The Dictionary Wars: the American fight of the English Language

Today's non-fiction book review is on The Dictionary Wars: the American fight of the English Language by Peter Martin. It is 358 pages long including index and bibliography and is published by Princeton University press. There is no foul language, no sexuality and no violence in this book. The intended reader is someone who is interested in the history of American Dictionary making. There Be Spoilers Ahead.

From the dust jacket - A compelling history of the national conflicts that resulted from efforts to produce the first definitive American dictionary of  English.

In The Dictionary Wars, Peter Martin recounts the Patriotic fervor in the early American Republic to produce its definitive National dictionary that would rival Samuel Johnson's 1755 Dictionary of the English language. But what began as a cultural war of independence from Britain devolved into the battle among lexicographers, authors, Scholars, and publishers, all vying for dictionary supremacy and shattering forever the dream of a unified American language.

The overwhelming questions in The Dictionary Wars involved which and whose English was truly American and whether a dictionary of English should attempt to be American at all, independent from Britain. Martin tells the human story of the intense rivalry between America's first lexicographers, Noah Webster and Joseph Emerson Worcester, who fought over who could best represent the soul and identity of American culture. Webster believed in American Dictionary, like the American language,  ought to be informed by the nation's republican principles, but Worcester thought that such language reforms were reckless and went too far. Their conflict continued beyond Webster's death, when the ambitious Merriam Brothers acquired the publishing rights to Webster's American dictionary and launched their own language wars. From the beginning of the nineteenth Century to the end of the Civil War, the dictionary wars also engaged America's colleges, libraries, newspapers, religious groups, and state legislatures at the pivotal historical moment that coincided with the rising of literacy and the print Revolution.

Delving into the personal stories and national debates that arose from the conflict surrounding America's first dictionaries, The Dictionary Wars examines the linguistic struggles that underpinned the founding and growth of a Nation. 

Review- An interesting historical book about interesting but very dramatic people. The reader starts out following Webster at a young age all the way until the end where the Miriam Brothers have won the Dictionary Wars but at the cost of Webster's vision. Matrin has records, personal letters, and other first-hand documents that he uses to reconstruct the drama that surrounded Webster and his dictionary from when he first began to build it to what we would consider the modern Webster's Dictionary today. Webster had a vision that an American Dictionary would be wholly unique from all other English dictionaries in the world. He justified that by saying America was a wholly new nation set on wholly new ideals but he was not the best Lexicographer and his dictionary suffered for that. Worcester was the much better and solid scholar of the two men but he was a more retiring personality and only wanted to make his dictionaries and spelling books for children.The clash of the two personalities over the building of America's dictionary was intense and at times absurd. the sniping and fighting language in the letters between each other and about each other to other people was quite funny and the reader should delight in reading these two scholars tear each other apart over the meaning of a word. I highly recommend this book if you are interested in the history of dictionary making or Noah Webster or Joseph Worcester.

I give this book a Four out of Five stars. I get nothing for my review and I borrowed this book from my local library.