The Dictionary Wars: The American Fight over the English Language – Peter Martin

There is a lot of stupidity about the differences between American English and British English, and it works out to mostly a lot of hot air from blowhards who react emotionally, often to a notion that works out to little more than an emotional argument. If you want to get rid of those notions, look into The Prodigal Tongue by Lynne Murphy.

The Dictionary Wars is a slightly different perspective on this. It goes back to Early US history, and how many Americans felt the need to have differentiations within the language so that it is distinct from the England the US had recently gotten their independence from. It was, at least initially, a matter of establishing much needed patriotism and cultural distinction.

The narrative follows the story of Noah Webster (as in Merriam-Webster dictionary), and how he was massively influential to this end, although the revisions he imagined were significantly deeper than what we have no. He did this all when Dictionaries themselves were still a new idea, and the printing and publishing industry were still in their infancy. Webster is seemingly as responsible for the changes between American and British English as he isn’t. He had some wild ideas about spelling reform, and many of them are pointed out in this book. We should be somewhat grateful that the man did not get his way.

The belief at the time was that having a national language is important to the notion of national identity, and while this notion is still alive and well today (I think of those people who promote local dialects over regional Italian dialects, for instance), it seems backwards to me that this argument be used to suggest changes to a language, but that seems to be the case. America always does seem to strive to be unique.

If this facet of historical linguistic is something you find interesting, then pick this book up. For me personally it is always interesting to see to what extent debates people consider contemporary are in actual fact hundreds of years old, and I got a pretty good chuckle that even back then people were going on about the descriptive v prescriptive nature of languages.