Webster, the self-styled grammarian who egotistically claimed for himself the role of “prophet of language to the American people,” was by far the most hostile to British interference in the development of the American language. Unless Johnson were toppled from his perch as the sage of the English language, he argued, America could remain hostage to British English deep into the 19th century. Jefferson led the charge by declaring war against Samuel Johnson’s famous Dictionary of the English Language, which continued to reign supreme for a century after its publication in 1755. On the part of the more zealous American patriots like Thomas Jefferson and Noah Webster, the goal was national unity fostered by a conviction that Americans now ought to own and possess their own language. Independence, it was felt by many, was a cultural as well as political matter that could never be complete without Americans taking pride in their own language. Why, after trampling upon the honour of our country, and representing it as little better than a land of barbarism – why, we say, perpetually trample also upon the very grammar of our language? … Freely, good sir, will we forgive all your attacks, impotent as they are illiberal, upon our national character but for the future, spare – O spare, we beseech you, our mother-tongue!” Even Thomas Jefferson found himself on the receiving end of an avalanche of British mockery, as The London Magazine in 1787 raged against his propensity to coin Americanisms: “For shame, Mr. “Here then is the ruination of our classic English tongue,” mourned the British engineer, John Mactaggart. ![]() Frances Trollope, mother of the novelist Anthony Trollope, was disgusted by “strange uncouth phrases and pronunciation” when she travelled in America in 1832. “Their language will become as independent of England, as they themselves are,” wrote Jonathan Boucher, an English clergyman living in Maryland. Prophets of doom flourished the English language in America was going to disappear. The British cringed over new American accents, coinages and vulgarisms. ![]() “I have heard in this country,” he wrote in 1781, “in the senate, at the bar, and from the pulpit, and see daily in dissertations from the press, errors in grammar, improprieties and vulgarisms which hardly any person of the same class in point of rank and literature would have fallen into in Great Britain.” Among the Americanisms he said he heard everywhere were the use of “every” instead of “every one” and “mad” for “angry.” He particularly disliked “this here” or “that there.” Although he greatly admired America and Americans, the expatriate Scottish churchman John Witherspoon, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and member of Congress, had no taste for the language he heard cropping up in all walks of life in the country. New American words were springing up seemingly out of nowhere, and the British had no clue what many of them meant. British ridicule of American ways of speaking became a vitriolic and crowded sport in the 18th and 19th centuries.
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