ABSTRACT
In the post-revolutionary moment, Noah Webster famously used his ideas about language to express his political opinions about national identity. Viewing American English as a unifi er, Webster espoused that “Our political harmony is [ . . . ] concerned in a uniformity of language,” such that “a national language is a band of national union” (Dissertations 20, 397-98).1 Over the century-plus from Webster’s Dissertations on the English Language (1789) to H. L. Mencken’s fi rst edition of his monumental American Language (1919), the practice marked by Webster’s Dissertations-a now well-noted tradition of projecting concerns about national identity onto commentary about language-overlapped with an equally notable rhetorical tradition of inserting notions of gender into commentary about language, a practice epitomized in the writings of Mencken, whose American Language renewed a sense of American cultural independence in the post-World War I era. While Mencken, like Webster, ultimately envisioned the global conquest of American English, Mencken departed from Webster in his rhetoric: In his fi guration of American language as a “vigorous organism”—a kind of robust and impish schoolboy resisting the feminized forces of standardization embodied in the “schoolma’am”—Mencken conceived the language’s imperialistic conquest in gendered terms (“Future of English” 89).
