Chapter 2.1 Summary

The writer begins with a report of a rumored tale: during the American Revolution the plan was to abandon English as America's national language and replace it with, depending upon who is telling the story, Hebrew or Greek. True or not, Mencken says, what the tale does admit is the attitude of the mid- to late 1700s. Americans were passionately pro-independence and violently anti-English rule. He reminds readers that before the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Franklin invented a new American alphabet, reformed spelling, and cited Webster's work, "endors[ing]" "revolt against English domination and his forecast of widening differences in the future." That future included a Congress, which instructed Franklin to use the language of the U. S. when he visited as Minister to France...two years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence from England.

As American independence grew, so did...