Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgment
- Abbreviations and Editions Cited
- Introduction
- Part I The American Logocracy: The Nexus of Word and Act
- Part II Political and Linguistic Corruption: The Ideological Inheritance
- Part III The American Language of Revolution and Constitutional Change
- Part IV From Logomachy to Civil War: The Politics of Language in Post-Revolutionary America
- 9 The Unsettled Language: Schoolmasters vs. Truants
- 10 Corrupt Language and a Corrupt Body Politic, or the Disunion of Words and Things
- 11 Sovereign Words vs. Representative Men
- Afterword
- Notes
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture
11 - Sovereign Words vs. Representative Men
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgment
- Abbreviations and Editions Cited
- Introduction
- Part I The American Logocracy: The Nexus of Word and Act
- Part II Political and Linguistic Corruption: The Ideological Inheritance
- Part III The American Language of Revolution and Constitutional Change
- Part IV From Logomachy to Civil War: The Politics of Language in Post-Revolutionary America
- 9 The Unsettled Language: Schoolmasters vs. Truants
- 10 Corrupt Language and a Corrupt Body Politic, or the Disunion of Words and Things
- 11 Sovereign Words vs. Representative Men
- Afterword
- Notes
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture
Summary
They say that folks misuse words, but I see it the other way around, words misuse people… Throw a kiss or hold out your arms and even a baby can understand you. But just try to say it in words and you raise up Babel and the grapes of wrath. If you nod your head and smile even folks who don't speak your language will get the idea, but you just whisper peace somebody will claim you declared war and will insist on trying to kill you. No wonder we have war! No wonder history is a bitch on wheels with wings traveling inside a submarine. Words are behind it all.
Ralph Ellison, “A Song of Innocence”“But we care not for men's words; we look for creeds in actions; which are the truthful symbols of the things within. He who hourly prays to Alma, but lives not up to world-wide love and charity - that man is more an unbeliever than he who verbally rejects the Master, but does his bidding. Our lives are our Amens.”
Herman Melville, MardiWhen John Quincy Adams delivers his inaugural lecture as the first Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard, before he proclaims the glorious promise of eloquence in a republican America he explains that in Europe, “where the semblance of deliberative assemblies has been preserved, corruption … in the form of executive influence, [and] … in the guise of party spirit” has “crippled the sublimest efforts of oratory,” so that in the old world “questions of magnitude to the interest of the nation” are decided “long before the questions themselves are submitted to discussion” (LR, I, 27).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Representative WordsPolitics, Literature, and the American Language, 1776–1865, pp. 372 - 396Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1993