On American words.

IN his review of Buckley: The Right Word (NR, Dec. 23), James Jackson Kilpatrick planted the false assumption that WFB's interest in verbal exotica is an aberration, nigh unique on this continent. That has long been a knee-jerk attitude among people who should know better. Back when I lived in Baltimore, regarded by the Washington Post as an accessible D.C. suburb, I would get occasional calls from one or another Post reporter in quest of comments on "Why Americans Have No Interest in Language."

One time I was able to riposte with an anecdote. Harper's had asked if I'd review some word-books they had had trickling in. I would? OK, they'd send them. And it took two men to lift the box of books off the mail truck. Books about words are an American sub-genre. No interest in language among the populace? Nonsense. Authors in this field even command personal publics, for whose pleasure publishers commission book after book.

A few of the books in that box were by William Safire; and note that Safire's word columns, which appear weekly in the Newspaper of Record and over the years have been collected into numerous volumes, focus by custom on one word at a time. That's exactly how you focus when you're spelling, and somewhere I've stashed a clipping from the New York Times, an authoritative letter on why it's only students of English who need spelling classes. It seems that in other European languages words are normally spelled as they're pronounced, though here it's the rough cough and the hiccough that must plough us through.

Still, however necessary attention to spelling may be, it needn't entail rituals the like of spelling bees. There's a story, documented, about folk in -- was it Nebraska? -- whose nineteenth-century ritual was to circulate weekend by weekend to one another's parlors for an evening of, yes, spelling. Imagine that in Sussex! No, it seems specifically North American. And why?

Well, a wonderful article by Michael West ("Spellers and Punsters," Southwest Review, Autumn 1987) derives the U.S. phenomenon from Noah Webster, whose blue-backed Speller "sold some 75 million copies throughout the nineteenth century." It was "perhaps the world's best seller after the Bible." For, as an imported language, English received from Webster a scrutiny it had not been accorded in England. Scrutiny discerned pedagogic chaos; nothing for that but drill. So students were "drilled relentlessly in long lists of three- and four-syllable words like alcoran, parallax, sumptuary, apostasy, and empyreal." We can imagine that "many written words first impinged on the juvenile consciousness as darkly mysterious phonetic formulae, to be savored syllabically, reverently pronounced, and related to other words if possible by similarities of sound."

True, "the process was almost comically inadequate for fostering mass literacy." Yet, "When the American Adam awoke to literary consciousness in the verdant garden of the Republic, its schools thus encouraged him to utter his first written words in a spirit of quasi-magical naming." (If words are just syllabic sequences like "abracadabra," well, what's to be made of the way such a sequence interacts with some non-linguistic object?) Emerson, in "The Poet," the most influential essay ever written on these shores (it prompted the OED, but that's another story) exalted the Namer, who, using each thing's "own name and not another's," can nourish "the intellect, which delights in detachment or boundary." That led to Ezra Pound, who intoned a Confucian wisdom of "calling things by their names," and delighted in naming them via Chinese, Greek, Latin. And en route to Pound, it induced Whitman, whose huge catalogues West rightly ascribes to a poet who thought of himself as "primal namer." What, after all, are Catalogues? It's easy to reduce them to just Lists of Words.

And Table LIII of Webster's Speller could save "from terminal boredom" a student who had "persevered to the end." Its five pages listed "Words of the same sound, but different in spelling and signification." Scanning it, you were prompted to think that you must groan until you're grown. As early as 1854 a man named Hill wrote in Putnam's magazine that bad puns derived from the spelling book, which confined attention "to syllables and to the cold relations between ideas they suggest." Hill was right about genesis, wrong about impulse. Puns abound wherever people are fluent in a language they sense is yet not quite theirs. In Jamaica, where excellent English abounds, you'll find a Sneakey Peach Road, likewise a shop for skin-divers' equipment called Lady G'Diver. In Ireland too they feel detached from the English they use constantly. One result: a quintessentially Irish book made of multi-thousands of multi-lingual puns. Its title? Finnegans Wake.

In nineteenth-century America, puns, passed from editor to editor, absorbed decades of attention. "Why is Noah Webster like the Devil? Because he takes you from our Saviour" -- a word Webster insisted should be spelled minus the u. I don't claim such capers are witty; I do claim they illustrate a remarkable detachment from printed language. No longer a notation for speech, it's an assemblage of nigh arbitrary signs. That aligns it with "OK," which appeared among "a sportive group of young sparks as an abbreviation for the comically misspelled catchphrase oll koreect." Picked up in 1840 by "Tammany rowdies" who wanted to push the candidacy of Van Buren (known as Old Kinderhook), OK "swept the country and eventually the world."

Is the theme of all this evanescing as you read? I hope not; I'm seeking to offer a context for a North American interest in single, separate words. "Why is imprisonment like a person eating dinner in the rail cars?" asked an 1844 magazine. "Because it's in-cars-a-ration." Yes, bad; but "such jokes pleased an audience who had been relentlessly drilled in dividing words syllabically, then spelling them by sounding them out." And that led to the Spelling Bee, and to long Nebraska evenings, documented. All of which enjoys one apotheosis in Bill Buckley, not eccentric, no, echt American.

But echt, is that perchance American? Well, it's audible enough in America to be found in the 1983 Random House Unabridged, page 618, though they're careful to mark it "German." For no, you can't be too careful.