The Adventure of English - Episode 5 English in America -

BBC Documentary

This was the Newfoundland. To the first settlers’ eyes, this was a vast and
it seemed an empty space, and yet/that is because of their first determined
steps onto this soil nearly four hundred years ago that English would one
day speak(s) for America.
This is Plymouth Rock: it is literally the foundation stone of modern
America; this is the very spot where the Pilgrim Fathers landed in New
England in November 1620; they came on the Mayflower, they were
religious separatists and they were here to create a new community where
they could worship as they wished. They bound themselves to another, the
Mayflower Compact, swearing to found a colony for the glory of God and
the advancement of the Christian faith. They were, above all, people who
lived by the word of God in English, they came from a hardline Puritan
religious tradition, which had been persecuted and reviled: they had been
tortured and murdered for their faith in an English-language Bible, and to
them, that Bible, that language, meant life itself. They were not the first
people on the continent: Native Americans had been here for 30 thousand
years and the woods and the plains rang the sounds of hundreds of their
languages. When the Pilgrim Fathers looked around them, instead of a
New Eden they saw what they described as a “hideous” and “desolate
wilderness, full of threat and danger”. And for the season, it was winter
and they even know that the winter of that country know them to be sharp
and violent, and subject to cruel and fierce storms; dangerous to travel to
unknown/known places much more to search an unknown coast. Besides,
what could they see but a desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild
men, what multitudes there might be of them, they knew not? They were
cold, hungry and pray to sickness, nearly half of the company 0f 144 died
that first winter.
It was not going to be easy to turn their oath into reality and to give
English its toehold on the land.
The Pilgrim Fathers had one advantage though: they had come here to stay
and they wanted their settlement to be English; New England they were
call it but true England might have been more accurate. Their first move
was to build a settlement recreated here, Plymouth Plantation, they lived in
terror of the supposedly wild men in the wilderness outside, but before
they could even do that they were to owe their survival to one of those
wild men and an extraordinary encounter with the English language.
So “welcome” was the first word spoken by natives that the Pilgrim
Fathers understood. The man who had come out of the wilderness had
picked some words from the English fishermen who worked the coast.
Even more extraordinary he was able to introduce them to this quantum or
Squanto, as he became known: he is the most important man in this
chapter of the adventure of English. English sailors had kidnapped him 15
years before, taken to London where he was trying to be a guide and
interpreter, and learn English, and then he managed to escape on a return.
To the colonists, it must have seemed like a miracle: he was the most
unlikely of all coincidences that they should have settled near the tribal
home of the man who was almost certainly the only English speaker for
hundreds of miles. But the extraordinary good fortune the whole history of
America might have been different for Squanto saved the colony and who
knows gave America the English language.
Squanto taught the settlers how to farm the unfamiliar land and he got
them through that terrible first New England winter. It was almost certain
that without him sickness and hunger would have wiped out the settlers.
Against all odds, the English colony had been saved by an encounter with
the English language. The adventurer had planted its roots in American
soil.
The settlers had a new country full of new places and geographical
features, new animal and plants, they needed words to describe them and
occasionally they turned to the native languages. “Skunk” (= puzzola) had
derived from the local language, “Squash” for the variety of pumpkin
grown here; “squaw” (=young woman) and “papoose” (=young child),
“wigwam”, were all early borrowing from the local language.
But what’s remarkable is not that these words enter the English vocabulary
but how few of them there were. For centuries English had been borrowing
words from Latin, Danish, French and every other language it had come
into contact with but there, faced with a richness of an entire continent, the
English borrowed words not in thousands but in handfuls. The writings of
the founding Fathers here run to thousands of pages but contain less than a
dozen borrowed Indian words. So why are there so few?
In a strange new country, the English settlers may have taken great comfort
in making the objects around them at least sound familiar: Falmouth,
Yarmouth, Boston, Cambridge, Billericay, Bedford, Taunton, they were
trying to recreate the English shires in the American wilderness.
And perhaps there was desperation here as well as determination. The true
language, their own they would survive as they had in the old country.
They put a wall between themselves and the native world. In the end, we
must conclude that they were here to impose their habits and their
language on the land, not to be changed by it.
Words, god’s good English words were at the heart of the lives of the
settlers her. Improper speech was a crime: blasphemy, slander/slur,
cursing, lying, perjury, railing, scolding, swearing, threatening, treason and
defying authority were all offenses. The colonists were trying to control
the language and this set the pattern for their teaching of English. As the
New England grew this was how they did it, with a New England primer.
From the very beginning, Americans took immense care overt the correct
teaching of English. It was taught well and in a way that was highly
religious and this set the tone as English spread. It wasn’t going English’s
way though; other European powers are adjusting for influence in the new
world. Delaware, where a Swedish settlement had taken root was
conquered in 1655 by the Dutch admiral Peter Stuyvesant, and
incorporated into the Dutch New Netherlands. His base, New Amsterdam,
was conquered by the British in 1664 and renamed New York. There was a
rivalry with the French which turned into war; when it finally ended in
1763, Britain was given sell claim to the east of the continent and took a
grip on the north in Canada. Even the Spanish colony of Florida came
under British rule.
But perhaps the real edge that gave English a stronger presence that other
European languages came not through the gun but to the “pleasure”: the
Spanish on the whole concentrated on sending armies and priests to the
new world and taking gold. The French were interested in sending fur
trappers and trading with the natives. It was only the English who
continued the spirit of the Pilgrim Fathers and came to stay: persistence
and sheer weight of numbers eventually ensured that English, not Spanish,
Dutch or French would be the language heard from the Atlantic coast to
the Appalachian Mountains.
But as English spread, it also started to develop a character of its own to
drift away from the language spoken in England. There was already the
beginnings of the tomato problem. In some cases, meaning shifted; the
English “Shop” had become an American “Store”; “Lumber” meant
“rubbish” in the old country, for Americans “Lumber” was and still is “Cut
timber”; and “Hall came to me to transport in a vehicle not as in England
to move by force”. American English was also developing its own sound.
The first settlers had come from various parts of England, each with its
own regional accent but no single accent dominated as they talked to each
other; the variety very quickly became a blend.
To this day there’s only a tiny variation accents across America compared
to Britain and the further west you go, the more true that become. By/But
the middle of the 18th century, the absence of regional pronunciations and
dialect words has been noted approvingly by the upper class British
visitors, who regarded all such variations as vulgar. In 1764 Lord Gordon
wrote “the propriety of language here surprised me much. The English
tongue being spoken by all ranks in a degree of purity and perfection
surpassing any but the polite part of London it’s a sentiment that would be
repeated again and again, that the Americans didn’t just speak good
English, they spoke it better than the English themselves.
It wasn’t only where language was concerned that the colonists began to
stand up to the English; tension was growing between them and the
Crown. In 1775 here on this bridge at Concord, in Massachusetts, 75
Americans volunteers confronted 700 British troops. One of them fired,
and that have been called, with a touch of hyperbole, “the shot heard round
the world”. Revolution had begun. A year later, 13 colonies declared their
independence and did so imperfect what we might call “classical English”.
John Adams, who had become the 2nd president of the US rates a future in
which all Americans spoke the language equally well, in which eloquence
would be the way to high office and no one will be excluded because their
speech betrayed inferior origins: it was a birth of a democratic ideal that it
is still part of the American myth that anyone can become a president and
everyone would have a presidential recovery and accent. This was no
longer the King’s English but perhaps the people’s English, and they
wanted to set it in stone.
This is another foundation of America: not a rock but a little blue book. It
was written by a schoolteacher called Noah Webster. Trough the last years
of the 18th century and the 19th century, it was sold in countless general
stores like this, stacked among the tins of molasses and sacks of beans, the
snake’s oil, paraffin lamps and shovels. It soon became known “The
American spelling book” or “the blue-back speller”. It sold a 14 cnets a
copy and in its first hundred years it sold 60 million copies, more than any
other book in American history with the exception of the Bible. This is one
of the most influential book in the history of English.
The hundreds of words and model sentences in Webster’s book have been
repeated by millions of children on countless occasions. And the practices
thought have changed the sound of the language. To this days, Americans
tend to pronounce words with emphasis than English and in particular that
the clipped vowels of the English aristocracy, whose influence Webster
wanted to oppose. Where the English say “cemetery”, the Americans have
“cemetery”. But pronunciation wasn’t all that he influences. It was from
this book that Americans learn how to spell. Correct spelling came to be
seen as a standard of education and civilization throughout America and it
still is today and the spelling bee became part of the life of every town and
village. Webster’s book standardized spelling across America and he also
tried to improve on inconsistent and illogical spelling. Under Webster’s
system “honour”, “colour” or similar words lost their –u; double letters
were reduced to single ones like the –l in “traveler” or the –g in “wagon”; -
er replaced our –re in “center” and “theater”; “defence” with –c became
“defense” with –s; “axe” lost its –e. England had made the language but
America had begun to claim its future.
By the 1820s East Coast America was presenting itself confidently as the
guardian of English, meeting up vulgarity and fashion. There is even a
cheeky motion proposed in the House of Representatives to invite the sons
of the English aristocracy to come to America to learn how to speak
properly. Americans felt they kept the English language pure for 200 years,
so pure that they were still using words in/that English had dropped: words
like “greenhorn”, “burly”, “deft”, “scant”, “talented” and “likely”, “sick”
to mean ill not just nauseous; they say “fall” (= autumn) just as the English
did once. And when Americans say “I guess” they’re using a formal word
that would have been familiar to Chaucer “yes”, amd they denied that they
were changing the language. When Webster published his groundbreaking
American Dictionary in 1828, he claimed that it contained less than 50
terms that were new to the country.
Here was America claiming to preserve English in all its past glories, to
have erected a barrier against change and corruption but they could no
more exclude these natural developments in the language than the first
colonialists could hide behind a stockade from the world beyond.
John Adams had predicted that America would drive the English language
into a great future; his vision was prophetic but the language would be
very different from the measured East Coast tones that Adams had known.
American English was going west, and going wild.
In 1804 the US purchased Louisiana from the French for 3 cents an acre
and more than doubled the size of the country overnight. These lands were
nothing less than the whole American heartland, the Great Plains and
Prairies drained by the Mississippi River and its tributaries like the
Missouri, Ohio and Tennessee, it stretched all the way from New Orleans
in the south to the Rocky Mountains and what is today the Canadian
border in the north. Jefferson the president sent an expedition of 45 men
under the leadership of captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark into
the unknown interior, in search of a navigable river route to the West
Coast. Lewis and Clark’s expedition became one of the epic journeys in
the history of exploration: it started in St. Louis, on the great junction
where the Mississippi and the Missouri rivers come together. Lewis and
Clark were army trained frontiersmen, backwoods specialists, and because
of Jefferson insisted on daily journals being kept, the expedition was
recorded not in a Puritan language of faith nor in Webster’s urbane prose
but in a practical language of frontier. This is crucial because it marks the
beginning not only of the opening of the continent but the decline of the
East Coast grip on American English. In England “the creek” is a tidal
inlet while in America it’s broadened its meaning to cover all manner of
streams adjectives turning to nouns (“rapid” = “rapids”); and “bluff” was
coined her to describe flat cliffs; “rattle-snake” was another descriptive
combinations of English words as was “cotton-wood”; and “el” is one of
the words imported from England and applied to a different beast;
“buffalo” though had been in English words for over two centuries
imported from a Portuguese book about China.
Lewis and Clark’s journal include not Webster’s 50 words peculiar to
America but over 2.000 of them: most of them are names of objects, a
great catalog of flora and fauna and man-made items: words like
“hickory”, hominy”, “maize”, “moccasin”, “moose”, “opossum”, “pecan,
“persimmon”, “toboggah” derived from native languages as well as more
obscure words like “kinnikinnick”, “tamarack”. Others are English
carnages with descriptive properties of their own: the “whippoorwill” (=a
bird named by the sound of its call), “mocking-bird” (=by its habit
imitating other bird songs). There are hundreds of names made by by
combining existing English words from “black bear”, “bottom-land” to
“sugar maple”, “timber land”. This was just the beginning.
In the lake/wake of Lewis and Clark, the Great Rivers became America’s
super highways. Once, this key side in St. Louis, the Gateway to the West
hustled with scores of paddle steamers taking new settlers to the new
lands. This was the hub of the frontier in the 1830s and 40s. the very word
“immigrant” is an American invention: vast migrations if people had never
been a huge factor in the old world but it was the defining experience of
the new one.
New settlers brought new linguistic energies. The Pilgrim Fathers had
come primarily from the South and East of England but 2 centuries on,
Americans were as likely to come from Scotland escaping from the
aftermath of the Highland Clearances or from Ulster, often driven out by
famine, high rents, religious intolerance or simply looking for the chance
to make a new and better life. As many as half of the population of Ulster
crossed the Atlantic and many kept moving west, they became a major part
of the rich mix of people who were creating a new American country and a
new American voice.
Scots and Irish brought new words and expressions to America: the
Scottish verb “scoon” (= to skim over water, took to the sea as a new type
of ship, the “scooner”); the Irish “cabin” (=to name the typical frontier
dwelling). They also brought “dead” (= as in dead straight) and the similar
use of plumb and right came to America through use by both scots and
Irish as did the habit of sticking an –a on the front of verbs like “a going”.
The old French process too is apparent everywhere along the Mississippi.
It’s there in the place names from New Orleans, Baton Rouge and
Lafayette in the South, to St. Louis, Cage Girardeau and Belleville further
north and towns ending in the French suffix –ville but everywhere:
Edwardsville, Greenville, Jacksonville Clarksville. The French gave us the
name of one of the great Western institutions, the hotel. America took who
were the French had given to a grand private house for a municipal
building and turned and turned it into the name of a new invention, a place
for all of people , far grander in ambitions and the Inns and taverns had
offered rest to travelers in England. And their clients were businessmen. In
18th century England merchants had been described as businessmen but
now the word took on its modern American meaning, the mover and
shaker in the worlds of finance and expansion and opportunity.
The country was on the move and on the make. The river Team (?) with
poor migrants rednecks have got their name from away their necks were
burnt by the Sun as they bent to work in the fields, because they couldn’t
afford the steamboat fur they traveled on rafts which they steered with us
called “rifts” so the were known as the “riffraffs”. On board like this one
richer travelers were in turn regarded as “highfalutin” because of the high
fluted smokestacks that carried soot and cinders well way from the those
passengers’.
Gambling was a favorite activity among the riverboat passengers, passed
the buck and the buck stops here both come from such card games. The
buck was a buck-horn-handled knife passed round to show who was
Delia/deal and they’re just at the start of the phrases that American
gamblers gave to the language in the middle of the 19th century. Deal
became part of phrases like “square deal”, “new deal”, “no big deal” or
“I’ll raise your bid you bet”, “put up or shut up”, “you have an ace up your
sleeve”, “I’ll you bluff we’re all first heard around the card table”,
“someone throws in his hand but you keep a poker face”.
Gambling and drinking spread across the West, no surprise. This was a
very different frontier from the original one at Plymouth and nothing
added more slang words and phrases to the language than alcohol.
Barroom and “Saloon” both entered the language soon followed by
“bartender” and “set him up”; measures like “a snifter” and “a finger” all
came from the bars of America. “Bootlegging” comes from the practice of
hiding a flat bottle of whiskey in the leg of a boot to be sold illegally to the
natives. There were literally hundreds of terms for drunk: even before the
Revolution, Benjamin Franklin listed 2.029 of them minted in America
included “he’s ate a toad and a half a breakfast”, “his head is full of bees”,
“he sees the bears”, “he sees 2 moons”, “he’s got the Indian vapors”.
“teetotal” was another word that came into the language from the Irish
settlers along with “speakeasy”, “shillelagh” and “smithereens”.
Westward expansion had long been the cause of land disputes between the
settlers and the natives, and once they left the Great River for the wagon
route like the Oregon and the Santa Fe trails contact and often friction
between migrants and Indians increased. Many of the Indian words that
had already come into English reflected this antagonism: “sculpt”, a good
old English noun had become a far more threatening verb as early as 1693.
“Tomahawk” was another early addition to the language, so were
“warpath”, “war dance” and “long knives” (= an Indian word for white
men) and “firewater” (= the term they gave to alcohol). Phrases like “no-
can-do” or “no long time no see” are literal translations from Indian
languages. The word “grave” to describe Indians warriors were certainly
inherited from the French and buk slang for a dollar derives from
“buckskin” (= the standard unit of trade between Europeans and Indians).
Conflicts with the natives was just one of the hazards faced by the people
who went west; every one of them had an epic journey to tell of the
hardships imposed by distance and the weather, everyone had carved a
new life out of a landscape made on a scale unknown in Europe. They
chose new American heroes for themselves, through whose stories they
could distill their own experiences and they chose them and told tales
about them on a grand scale. The most famous of all straddled the gap
between fact and fiction: Davy Crockett. He was, as we know from the
song, born in a mountaintop in Tennessee. He was the son of a veteran of
the Revolution, he became a congressman, famous for his plane speaking
and he died defending the Alamo in Texas in 1836, he was as American as
they came and he became a legend: the king of the wild frontier, the hero
of a series of paper-bound books telling exaggerated stories about him.
This fictionalized Crockett was the first great exponent of a style of speech
as big as the country called “tall talk”, when he opened his mouth he made
a first shank/shake. Confidence, ornate, baroque words, shebang, shinding
and slumgullion, the language was hunky-dory, rambunctious,
splendiferous. Its figures whose in speech and that habit of coming up with
vivid verbal images has left us with many that figure in everyday talk: “I
might sit on the fence and dodge the issue” “I’ll knuckle down and make
the fur fly”, “I’ll go the whole hog and knock the spots out of you and
you’ll be a goner”, “face the music you’re barking at the wrong tree”.
Within 2 generations of the opening of Louisiana, the American language
had been reborn: no legislator’s city in a library in all of the eastern states
could have hoped to arrest its exuberant progress. It’s a fact that the
biggest author of the biggest author of the language is known. This was the
democratic language that Adams had foreseen but democracy meant that
everyone threw in their two cents worth and the old conservatives values
were trampled in the movement West.
Gold Fever brought tens of thousands of people from the eastern states and
now let us home were loaded with new words. “Prospector” was one they
wrote about how they staked their claim about how they hope the gold dust
would pan out of the water that they were sipping, while they would strike
it lucky or strike it rich and brews a “bonanza”, which came from the
Spanish word for “fair weather”. For the first time a surefire investment
became known colloquially as a “goldmine”.
The Gold Rush gave us 2 words that became far more famous in the 20th
century, when a certain Levi Strauss started to make hard wearing clothes
for miners, use the cloth called “jean Faustian” originally made in Genoa.
Levi’s and jeans have been as Americans as Stars and Stripes ever since.
The arrival of the railroad was what really opened the country and that
gave to the West its most characteristic vocabulary.
It was a certain Joseph McCoy who had the idea of driving cattle
over/often hundreds of miles to railheads so they could be exported to the
markets back east previously, they’d only been butchered for local use
overnight. McCoy became immensely rich, so rich that other envious souls
used to try to pass themselves off as the man who had such a simple but a
brilliant idea. He developed the habit of introducing himself to stranger as
the real McCoy. He gave to the world a catchphrase and he also gave it the
“cowboy”.
English had known the word “cowboy” since the 18th century but now it
took on a new currency in a new meaning. McCoy’s brainwave turned the
cattle industry into a license to print money, and the cowboy into a national
icon. Cowboys had been working near the Mexican border for years,
picking up Spanish words which now drove north with: “ranch” comes
from the Spanish as does “corral” where the horses or cattle were penned;
“Mustang”, “Burro”, the “chaps”, “sombrero” and “Pancho”, the
“Stampede”, the “rodeo where they drove the cattle together. All came
from Spanish.
The language of the West has become the standard idea of what American
English is like, completely overtaking the proper speech of the East, amd
the man who is virtually single-handedly responsible for this was one of
the greatest showman and booster of all of them. He was William F. Cody
Buffalo Bill, and he chose to be buried on the hill above Denver where the
Rockies rise steeply out of the Great Plains. He turned the frontier
experience into an epic entertainment: Buffalo Bill’s Wild West,
extravaganza featured live elk and Buffalo real Indians attacking a
stagecoach, sharp shooting displays, musical cowboys in spotless outfits
that have never seen a cattle drive and the reenactment of the Custer’s last
stand at Little Bighorn, in which Buffalo Bill himself arrived on the scene
just too late to save the day.
It was nonsense and it was a smash across America and Europe for 30
years, long after Indian Resistance had ended and the last Buffalo herd had
been massacred. He created a vote for the language of the West and began
a line of Western myth that kept that language alive through countless
books and films. And the dreams of luxury and optimism became an
enduring fantasy of a Western Eldorado and Eden somewhere over the
rainbow or at least the next county line. It’s all there in a little song about
the “hobos”, another good frontier word who rode the railways west in
search of their own American dream (=> Big Road Candy Mountain is
playing).
But there was another group of American who’d never been invited to
show that dream: the Black Slave population of the South, and they spoke
about their experiences in a very different language. Sullivan’s Island is a
little patch of land in Charleston Harbor off the coast of South Carolina. It
was the first taste of America for hundreds of thousands of immigrants in
the 18th and 19th centuries, but the immigrants who came through here
hadn’t chosen the American dream of a better life: they had been sold
into/for slavery. Sullivan’s Islands was a holding pen for imported slaves:
between half and two-thirds of them entered America here before being
sold on mainly to work on the cotton plantations. There’s no Statue of
Liberty here, just this plaque erected in the 1999 to commemorate their
arrival. They came here from the countries of West Africa and form
plantations in the Caribbean. Slaves who spoke different languages were
put together on the same sea voyage here to stop plotting together to seize
control of the ship: so one ship and on shore there was a great fable of
languages. The slaves had to find a tongue in which to talk one another and
to their masters: it was English, but very heavily influenced by African
ways of talking. The language that these people are talking is Gullah,
which survived as a distinctive variety of English here around the South
Carolina Islands. It was taught by many people to be the closest we can get
to the kind of language that would have been spoken by the slaves in the
18th and early 19th centuries, and this is the origin of the modern Afro-
American vernacular. Once slaves reached the plantation, they lived in
cabins like these beside the main house. Here many words that came into
Gullah from African languages have their way into standard English. For
example: “banana”( which comes from a Wolof language spoken in
Senegal), “voodoo” ( in the language spoken by the Yoruba people),
“zebra”, “gorilla”, “chimpanzee”, or the musical terms “samba”,
“mambo”. African compounds words were translated giving English terms
like “bad-mouth” and “nitty-gritty” originated as a term for the grit that
accumulated in the bilges of slave ships. As well as Gullah employ some
grammatical features that differ from standard English. Phrases like these
(pls don’t ask me to write down the whole damn thing I’m tired) have a
rich and economical expressiveness. In other ways, Gullah and other black
Englishes have stripped down their grammar: they drop verbs like “is”, use
“don’t” where Standard English say “doesn’t” and omit the apostrophe and
–s that Standard English uses as a sign of ownership. This kind of
simplification is common when languages meet and emerges of/a new
hybrid: it’s exactly what happened when Saxs and Angles dealt with each
other in England in the 9th century and changing this grammar forever. In
this case, the changes were mistakenly taken by many white observers as
evidence that black speakers just hadn’t got the intelligence to speak the
language properly, that they were simply trying and failing to copy white
speech. In fact, they were adding to the language.
Black speakers had their own tradition of performances that showed just
how flexible and expressive their language was. They told stories and
they’re are still told today. But folktales weren’t the only thing that fueled
dreams of freedom. With English, the slaves had learned Christianity.
White society thought it would teach obedience. The bible became central
to the lives of the slaves as it has been to the first settlers in New England,
but the message they found in it wasn’t obedience: it was liberty. Once
again the bible in English became the book of Freedom.
By the first decade of the 19th century the American states in the North had
abolished slavery. When the blacks of the South sang “Steal away” or
“One more river to cross” they were introducing new words and sounds
into the language and they’re also singing not just about the next world but
about this one, about the hope of escaping to the north and to freedom. The
chains of slavery were rusting, and on 12 April 1861, in the early hours of
the morning, shots were fired at Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. This
was the start of the American Civil War, which the North of course was to
win. 4 years later, Confederate forces abandoned Shultz. The Union army
marched in unopposed, they freed the slaves. Promised in the language of
their spirituals had come good for the black people. The American Civil
War gave us the phrase “Hold the fort”. The first people to hear anything
on the grapevine were in the southern states where army telegraph lines
strong in the trees became so knotted that they were said “to look like
grapevines”. There was plenty of resistance to the new order. The Ku Klux
Klan (or KKK), who apparently derived their name from the Greek word
kyklos [cerchio] and klan [clan] were formed in the aftermath of the war.
They gave English the word “bulldozer” (originally, a bulldoze meaning
2a dose large enough for a bull”), it was a dose of whipping and it was
administered to black people often fatally. Words like this one are a savage
reminder that the end of the war didn’t bring the end of segregation and
prejudice. In theory, blacks in their language were free to mix with whites
but in practice it was only the 20th century that the mixing of the
vocabularies was really began. Just like in the plantation houses, white
speakers started to hate black speech.
Even after the Civil War, very few white people treated black language
with any interest or respect. One who did was a man who’d grown up on
the Mississippi and was fascinated by all of its talk, black and white.
Luckily for us, he was a genius. When he made writing his profession, he
chose as his pen name a call that he’d heard on the river Bergman used to
sound a depth of 2 thousand: Mark Twain. The river runs through Twain’s
greatest book, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It’s set in the years
before the Civil War and it’s the story of a young boy who escapes what
he disdainfully calls the civilizing influence of his aunt Sally. Huck takes
to the river on a raft in the company of an escaped slave called Jim. In his
introduction, Twain told his readers that he’d taken great pains to capture
the different dialects of the rivers: “a southerner talks music”, he once
wrote; and when Huck Finn described life on the river he found its
melody.
English has come a long way from the sober and sacred language that the
Puritans at first brought to New England. It has changed its sound and its
character. Words were no longer solely vehicles of God’s truth.
There are also words defended (?): the East Coast wasn’t yet ready to
relinquish its self-appointed role as guardian of the language. Like here, at
Concord, the cradle of the Revolution, the civilized and Salas who sat on
the library committee banned Huckleberry Finn for its vernacular
language: it was, they said, wrote in a rough, ignorant dialect and there
was a systematic use of bad grammar and unemployment of inelegant
expressions. Though the library committee might call Twain’s language
vulgar, it couldn’t ban the vigor of English that had grown up away from
the East Coast American English. Huck’s closing words defied their
attempts to control it.
The vigor continued to increase in the late 19th century. New waves of
immigrants flooded into America: Germans, Italians, Greeks, Russians,
Jews, for all across Europe they came, to a land promised to give a new
home to the tired poor huddled masses, longing to breathe free. To become
American was their dream and for most all of them, that meant that they
wanted their children to speak the language of the new country. They
would power the adventure of English into the 20th century.