'Separate in name and power': How America reinvented English

From "deadline" to "lituation", from "prairie" to "amirite", America's linguistic independence has transformed the English language with a wealth of new words and phrases – shaping its own cultural identity in the process. Did the founding of the United States of America demand a new way of speaking? President Thomas Jefferson certainly thought so. In August 1813, he wrote an impassioned letter to his friend John Waldo about the blossoming of new terms in fertile terrain of the 37-year-old United States of America. "So great growing a population, spread over such an extent of country, with such a variety of climates, of productions, of arts, must enlarge their language, to make it answer its purpose of expressing all ideas, the new as well as the old," he claimed. "The new circumstances under which we are placed, call for new words, new phrases, and for the transfer of old words to new objects." Let British English remain "stationary", Jefferson argued, while American English gained strength: "Its new character may separate it in name as well as in power, from the mother-tongue." By this point, the British had long complained about American phrases "contaminating" the purity of the

Jul 2, 2026 → Jul 4, 2026