These United States
(Posted by John)
Like a good law student, I was perusing my Constitutional Law book today. Along the way, I found a sort of linguistic diamond in the rough:
“Prior to the Civil War, ‘the United States’ was treated as a plural noun. In Dred Scott, for example, the Court referred to a federal statute passed during the War of 1812 that referred to ‘the war in which the United States are engaged.’ After the Civil War, by contrast, ‘the United States’ became a singular noun.” Stone, Seidman, Sunstein, Tushnet, and Karlan. Constitutional Law,6th Ed. Aspen Publishers. 2009. p 451
When I read this, I was immediately reminded of Sandeep’s post on the linguistic legacy of 9/11, where he discusses the effects wars have had on our language. The change from “are” to “is” that the Civil War brought about is minuscule in size, but ginormous in meaning. It reflects a profound reinterpretation of the relationship between one state and another, as well as between the states and the federal government. The shift marks the real beginning of the public’s acknowledgment that the federal government would expand its control over the states. Personally, I think it’s super cool that this tiny linguistic indicator is as important as any analysis of federal statutes or court opinions in figuring out when this trend began.
Oh, and don’t forget to vote for The Diacritics here for the Best Grammar Blog of 2011!!
johnwcowan, 
Bander Alfraikh, 
Richard White, and 3 others are discussing. 
The Diacritics 10:22 pm on September 28, 2011 Permalink |
Interesting! Also, what about colloquially referring to the United States as “the states”? The last instance of “the states” as referring to the U.S. in the OED is in 1890. Of course, people still do use it today. I have a hunch, though, that “the states” is more common outside of this country than inside it. I wonder if that’s a cultural thing that’s associated with the post-Civil War shift you reference here. –Sandeep
The Diacritics 1:05 pm on September 29, 2011 Permalink |
Sandeep, here’s a test for whether “the states” is being used as the states collectively or as a shortened form of “the United States” (so “the States”)
(1) I’m from the states, which is a good place to live.
(2) *I’m from the states, which are a good place to live.
(3) I’m from the states, which is currently experiencing difficult economic times.
(4) *I’m from the states, which are currently experiencing difficult economic times.
I like (1) and (3), thus the asterisks before (2) and (4). Those really do sound wrong to me. If you agree, then it does just look like we’re saying “the States” as a shortened form of the singular United States.
I chose those examples, because, interestingly enough, I have trouble with the simpler sentences you might think to use as a test, in (5) and (6) below.
(5) ?The states is an awesome place.
(6) ???The states are an awesome place.
I think the fact that these sound weird, but (6) worse than (5), is evidence that we are trying to use “the states” singularly. But it gets complicated, and thus the sentences sound weird, because “the states” is typically a plural syntactic object (unlike the United States, which is now a singular entry in the lexicon). We get around this problem by placing some syntactic barriers between “the states” and its verb (i.e. the complementizer ‘which’). This lets us use “the States” (as a stand-in for the United States) without confounding it syntactically with the homophonous “the states.” Or something like that….
John
The Diacritics 6:24 pm on September 29, 2011 Permalink
The Indiana Journal in 1895 had some strong words about whether to use “is” or “are”… they called the former “ungramatical” (sic): http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F30F15FA3B5D15738DDDAD0A94DE405B8585F0D3
Sandeep
Sam 10:47 pm on September 28, 2011 Permalink |
Here’s a quick-and-dirty check of Google Ngram Viewer, which appears to support the claim (though with a transition date in the 1870s rather than 1860s): http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/ngrams/graph?content=The+United+States+is%2CThe+United+States+are&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3
(The search is case-sensitive, so the uppercase “T” in “the” eliminates noise from occurrences within phrases like “the powers of the United States are,” which otherwise will swamp the signal.)
johnwcowan 11:23 pm on September 28, 2011 Permalink |
Americans refer to “the States” only when they are somewhere else.
The OED cannot be safely trusted for 20th-century quotations. Even though the upper right corner says “Second edition, 1989″, only new words and new senses were added in that edition; that text is almost certainly unrevised OED1. Volume 9 part 1, which contained state, was published in 1919, but the underlying fascicle or installment containing the word, namely standard to stead, was published in 1915, so it’s unlikely that any quotations would be added thereafter.
The Diacritics 6:25 pm on September 29, 2011 Permalink |
Do you have a source for your first assertion? That’s what I suggested in my earlier comment above, but I don’t have any actual data.
Sandeep
Bander Alfraikh 3:29 am on September 29, 2011 Permalink |
Perhaps the most current word during the Civil War was Union, a singular word harbingering the shift from plural to singular in reference to the “States”. The shifts and shades of meaning words receive are often socio-cultural in nature as in this case although it is syntax that is affected here.
Josiah 3:55 am on September 29, 2011 Permalink |
Love this post. Something I’ve been thinking about, particularly in light of all the current political happenings in our country. I’m not sure if I remember correctly but I think “Remember the Titans” referenced on this idea once. Awesome post!
Richard White 8:29 am on September 30, 2011 Permalink |
Cf., inter alia, the following Language Log entries: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1794 and
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1831.
Richard White
Bander Alfraikh 2:45 am on October 3, 2011 Permalink |
I am also reminded here of similar constructions in Old English. The word “woman” was treated as masculine simply because the word ends with -man. Similarly, the United states ends in a plural, therefore, it should take the verb in the plural. This was the prevailing view of the prescriptive grammarins then. It would be equally interesting to find out if a word like “police” took “are” or “is” during the same period, the late 1890′s.
johnwcowan 11:31 pm on October 11, 2011 Permalink |
Not “simply because”, but because “woman” is a compound of “wife” (meaning “woman”) and “man”. Compounds take the grammatical gender of the last element in all Germanic languages that retain grammatical gender.