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We celebrate Noah Webster as a founding father of American English because his 1828 dictionary was the first to include words, meanings and spellings that were unique to the United States. But another 19th-century American was Webster's equal as a linguistic pioneer: Mark Twain.

As his biographer Ron Powers has observed, Twain was a "prodigious noticer." And one thing he noticed most keenly was the rich complexity of vernacular American English.

Disdaining the fancy wedding cake of Victorian literary prose, Twain served readers the unadorned sourdough of plain-spoken language. His ear for the rhythms, intonations and idioms of the lingo spoken in the American West and South was sharp and true.

He possessed the same gift he ascribed to one of his characters: "He could curl his tongue around the bulliest words in the language." Among the bulliest slang phrases that first appeared in Twain's work are "close call," "take it easy," "dead broke" and "get even."

His meticulous rendering of subtle distinctions among regional and racial dialects is reflected in his tongue-in-cheek preface to "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn": "In this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri Negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods South-Western dialect; the ordinary 'Pike-County' dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a hap-hazard fashion, or by guess-work; but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with the several forms of speech."

The first sentence of "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" is nothing less than a Declaration of American Linguistic Independence: "You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of the Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but that ain't no matter."

Twain detested and ridiculed what he called "the wasteful and opulent gush of 'fine language.'" In his novel "The Gilded Age," for instance, he peppers the pseudoelegant pronouncements of a pretentious parvenu with colloquialisms that poke through the speaker's silken suit of affectation like bony knees and elbows: "if he don't have a change," "swap round," and "a body can't stand back for trouble."

Never one to stand back for trouble himself, Twain embraced the American language in all its diversity, democracy and deviltry. As he himself put it: "There is no such thing as the Queen's English. The property has gone into a joint stock company and we own the bulk of the shares."

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Rob Kyff, a teacher and writer in West Hartford, Connecticut, invites your language sightings. His book, "Mark My Words," is available for $9.99 on Amazon.com. Send your reports of misuse and abuse, as well as examples of good writing, via email to WordGuy@aol.com or by regular mail to Rob Kyff, Creators Syndicate, 737 3rd Street, Hermosa Beach, CA 90254.

Copyright 2024 Creators Syndicate Inc.