The Language of Adam, take two

and Adam named all these things, Genesis

Linguists tell us that not only do countries in which the same language is spoken have many and changing dialects;but they also allege that each person has an idiolect, a dialect which is as idiosyncratic as a fingerprint.I would like to describe the American idiolect on the grounds that it reveals our evolving character as a nation. We see the world and speak about it to ourselves and others through an idiolect which transcends
regional boundaries.

Take the word "New". It was an understandable reflex of Western European countries to domesticate their new territories by prefixing the name New to it. New Caledonia, New Hebrides, New Guinea, New England. Like so much in the colonializing experience it was only "new" to the "discoverers". There is an interesting story about the first English settlers in Virginia believing that a polysyllabic word the natives were always using in their presence was the indigenous name for this turf.

Only much later was it discovered that it was the local Indians' way of saying, "You are wearing very nice clothes". And I think all of us with a zest for languages bless the Amerinds for their onomastic splendor: Tallahassee, Winnepasauke, Minnesota, Mississippi, Shenandoah. How much more glorious than New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey.

But it wasn't until the turn of the twentieth century that American onomastics took on political overtones with the modifier "New". It was Teddy Roosevelt who opened the chorus of News with his program for the New Nationalism in 1900. Why then? I think because Frederick Jackson Turner had declared the frontier closed in 1890-- in a paper at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago, celebrating the 400th anniversary of our "discovery" --a year late because of the Panic of 1891.

If the frontier was no longer to be the alembic of the American character, of "this new man the American" was how Crevecouer phrased in his "Letters from an American Farmer" in the formative years of the Republic, then how could we go on being the world's last best hope (as Lincoln put it in the harrowing midst of the Civil War--talk about whistling in the dark!)

TR believed we could do it with a New Nationalism that thrust us, no apologies needed or even allowed, on the world stage of imperialism. Twain and William Dean Howells hollered mightily that it was a sellout of the real American Dream, but they were ignored as Emerson and Thoreau had been in criticizing our take over of huge chunks of Mexico in the 1840's. TR's white man's burden entailed building a first class Navy and steaming it around the world as it took possession of fueling stations in Guam and the Philippines.

Woodrow Wilson got elected in 1912 under the rubric of the New Freedom--after Teddy, dissatisfied with the way his protege William Howard Taft was not assuming the new global burdens he was formulating under the New Nationalism, split the Republican vote with his Bull Moose Progressivism, making Wilson a minority president. We know how FDR coined the term New Deal and Kennedy New Frontier to marshall its voters into electoral victories. New had become a cliche encouraging us to ignore how the realities of America were drifting ever farther apart from its visionary ideals.

Instead of closing the great Expectations Gap of egalitarianism, the country copped out with advertising that emphasized giganticism and speed. Big Macs, Whoppers, Mount Rushmore--our language encourages us to believe that Bigger is by definition Better. Biggest ocean liner, longest railroad, fastest airplane, we think hyperbolically, not carefully.

We also put great stock in being laid back. Free 'n' Easy is how the Saturday Evening Post taught us to think. The casual enclitic I call it. Workers might be living in tenements, slaving away in factories, but our public rhetoric encouraged them to think they were living in a Paradise of Casual.

Even the way we award excellence has this tang of the casual. Apart from the Oscar, named after someone's uncle, we award Emmys, and you make your Awards list. The nomenclature is casual.

Not everyone speaks in the same idiolect however. Notice how the dream deferred, to use Langston Hughes' resonant phrase, worked out onomastically in the colored, black, Afro-American, African-American community. It's Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Earl Hines--Lady Day, the First Lady of Song--an unending self-naming accolade of compensatory royal naming.

Until a certain generation couldn't take the contradictions, as in Cassius Clay renaming himself Muhammad Ali. The "Cassius" of course refers to a noble Roman, a method of self-legitimizing endemic in the more educated sectors of those we now are enjoined to call African-Americans. The American idiolect, in short, encapsulates the ways we have lived over two centuries. Using it as a mirror, we can speculate on how to do better in our closing of the Expectations Gap.