William Cobbett, the successful editor of Porcupine’s Gazette in Philadelphia, who had endured just about enough of what he regarded as Webster’s self-proclaimed and bombastic authority, called him “a most gross calumniator,” “a great fool,” and a “bare-faced liar.” Many others also taunted Webster in print.Įmbittered and deeply in debt, Webster mourned that America had begun to “crumble”: “From the date of Adam, to this moment,” he ranted in the July 12, 1797, issue of his newspaper, the Minerva, “no country was ever so infested with corrupt and wicked men, as the United States … Bankrupt speculators, rich bankrupts, ‘patriotic’ Atheists … are spread over the United States … deceiving the people with lies … We see in our new Republic, the decrepitude of Vice and a free government hastening to ruin, with a rapidity without example.” He decided instead to take up an offer to edit and write a new Federalist newspaper, the American Minerva, in New York, which would undergo several name and leadership changes before an exhausted Webster severed his ties. More than anything else, he wanted to write, but he thought he might try the business world, perhaps as a book merchant in Boston: “To renounce all my literary pursuits, which are now very congenial with my habits, would not … make me unhappy,” he wrote in a letter.
He lost a good $400 (about $10,000 today) on the Dissertations, which added to his money worries.
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Read: The dictionary is telling people how to speak again By conceeling my name, the opinions of men hav been prezerved from an undu bias arizing from personal prejudices, the faults of the ritings hav been detected, and their merit in public estimation ascertained.
I very erly discuvered, that altho the name of an old and respectable karacter givs credit and consequence to hiz ritings, yet the name of a yung man iz often prejudicial to hiz performances. These aspects of Webster’s philosophy can sometimes seem to conflict with one another though his dedication praises Benjamin Franklin for never assuming “dictatorial authority,” it is less clear that Webster himself avoids it. The most distinctive character of the Dissertations, however, relates to his assessment of flaws in American culture his antipathy toward foreign influences his strident plea for the banishment of local dialect and pronunciation the establishment of a national “standard” of language his assertions that all languages descend from “a common stock” his elaborate scheme to reform spelling in America and, especially, a distrust of a variety of so-called authorities in matters of language usage that, if unchecked, he is adamant would threaten national unity. The Dissertations illustrates, at a young age, Webster’s copious memory and tireless and detailed attention to what would become self-defining themes in his efforts to reform the profile of the English language in America: hundreds of sounds and numerous examples of classes of letters and words that complicate English pronunciation, orthography that confounds consistent pronunciation, irregularity of orthography that bedevils young people and adults alike, and etymology to which few people paid much attention but that would, if handled his way, clarify and help solve a good many problems in the way the language is learned and used. At least America did not have to cope with the deleterious effects of “superfluous ornament” in prose like Edward Gibbon’s and Samuel Johnson’s, the language of nobility and the British Court, and “the influence of men, learned in Greek and Latin, but ignorant of their own tongue who have laboured to reject much good English, because they have not understood the original construction of the language.” The book’s main argument goes something like this: There is to be no elite in America, no linguistic differentiation between classes and regions.įor Webster, new nationhood provided unique opportunities for language reform-opportunities that would fade quickly, he warns, if not grabbed before America’s language, like Britain’s, deteriorated owing to homegrown “corruptions” such as regional dialects, affectation, nostalgia for English manners and customs, class divisions, and innumerable other evils. It is a clarion call for American linguistic unity and independence in his Dissertations on the English Language-a 409-page treatise remarkable for its boldness and length as much as for its sweeping, generalized history of the language. That is what Noah Webster wrote in 1789 at the age of 31, long before he had compiled the nation’s first major dictionary. Let us then seize the present moment, and establish a national language, as well as a national government.”