Word Wars

2021 ◽  
pp. 219-230
Author(s):  
Ralph Keyes
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
English Language ◽  
New World ◽  
Daniel Defoe ◽  
Jonathan Swift ◽  
John Adams ◽  
New Words ◽  
Mother Country ◽  
Noah Webster ◽  
The Many

Pitched battles have long been fought between neology advocates and those who think we have enough words already. Centuries ago language purists such as Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift railed against the many new words they thought were defiling the English language. Britons and Americans subsequently squabbled fiercely over Americanisms, the neologisms that settlers began to create soon after they arrived in the New World (e.g., foothill, skunk, eel grass). Jefferson’s coinage belittle raised particular hackles in the mother country. Jefferson – a self- proclaimed “friend to neology” – joined John Adams, Noah Webster and others in defending the coinage-rich American version of English that they thought was integral to establishing a sense of independence from the mother country. Guardians of the King’s English in Great Britain considered this attitude impudent. Protecting their national franchise and sense of ethnic privilege proved to be integral to that guardianship.

James Fenimore Cooper on the Languages of the Americans: A Note on the Author's Footnotes

2011 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lance Schachterle
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Best Practices ◽  
New World ◽  
American English ◽  
James Fenimore Cooper ◽  
Charles Brockden Brown ◽  
Life Forms ◽  
Sufficient Evidence ◽  
John Adams ◽  
Noah Webster

Lance Schachterle, "James Fenimore Cooper on the Languages of the Americans: A Note on the Author's Footnotes" (pp. 37–68) James Fenimore Cooper scattered observations about the formation of a distinctive American language throughout such social analyses as Notions of the Americans (1828), Gleanings from Europe: England (1837) and The American Democrat (1838), arguing the need for Americans to establish mental independence from England in matters of language as well as politics and social structure. And many of the footnotes he added to his novels reinforce this message. "Twenty millions of people not only can make a word, but they can make a language, if it be needed," Cooper wrote in a burst of enthusiasm at the end of a footnote justifying Americanisms in his novel Satanstoe (1845). In this essay I investigate these authorial footnotes for evidence of words that Cooper defended as Americanisms necessary to comprehend the new topography and life-forms that Europeans were finding in the New World. Cooper found such words not only among older usages in English, but also in French, Dutch, and especially Native American adoptions—and even in some neologisms of his own. Unlike Charles Brockden Brown and John Adams, Cooper never advocated for a select elite like an academy to oversee the formation of the American language. The best practices among people like himself, "educated gentlemen of the middle states"—not the nasal tones and artificial rules of New Englanders like Noah Webster—would regulate the amelioration of American english. But he realized in the end that "the twenty millions…can make a language"; as he observed in Notions of the Americans, "when words once get fairly into use, their triumph affords a sufficient evidence of merit to entitle them to patronage."

Testing the Market

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Oakleaf
Keyword(s):  
Daniel Defoe ◽  
Jonathan Swift ◽  
Eliza Haywood ◽  
Robinson Crusoe ◽  
Gulliver's Travels ◽  
Jane Barker ◽  
Market Driven ◽  
Fictional Memoir ◽  
Mary Davys ◽  
The Many

Like their imitators, Eliza Haywood and even Daniel Defoe have been called mercenaries who wrote to formula for low readers with limited intellects. Yet Love in Excess and Robinson Crusoe inaugurated a decade of lively, market-driven narrative experiment aimed at sophisticated gentry readers. When low scandal titillated, it originated in high life. Highly inventive, Jane Barker, Mary Davys, Penelope Aubin, and some authors of the many lives and surprising adventures in the Crusoe manner read their rivals with professional care. They adapted and contested as well as adopted Defoe’s distinctive fictional memoir, Haywood’s equally modern amatory sublime. So did Jonathan Swift when he parodied Robinson Crusoe’s strategies in Gulliver’s Travels, an anonymous narrative that matched its commercial triumph. Swift hastened the vogue’s end, but these novelists’ commercial and literary legacy endures.

scholarly journals Annotated Copies of Early Editions of Johnson's Dictionary: A Preliminary Account

The Library ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 135-154
Author(s):  
John Considine
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
English Language ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
New Words ◽  
Leigh Hunt ◽  
Preliminary Account ◽  
Noah Webster ◽  
Private Collections

Abstract Early responses to Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language included manuscript annotations, sometimes very extensive, in copies of the dictionary. This article surveys twenty-one copies of eighteenth-century editions of the dictionary with critical or informative annotations, bearing on etymology or usage, adding new words or senses, or improving the supply and referencing of quotations. Some of these copies are extant in institutional or private collections, and others are unlocated. The annotators include Johnson himself; members of his circle including Edmund Burke, Samuel Dyer, Edmond Malone, Hester Piozzi, and George Steevens; and other readers including Leigh Hunt, Horne Tooke, Noah Webster, and John Wilkes.

Taunt Terms: U.S.

2021 ◽  
pp. 76-86
Author(s):  
Ralph Keyes
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
English Language ◽  
Congressional Districts ◽  
New Words ◽  
The Many ◽  
Over Time

More than a few of the many new words coined by exuberant Americans were created as insults. Like their counterparts abroad these terms lost their sting over time and became mainstream terminology. Gerrymander is one. By combining the last syllable of “salamander” with the surname of Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry gerrymander was meant to make fun of the convoluted Congressional districts drawn in 1812 while Gerry was the governor of Massachusetts. Hoosier was used to ridicule backwoods immigrants new to the new state of Indiana, but in time became the official, non-pejorative way to refer to Indianans. Before it became a name for underwear bloomer was introduced to deride American feminists such as Amelia Bloomer who, during the mid-nineteenth century, wore a type of garb that featured loose trousers worn beneath a billowy skirt. Hurling such insults inadvertently added words to the English language.

Eurocentric Views of Universal Languages from 1605 to 1828

Itinerario ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 103-115
Author(s):  
David Mikosz
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
North American ◽  
English Language ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
International Language ◽  
Universal Language ◽  
European Tradition ◽  
Language Study ◽  
Noah Webster

This paper will examine how a group of theorists in the European tradition of language study was influenced by non-European and intra-European comparisons of language. These theorists were primarily based in Great Britain, although North American perspectives will also be considered. I shall trace this tradition of understanding from Francis Bacon to the American lexicographer Noah Webster. This way of considering language was initially a tool in the attempt to create a universal language that would enable Europeans to discuss and explain the new worlds then being explored. The context of Europe, however, proved significant in changing this outward looking view, resulting in an attempt to vernacularize the concept of a universal language and to make the English language an international language of discovery.

Psychiatrie Sociale De L'Enfant

PEDIATRICS ◽  
1952 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 378-378
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
Child Psychiatry ◽  
Social Psychiatry ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Broad Subject ◽  
The Many

This interesting book, written in French, consists of 535 pages of which 46 are devoted to the description of the many tests now in use in psychologic work, and 33 deal with an extensive "international" bibliography on the subject of child social-psychiatry. The most important part of the book is devoted to the broad subject of child psychiatry itself which is approached through many different angles and by authors of various countries including France, Great Britain, Sweden, Belgium, Spain and Switzerland.

The First Globalization Debate: Crusoe vs. Gulliver

2011 ◽  
pp. 107-125
Author(s):  
Craufurd D. Goodwin
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
World Economy ◽  
Daniel Defoe ◽  
Jonathan Swift ◽  
Gains From Trade ◽  
Robinson Crusoe ◽  
Adventure Story ◽  
Gulliver's Travels

Two of the earliest novels in English, Robinson Crusoe (1719) by Daniel Defoe and Gulliver's Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift, are widely perceived as an entertaining adventure story and a pioneering work of science fiction. Viewed by modern economists, however, they appear as expressions of opposing positions on the desirability of integration within a world economy. Crusoe demonstrated the gains from trade and colonization and the attendant social and political benefits. By contrast, Swift warned of complex entanglements that would arise from globalization, especially with foreign leaders who operated from theory and models rather than common sense.

Examining the Use of Vocabulary Learning Strategies among EFL Learners in Baghlan University of Afghanistan

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Keyword(s):  
Language Learning ◽  
Learning Strategies ◽  
Quantitative Research ◽  
English Language ◽  
Vocabulary Learning ◽  
Vocabulary Knowledge ◽  
Social Strategies ◽  
Efl Learners ◽  
New Words ◽  
Vocabulary Learning Strategies

Vocabulary learning is one of the problems in language learning skills. Tackling such problems is to provide useful and effective strategies for enhancing students’ VLSs. Therefore, this study aims to survey vocabulary learning strategies (VLSs) utilized among English as a Foreign Language learners (EFL) in Baghlan University of Afghanistan, and to study the high and least frequently used VLSs that contributes to the learners’ vocabulary knowledge. This study utilizes a descriptive quantitative research method with 67 EFL learners who participated in the survey questionnaire adopted from Oxford (1990) taxonomy of VLS from different faculties of Baghlan University. The findings indicated that EFL learners preferably utilize VLSs at a medium level, and the highly used vocabulary learning strategies are the social strategies through which they ask the native speakers, teachers, and classmates for the meanings of new words in English language conversation. Determination, cognitive, and memory strategies are respectively followed by the learners. Whereas, metacognitive strategies are the least used strategies among EFL learners, the reason is that they only focus on the materials related to examination; explore anything about the new words for learning, and rarely think of their improvement in vocabulary learning.

scholarly journals Federal Aspects of Preferential Trade in the British Empire

1918 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 381-402 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. D. Allin
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
Fiscal Policy ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Free Trade ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Commercial Policy ◽  
New Era ◽  
Mother Country ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Right

The battle over the Corn Laws was fought out in Great Britain as a domestic issue. But it had nevertheless a great imperial significance. During the mercantilistic régime the colonies had been regarded as a commercial appanage of the mother country. The victory of the free traders opened up a new era in the economic history of the empire. The colonies were released from the irksome restrictions of the Navigation Laws. They acquired the right to frame their own tariffs with a view to their own particular interests. In short, they ceased to be dependent communities and became self-governing states.But the emancipation of the colonies was by no means complete. The home government still claimed the right to control their tariff policies. The colonies were privileged, indeed, to arrange their tariff schedules according to local needs; but it was expected that their tariff systems would conform to the fiscal policy of the mother land. The free traders, no less than the mercantilists, were determined to maintain the fiscal unity of the empire. There was still an imperial commercial policy; its motif only had been changed from protection to free trade. The colonies were still bound to the fiscal apron strings of the mother country; but the strings were no longer so short, nor the knots so tight as they had formerly been.

On the Chloride Waters of Great Britain

1945 ◽  
Vol 82 (6) ◽  
pp. 267-273 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
The South ◽  
Very Old ◽  
North East ◽  
The North ◽  
Exact Position ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Village ◽  
Made In

Formerly there were several surface brine springs in the North-East Coalfield; to-day there are none. From the many accounts of their occurrence nothing has been learned of their exact position, and very little of the composition of their waters. The earliest record, made in 1684, described the Butterby spring (Todd, 1684), and then at various times during the next two centuries brine springs at Framwellgate, Lumley, Birtley, Walker, Wallsend, Hebburn, and Jarrow were noted. In particular the Birtley salt spring is often mentioned, and on the 6-in. Ordnance map, Durham No. 13, 1862 edition, it is sited to the south-east of the village. Although no record has been found there must have been either a brine spring or well at Gateshead, for the name of the present-day suburb, Saltwell, is very old, and brine springs are still active in the coal workings of that area.

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