On This Day in 1828, Noah Webster Transformed American Written English

https://redstate.com/subscribe?tpcc=wardclark041426_8We're fortunate today to have set rules for written English, even if a lot of people don't know or follow them (just look anywhere on this new thing all the kids are doing called "the internet"). It wasn't always like that. For much of the written history of the world, most written languages didn't have much in the way of spelling or grammar conventions. Latin was the standard, as it actually had grammatical rules, many of which have made it into English and the other languages of Western Civilization today. But take a look at something written in the early days of our own nation, and you'll see some head-scratching oddities in spelling; even in the Constitution, which describes, among other things, "places for the chusing of senators."

These days, our spelling conventions are more fixed. And the reason for that is because of a man named Noah Webster, a lexicographer, writer of textbooks, political writer, and editor. Webster was a staunch supporter of the fledgling United States and was determined as well to standardize the somewhat different English language spoken in those former colonies. To that end, 198 years ago today (Tuesday), Noah Webster published his masterwork: An American Dictionary of the English Language. This wasn't his first effort - but it was the one that had legs.

In 1806 Webster published A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language, the first truly American dictionary. For more information on this milestone in American reference publishing, please see Noah Webster's Spelling Reform and A Sample Glossary from A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language. Immediately thereafter he went to work on his magnum opus, An American Dictionary of the English Language, for which he learned 26 languages, including Anglo-Saxon and Sanskrit, in order to research the origins of his own country's tongue. This book, published in 1828, embodied a new standard of lexicography; it was a dictionary with 70,000 entries that was felt by many to have surpassed Samuel Johnson's 1755 British masterpiece not only in scope but in authority as well.

What's more, Webster Americanized his dictionary, devoting it to English as spoken by Americans. He is the one primarily responsible for documenting the removal of all the unnecessary vowels out of the King's English, as well, which made typesetters around the United States clap their hands together with glee; they had already been removing such troublesome folderol from the King's English, but after 1828, it was official.

One facet of Webster's importance was his willingness to innovate when he thought innovation meant improvement. He was the first to document distinctively American vocabulary such as skunk, hickory, and chowder. Reasoning that many spelling conventions were artificial and needlessly confusing, he urged altering many words: musick to music, centre to center, and plough to plow, for example. (Other attempts at reform met with less acceptance, however, such as his support for modifying tongue to tung and women to wimmen—the latter of which he argued was "the old and true spelling" and the one that most accurately indicated its pronunciation.)

This wasn't the last development in written American English, but it was the first definitive set of spellings, and that's important. Without defined, regularized spelling (and grammar) it's difficult, even impossible, to have everyone read and interpret a work in the same way, every time. And even today, in our modern, technology-driven world, writing skills are still important. Maybe more so than ever, in fact.

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Why more so? Well, here's why, and I'm going to tell you.

In this online world, all too often our first exposure to a person is only in the written word. Oh, sure, we have the various video streaming channels, video podcasts, and the like, but the internet is still largely a print phenomenon - just look at this site you are reading right now, which is mostly text-based. In such a world, the only thing we have to judge a newly encountered person by is their command of written English. That's all.

We all do it. I know I do. Being a writer married to an editor, I'm probably more persnickety than some, but lazy spelling stupidity like "u" for "you" and "ur" for "you're" or "your" annoy me to no end. Not only do they make the meaning of a sentence fuzzy, but they are just lazy. For the sake of two keystrokes, too many people sacrifice clarity - and make some of us judge them perhaps too harshly. At least, it seems harsh to people who didn't go to school back when they still taught kids how to diagram a sentence.

We do not only ourselves, but also Noah Webster, credit when we take just that tiny little bit of effort to do it right.

Rules for written language are important. It makes our language legible, in the same way, to every reader, every time. That's why we have standards. If the schools aren't teaching them to your kids, and a fair number of modern schools aren't, then we must take it on ourselves; my wife and I have four daughters, ranging in age from 30 to 44, and most of their written English language skills are the product of our hounding them to do it right.

Those standards, those defined spellings for American English, got a huge boost, 198 years ago today.

You can learn more about Noah Webster, the father of modern American written English, here.

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