7 - The Language of Revolution: Combating Misrepresentation with the Pen and Tongue

Summary

Indeed we ought firmly to believe, what is an undoubted truth, confirmed by the unhappy experience of many states heretofore free, that UNLESS THE MOST WATCHFUL ATTENTION BE EXERTED, A NEW SERVITUDE MAY BE SLIPPED UPON US, UNDER THE SANCTION OF USUAL AND RESPECTABLE TERMS.

John Dickinson, Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania

In The Professor at the Breakfast-Table Oliver Wendell Holmes makes a series of seemingly offhand remarks about language in general and the language of the Revolutionary era in particular that should be taken more seriously than Holmes's jocular style suggests. He writes:

Language! – the blood of the soul, Sir! into which our thoughts run and out of which they grow! We know what a word is worth here in Boston. Young Sam Adams got up on the stage at Commencement, out at Cambridge there, with his gown on, the Governor and Council looking on in the name of his Majesty, King George the Second, and the girls looking down out of the galleries, and taught people how to spell a word that wasn't in the Colonial dictionaries! R-e, re, s-i-s, sis, t-a-n-c-e, tance. Resistance! That was in '43, and it was good many years before the Boston boys began spelling it with their muskets; – but when they did begin, they spelt it so loud that the old bedridden women in the English almshouses heard every syllable! Yes, yes, yes, – it was a good while before those other two Boston boys got the class so far along that it could spell those two hard words, Independence and Union! […]