English was also altered to suit need. Some things were named using existing words for passably similar things: laurel, beech, walnut, hemlock, robin, blackbird, lark, swallow, hedgehog. Once the Americans had their new government, words were pressed into service for some of its details as well, such as congress, senate, and assembly. Some things were named with new compounds: rattlesnake, bluegrass, bobcat, bullfrog; later, as the need arose, sidewalk, skyscraper, and drugstore. Words for things invented after American independence have often differed on opposite sides of the Atlantic: does your car have a boot and bonnet or a hood and trunk?

Tongue twisters

Early British visitors sometimes wrote of how little the dialect changed from place to place as they travelled through the colonies. America was also settled by people from all over Britain, not just one region, and they were quite mobile, which had a further homogenising effect. But the USA is a large country, and groups of immigrants from different countries have given distinct flavours to different regions. Once people settled in place, their speech started localising.

Regional variations in accent also came – and are still coming, even today – from the same kinds of phonological shifts that, in England, had turned person into parson and more recently have given us the Sloany “fraffly” (frightfully). Sometimes regional pronunciations of words made their way back into the standard version of English as different words: varmint from vermin, cuss from curse, thrash from thresh, chaw from chew, tetchy from touchy, and gal from girl. Turns of phrase have developed differently in different parts of the country, too: depending on where you are in the US, “I might could do that,” “Anymore, we do it this way,” and “So don’t I” may or may not be perfectly normal speech.

Americans felt most free – even obliged – to take linguistic liberties once they had taken their political liberty. As Noah Webster wrote in his 1791 Dissertations on the English Language, “As an independent nation, our honor requires us to have a system of our own, in language as well as government.” Not that all Americans felt the same. When, in 1800, Caleb Alexander came out with his Columbian Dictionary of the English Language, one reviewer wrote: “This work, a disgrace to letters, is a disgusting collection of every vicious word or phrase, chosen by the absurd misapprehension, or coined by the boors of each local jurisdiction in the United States. It is a record of our imbecility.”