Battling Definitions of an American Language in the Early Republic

At the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump in January 2020, Chief Justice John Roberts made an obscure reference that sent reporters and broadcasters to their nearest dictionaries. “In the 1905 Swayne trial, a senator objected when one of the managers used the word ‘pettifogging’ and the presiding officer said the word ought not to have been used,” Justice Roberts remarked in the Senate as House managers concluded the first day of the proceedings. “I don’t think we need to aspire to that high of a standard, but I do think those addressing the Senate should remember where they are.” According to the Cambridge Dictionary, “pettifogging people give too much attention to small, unimportant details in a way that shows a limited mind.” That word effectively described the impeachment of Florida District Judge Charles Swayne, whom the Senate tried (and later acquitted) for filing false travel vouchers, improper use of private railroad cars, unlawfully imprisoning two attorneys for contempt, and living outside of his district. Chief Justice Roberts may have used “pettifogging” to hide his biting critique of partisan politics behind the veil of a lighthearted historical anecdote. But he also reminded the public that the definitions of words, and the dictionaries that supply those definitions, have the power to influence contentious debates about American democracy and our national character more broadly.¹

Peter Martin explores the antebellum debate over such definitions in painstaking detail in The Dictionary Wars: The American Fight over the English Language. When the Continental Congress declared independence, most colonists relied on Samuel Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary of the English Language. In the days of the early republic, two American lexicographers steadily raced to publish their own volumes whose definitions captured the American spirit better than the book that Johnson had printed in London before the Revolution. From 1806 to 1864, Noah Webster and Joseph Worcester combined to produce sixteen different dictionaries, alternately claiming to implement innovations in technology or politics to improve upon earlier editions. Martin, a retired English professor and biographer of Samuel Johnson, treats this project as if it is the biography of the ubiquitous Merriam-Webster Dictionary, which remains in print today—although, as current versions warn readers, “the name Webster alone is no guarantee of excellence . . . Merriam-Webster^TM is the name you should look for . . . It carries the reputation of a company that has been publishing since 1831” (p. 292). The Dictionary Wars is not the first scholarly study of the decades-long publishing battle between Webster and Worcester, but it is clearly the most comprehensive. Martin complicates and clarifies this lexicographic rivalry in several useful ways, but he is also guilty of indulging in many “pettifogging” details along the way.

Martin frames his narrative with a provocative argument, suggesting that the dictionary wars represented a broader struggle between two groups: “American reformers versus American traditionalists, between the growth of populist democracy and the defenders of traditional values and manners associated with elegance and refinement” (p. ix). While Thomas Jefferson also coined distinctly American phrases as an act of patriotism, Martin credits Webster for introducing many “unbridled Americanisms,” including the conversion of nouns into verbs, as in “dump,” “process,” and “scalp.” Webster took this patriotic lexicography too far in an attempt to overhaul American spellings (orthography) by omitting “all superfluous or silent letters,” changing “bread” to “bred,” “daughter” to “dawter,” and “laugh” to “laf” (p. 14, 33). These revolutionary changes alarmed well-read writers and orators on both sides of the Atlantic, and evidently Webster’s spelling reforms have not survived to today, so his efforts to pioneer a new patriotic language ultimately fell short.

Martin also entices readers with the prospect of titillating intrigue between the two lexicographers as they battled for dictionary supremacy. Even more than Webster’s radical orthography, the letters and pamphlets between him and Worcester and their various supporters receive tedious scrutiny with the publication of each new edition. The...