Speaking the same language, as the history of American English itself amply confirms, can, however, be highly contentious. If a SHARED LANGUAGE is, on one hand, symbolic of the union, it can also be resonant of dependence and subjugation—of a lack of independent nationhood and individual identity. It was tensions such as these that underscored comment on language in 18th- and early 19th-century America. Rather than speaking the same language as that used in Britain, the American lexicographer Noah Webster persuasively urged the need to consolidate American English as a language variety.
Contranyms are words that have two opposite meanings. For instance, the word clips means both to attach together, and to cut apart.
"As an independent nation, our honour requires us to have a system of our own, in language as well as government," Webster forcefully argued in1789. "Great Britain, whose children we are, and whose language we speak, should no longer be our standard." The parental authority of the mother country (and a still-shared mother tongue) is here determinedly cast aside. Instead, speaking the "same" language, based in a superordinate Britain and a subordinate America, was no longer desirable, either politically or in terms of words and meanings. It was for such reasons that Webster stressed the need for an "American Dictionary of the English Language"—a work that consolidated national difference and confirmed rightful independence of language and nationhood alike.
4,000 new words are added each year to the Oxford English Dictionary. In 2019 the dictionary included words like Jedi, nomophobia and easy-breezy
"Speaking the same language" in this light emerges as a problematic ideal. The imposition of a single and overarching "standard" variety, whether based on American or British English, would elide the vitality and variation of the multi-voiced nature of English across the world. Samuel Johnson, in his dictionary, reflected that it is folly to restrain language in rules. Johnson instead celebrated the "spirit of English liberty", the resistance to autocratic dictate that a living language embodies. Language is, of course, ultimately a democracy, not a dictatorship. For the 21st century, it is the SPIRIT OF LIBERTY for "Englishes" that should prevail.
