the time in Britain. If a single individual could be blamed for George Bernard Shaw's alleged quip that America and England were "two countries divided by a common language", it is Webster.

Though he had nothing to do with the Declaration of Independence and was not among the authors of the US constitution, Webster was a revolutionary up there with the best of them. A new country needed its own distinctive language, he believed. The Dictionary (and a speller and grammar that he published in the 1780s) were thus explicitly aimed at providing an intellectual and linguistic foundation for American nationalism.

Webster considered British English, with its weird constructions and bizarre spellings, reflected a country strangled by tradition, pedantry and privilege.