Posts Tagged ‘Noah Webster’
“Language brings with it an identity and a culture, or at least the perception of it.”*…
Liz Tracey on Noah Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language— and the way that it declared Americans free from the tyranny of British institutions and their vocabularies…
Sometimes, a dictionary is more than just words and definitions—it may be intended to serve as a declaration of linguistic independence. When Noah Webster’s first edition of the American Dictionary of the English Language was published in April 1828, it held 70,000 words, 12,000 of which were making their first appearance in dictionary form. Webster’s goals for the work were grand: “to furnish a standard of our vernacular tongue, which we shall not be ashamed to bequeath to three hundred millions of people, who are destined to occupy, and I hope, to adorn the vast territory within our jurisdiction.”
Noah Webster’s roles in the formation of the early United States were manifold: editor of the Federalist Papers, owner and editor of the first American daily newspaper [see below], textbook author, a founder of Amherst College, promoter of the first US copyright laws, and author of one of the first works on epidemiology, used by nineteenth-century medical schools.
But his 1828 dictionary is what he’s remembered for, coming at a tremendous personal cost: twenty-one years invested, and a lifelong struggle with debt. In his preface to the three-volume work, he writes of his hopes that the dictionary will result in his fellow Americans’ “improvement and their happiness; and for the continued increase of the wealth, the learning, the moral and religious elevation of character, and the glory of my country.”…
More at: “Webster’s Dictionary 1828: Annotated,” from @liztracey in @JSTOR_Daily.
* Trevor Noah, Born a Crime
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As we vindicate vernacular, we might recall that it was on this date in 1846 that the first edition of the Cambridge Chronicle was published. One of the earliest weeklies in the U.S., it served the newly-incorporated city of Cambridge, MA– using language consistent with Webster’s dictionary. (Nearby Boston was home to the first U.S. newspaper, the Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick, which was founded in 1690 (albeit short-lived).
The Cambridge Chronicle is technically the longest continuously-published weekly newspaper in the U.S… though it ceased original serving up original content in 2022, after being purchased by Gannett. It now re-publishes regional stories from other Gannett papers.
As for Webster, he began his journalistic career in 1779, writing articles for New England newspapers justifying the Revolutionary War. In 1793, Alexander Hamilton recruited him to edit the leading Federalist Party newspaper; then in December of that year, Webster founded New York’s (and the new American nation’s) first daily newspaper American Minerva, later renamed the Commercial Advertiser, which he edited for four years (writing the equivalent of 20 volumes of articles and editorials).
“Your toil will become light and amusing and your progress sure, if you will only read a little Lucian every day”*…
Detail from the title page to the 1774 edition of Carr’s Dialogues of Lucian
Lucian of Samosata, who lived from ca. 125AD to ca. 200AD, was an Assyrian writer and satirist who today is perhaps best remembered for his Vera Historia, or A True Story — a fantastical tale which not only has the distinction of being one of the first science-fiction stories ever written, but is also a contender for one of the first novels.
A True Story is a stylish and brilliantly conceived work of the imagination, and readers may still delight in its descriptions of lunar life forms and interplanetary warfare, its islands of cheese and rivers of wine, and its modernistic use of celebrity cameos. But by the time of its writing Lucian was already several years into a period of literary adventurism that had brought him considerable fame — and infamy — as one of the sharpest, funniest, and most original comic writers of the age. With the quartet of works consisting of Dialogues of the Courtesans, Dialogues of the Dead, Dialogues of the Gods, and Dialogues of the Sea-Gods, Lucian would not only scandalise some of the most influential and celebrated figures of the empire, but in what is perhaps the best-known of these, Dialogues of the Gods, he would also furnish the permanent decline of belief in the gods themselves…
Nicholas Jeeves tells the story behind the twenty-six short comic dialogues that made up Dialogues of the Gods– in which Lucian took the popular images of the Greek gods and re-drew them as greedy, sex-obsessed, power-mad despots– and their reception in the English speaking world: “Divine Comedy: Lucian Versus The Gods.” (Check out Jeeves’ new edition of the Dialogues here.)
* Thomas Linacre, Humanist scholar and teacher of Thomas More and Erasmus (who shared their mentor’s advice by leading the resurgence of interest in Lucian in the 16th century)
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As we titter, we might recall that it was on this date in 1828 that Noah Webster copyrighted the first edition of his American Dictionary of the English Language. Published in two quarto volumes, it contained 70,000 entries, as against the high of 58,000 of any previous dictionary. Webster, who was 70 at the time, had published his first dictionary, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language, in 1806, and had begun then the campaign of language reform (motivated by both nationalistic and philological concerns) that initiated the formal shift of American English spelling (center rather than centre, honor rather than honour, program rather than programme, etc.). His 1828 dictionary cemented those changes, and continued his efforts to include technical and scientific (not just literary) terms.
With apologies, your correspondent will again be away for a few days, this time, to a connectivity- free precinct. (Who knew such a thing survives?) With luck, regular service should resume in about a week.
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