The New Yorker is so deeply invested in Webster’s, trusting implicitly in the American brand name, even to the exclusion of the Oxford dictionaries (the OED may be endlessly fascinating, but it is not a practical reference book), that I began to wonder just who this Noah Webster was, anyway. Biographies make him out to be “the forgotten founding father,” but as a lexicographer he gets nowhere near the respect that Samuel Johnson got. And yet Webster’s accomplishment was monumental. The habits of generations of Americans—writers, editors, academics—descend from him. At his birthplace, a farmhouse (now a sleepy little museum) in West Hartford, Connecticut, I bought a facsimile edition of a small book he compiled in 1783, A Grammatical Institute of the English Language, which became known as the Blue-Back Speller. Webster had attended Yale during the Revolutionary War (class of 1778), hoping to be a lawyer, but instead he became a schoolteacher. He was so appalled at his students’ pronunciation and spelling that he put together the speller, afire to lift the standards of his compatriots while simultaneously rebelling against England by beginning to standardize an American language. Noah Webster turned out to be a marketing genius, peddling the Blue-Back Speller—the seed of the Little Red Web—all up and down the East Coast, and ultimately compiling a two-volume American Dictionary of the English Language.
The first thing you notice about the speller is that it employs on its cover the archaic long s, which looks like an f. The whole book is like that, and if you stop fooling around and just pronounce the f’s as s’s, as intended, Noah Webster turns out to be lucid and eloquent, but if you pronounce them as f’s you cannot take Webfter ferioufly at all. It is as if the book had been written by fomeone with a profound fpeech defect. The Blue-Back is about four by six inches and 119 pages long. Webster always intended to call it a speller, but early on he was swayed by the president of Yale, Ezra Stiles, who liked a title modeled on a Calvinist tract, and Webster, hoping for his endorsement, complied with “Inftitute.” It says on the cover that the book is “Defigned for the ufe of Englifh Schools” and quotes a line of Latin—“Ufus eft Norma Loquendi”—attributing it to Cicero. The biographies translate “Usus est Norma Loquendi” variously as “General custom is the rule of speaking” and “Usage should determine the rule of speech.” In other words, “Usage rules.” Noah Webster was a descriptivist!
Though Webster was, in the words of James Murray, a “born definer,” he was not always reliable as a scholar. For instance, the quotation he attributes to Cicero is actually from Horace, a passage in Ars Poetica about the balance between neologism and conservative usage and the coinage of words: Multa renascentur quae iam cecidere, cadentque Quae nunc sunt in honore uocabula, si uolet usus, Quem penes arbitrium est et ius et norma loquendi.
A friend looked it up for me and provided a literal translation: Many vocabulary words will be born which now have perished, and will fall Vocabulary which is now in honor, if usage should wish, Under whom rests judgment and the law and the norm of speaking.
Norma Loquendi is a joke among English-language pundits: she is the goddess of proper usage.
The Blue-Back is organized into tables of sounds and words, of graduated difficulty, starting with “Words of three or four letters” and moving on to “Easy words of two syllables, accented on the first” and finally getting to “Words of five syllables accented on the fourth” (“im a gin a tion . . . qual i fi ca tion . . . re gen e ra tion”). It is tempting to view Webster’s lists as free association (“bed, fed, led, red, wed”) offering a window into his soul (“glut, shut, smut, slut”); he was a bachelor at the time (“La dy, la zy, le gal, li ar, like ly, li ning, li on, lone ly”). He italicized the silent letters and the letter s when it is pronounced as a z (in fact, he suggests that when s is voiced it be called ez). He wanted to rename certain letters of the alphabet: h (aitch) should be “more properly” “he”; w (double-u) should be “we”; y (why) should be “yi.” Yikes. It is owing to Webster that in America the British “zed” became “zee.”