from Made in America by Bill Bryson

BV T H E DAWN'S EARLY LIGHT

79

m o s t every sentence had an acre of flowery verbiage between the subjCC!

and predicate. A single sentence gives some hint of its denseness:

Lord Bacon, in the true marshalling of the sovereign degrees of

honor," assigns the first place to the Condirotores [mperiorum,
founders of States and Commonwealths"; and truly, to build up
fiom the discordant elements of our nature, the passions. the inter
ests and the opinions of the individual man, the rivalries of family,
clan and tribe, the influences of climate and geographical position,
the accidents of peace and w a r accumulated for a g e s t o build up
from those oftentimes warring elements a wellcompacted, pros
perous and powerfial State, if it were to be accomplished by one ef
fort or in one generation would require a more than mortal skill

And this was just one of some fifteen hundred equally windy sen
tences. At 2 R M . , t w o long, cold hours after starting, Everett concluded
his speech to thunderous applausemotivated, one is bound to suspect.
more by the joy of realizing it was over than by any message derived
from the contentand turned the dais over to President Lincoln. The
audience of perhaps fifteen thousand people had been standing for four
hours, and was tired, cold, and hungry. Lincoln rose awkwardly, like a
telescope drawing out. asone contemporary put i t , adjusted his glasses,
held the paper directly in front of his face, and in a high, reedy voice de
livered his address. H e barely took his eyes ofl"the manuscript," accord
ing to one witness, ashe intoned those famous words:

Four score and seven years ago o u r fathers brought forth on this
continent a n e w nation. conceived in liberty and dedicated to the
proposition that all men are created equal.
N o w we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that n a
tion or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.
We are m e t on a great battlefield of that war. We have c o m e to ded
icate aportion of that field asa final resting place for those who here
gave their lives that that nation might live. It isaltogether fitting and
proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicatewe c a n n o t conse
hallowthis ground. The brave men, living and
dead, who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor
power to add or detract. The world will little n o t e n o t long remem
ber what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It
is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished
work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.
c r a t t h w e cannot

MADE lN AMERICA

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining

before usthat from these honored dead we take increased devotion
to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion;
that we here highly resolve that these dead shall n o t have died in
vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a n e w birth of freedom;
and that government of the people, by the people, for the people
shall n o t perish fi'om the earth.

Though Lincoln was never expected to provide anything other than

some concluding remarks, this was breathtakingly brief. The Gettysburg
Address contained just 268 words, twothirds of them of only one syl
lable, in t e n mostly short, direct, and memorably crystalline sentences. It
took only a fraction over t w o minutes to deliverso little, according to
several contemporary accounts, that the official photographer was still
making preliminary adjustments to his camera when the President sat
down.
Far from taking the listener on a discursive trip through the majestic:
of imperial Rome or the glory that was Greece, the address contained no
proper nouns at all. As Garry Wills notes, it doesnt mention Gettysburg
or slavery or even the Union. Lincoln thought it a failure. I failed: I
failed: and that is about all that can be said about it," he remarked for
lornly to Everett. Many agreed with him The Chicago Timer wrote:
The check of every American must tingle with shame ashe reads the
silly, flat and dishwatery utterances of the man who has to be pointed o u t
to intelligent foreigners as the President of the United States. Even
newspapers sympathetic to Lincoln scarcely noted his address. N o t until
considerably later was it perceived as perhaps the greatest of American
speeches.

The Gettysburg Address also marked a small but telling lexical transi
tion. Beforethe Civil War, people generally spoke of the Union, with its
implied emphasis on the voluntariness of the American confederation.
In his first inaugural address, Lincoln invoked the Union twenty n'mes,
and nation n o t at all. Three years of bloody Civil War later, the Gettys
burg Address contained five mentions of nation and n o t one of union.
We have come to take for granted the directness and accessibility of
Lincolns prose, but we should remember that this was an age of ludi
crously inflated diction, n o t only among politicians, orators, and literary
aesthetes, but even in newspapers. As Kenneth Cmiel n o t e s in Democratic
Eloquence, no nineteenthcentury journalist with any selfrespect would
write that a house had burned down, but must instead say that a great
conflagration consumed the edifice." N o r would he be content with a

1m

the Cement. Celebrating the Style

23

To appitadate the significance of chm oftenmisundemood words,

let's return to o u t three people describing the picture.

n In t h . abremenflnned picture In elderly woman is

about to speak in a middle aged wmnan who looks condescending
and whining.
museumlseemoldwmmnlooldngblckonhflyenrs remem
b a r i n n g it w to be beautiful and yvullg.
mm 3; m.- ahl w n i n a n ii . witch in anniething. She looks
k i n d . lilaa uh. ii coaxing the young one In do iii-mining.
Hanson

Nawiinagiue that somnlewuonlyabletospnktoyaumingfllehigh

lighted rter words whila trying to describe the picture. le would have
absolume no idea what the person was talking about.
Why make sud: a big deal about .tyh wards? Because pm
a u u i u , preponqu and m h g r function word: are dhe keys in the soul.
ox. maybe Lhzz's a bit if an wemntemenL but bear with m e , Stealth
midi m

- usedatveryhighmea
. shurtandlimliodem
- ymusaadinthhhuiudiflereutlythnucauleutwmds

Eachat these fixture: helps in explain why function words are psy
chologically unpnmnt and. at the same time, why sofew people have
examined them closely. Stealth womla, then, really are quite stylish. it's
about time that these forgettable. throwaway little words get their due.
F u N C T I O N W O R D S I N E V E R Y D AY L A N G U A G E :

THEY'RE

EVERYWHERE

In 1363, flour months after the devastating Battle 01 Gettysburg, Abra

hamunmlndalivmedmeuflhemostsigniflcamspeecheshlAmeflnan

24

T H E SECRET L I F E OF PRONOUNS

history. Overlooking the battlefield where 7,500 soldiers died, Lincolns

brief speech helped to reframe the Civil War. Read his speech quickly
so that you can form an impression of whats being said.
Four score and seven years ago o u r fathers brought forth, upon this

continent, a new nation, conceived in

Liberty, and dedicated to the

proposition that all m e n are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that
nation, or any nation soconceived, and sodedicated, can long
endure. We are m e t here ona great battlefield of that war. We have
come to dedicate a portion of it asa final resting place for those
who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether

fitting and proper that weshould dothis.

But in a larger sense we can not dedicatewe can not
Consecratewe can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living
and dead, who struggled. here, have consecrated it far above our poor
power to add or detract. The world will little note, n o r long remem
ber, what we say here, but c a n never forget what they did here.
It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the

unfinished work which they have, thus far, sonobly carried on. It
is rather for usto be here dedicated to the great task remaining
before usthat from these honored dead we take increased
devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure
of devotionithat we here highly resolve that these dead shall not
have died in vain; that this nation shall have a new birth of free
dom; and that this government of the people, by the people, for the
people, shall n o t perish from the earth.
Now, close your eyes and reflect on the content of the speech.
Which words occurred most frequently? In your mind, try to recall
which words Lincoln used the most in penning such apowerful speech.
Im serious. Shut your eyes and make a list in your mind of the most

frequently usedwords in this speech.

Ignoring the Content, Celebrating the Style

25

OK, you can open your eyes. Most unsuspecting people who are
asked to do this will think the most common words are nation, war,
men, and possibly dead. You probably wont be surprised to learn that

function words are far more frequent than any content words. In this
particular speech, the most commonly used word was that, which was
used twelve times and accounted for 4.5 percent of all the words in the
speech. Other frequently used words: the (4.1 percent), we (37 per
cent), here (3.5 percent), to (3.0 percent), a (2.6 percent), and (2.2 per
cent), can, for, have, i t , not, of, this (1.9 percent each). In fact, these
fourteen little words account for almost 37 percent of all the words Lin
coln used in this beautifully crafted speech. Only one content word isin
the top fifteen, nation, which was used only 1.9 percent of the times It is
remarkable that such a great speech can be largely composed of small,
insignificant words.
A very small number of stealth words accounts for most of the
words we hear, read, and say. Over the last twenty years, my colleagues
and I have amassed a very large collection of text files that includes
thousands upon thousands of natural conversations, books, Internet
blogs, music lyrics, Wikipedia entries, etc, representing billions of words.
Although there are some variations in word use depending on what
people are writing or saying, it is striking to see how common function
words are in all types of text.
Spend a minute inspecting the word table on the next page. This
is a list of the twenty most commonly used words in English based on
our large language bank Across both written and spoken text, for
example, the word 1 accounts for 3.6 percent of all words that are used.
If you consider these twenty words together, they represent almost
30 percent of all words that people use, read, and hear.
Notice that all of the words in the table are quite short and are made
up exclusively of pronouns, preposifions, conjunctions, articles, and auxil
iary verbs. Ifwe extendedthe list to all of the common stealth or function
words in English, the list would include around 450 words. Indeed, these
4.50 words account for over half (55 percent) of all the words we use.

Brought Forth, Conceived, Dedicated

blog.constitutioncenter.org /2013/11/brought-forth-conceived-dedicated/
Brandeis University English Professor John Burt wrote one of the most-praised books about Abraham Lincoln in recent
years. In this essay for Constitution Daily, Burt talks about the three verbs that define the first sentence of the Gettysburg
Address.

The verbs of the first sentence of the Gettysburg Address are drawn from
organic life, and they imagine the United States as a developing child. The
new nation is conceived (by the Fathers), brought forth (upon this
continent), and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
And the speech ends by projecting a new birth of freedom, transmuting, by
means of a life-giving idea, the deaths of the men who struggled in that place
into a new form of life, held in common by the entire nation, North and
South, Black and White. Even the date of the Declaration of Independence
(Fourscore and seven years ago) is given in terms that call to mind the
biblical phrase from Psalm 90 for the length of a human life.
This organic metaphor was noticed at the time by several hostile critics. The
New York World, for instance, ridiculed the speech for representing the
fathers in the stages of conception and parturition, and the Boston Daily
Courier sneered at the obstetric allusion. But the organic metaphor plays
several important purposes in the rhetoric of the speech.
First, as John Channing Briggs has pointed out, if the nation grows like a child, then the founders can beget it
and nurture it, and they can dedicate it, but they cant assemble it or design it. The nation is not to be seen as
the product of a contract, something subject to strict construction, and completely subordinated to the plan of
the founders, but rather is to be seen as something that grows from within, in its own way, towards ends which
it gropingly, and only gradually, realizes. A child like this one, a dedicated child, is born with a calling, but it
must find its own way to realizing that calling, and even its parents cannot fully understand where that calling
will take it, although they know where it began, and how it began to take shape. The dedication of the young
nation is not merely a covenant, but a baptism, the giving of its true name, the sign that its identity includes a
destiny which, at that moment, could only be seen as in a glass darkly.
DEFINING THE WAR IN AN UNEXPECTED WAY

A second effect of the organic metaphor of the first sentence is that it enabled Lincoln to define the meaning of
the Civil War in an unexpected way. If the nation is a growing child, the Civil War is an almost inevitable, lifethreatening childhood trauma which either kills or transforms the child. By phrasing the legacy of the
Declaration as a proposition rather than as a self-evident truth, Lincoln implied that that legacy has to be
tested, has to undergo a trial by fire before its truth can be recognized. What is at stake is not the mere survival
of the United States, but whether any society dedicated to equality can survive. Moreover, any society dedicated
to equality must risk a similar test, and cannot authentically affirm equality until it has undergone such a test.
The republic had to survive the almost mortal test of Civil War as children had to survive the almost mortal test
of disease.
The citizens watch over their imperiled republic was analogous to the parents watch over their dangerously ill
children, a touchstone of nineteenth century fiction from Little Nell to Little Eva to Beth March. Lincoln
himself, during the ceremony at the Gettysburg National Cemetery, still wore the black band on his hat he put
on after the death of his son Willie the previous year.

In all of these novels of the death of children from Uncle Toms Cabin to Little Women the dying children
became a source of transformative wisdom to their grieving families. Eva St. Clair in Uncle Toms Cabin, for
instance, saw the wrong of slavery clearly, and, in dying, brought her father to recognize that wrong, something
he had perhaps dimly known from the beginning, but had never fully acknowledged to himself, blinded as he
was by the ironies and double-binds of adulthood. The care and grief of the worried parent is transformed into
the wisdom given that parent by the dying child, and the direction of the action reverses itself, so that the
parents, who dedicated the child, are rededicated by their dying children to a cause the children saw more clearly
than their parents did. Indeed, in the final movement of the Gettysburg Address, in which the living are
rededicated by the dead, only the experience of mourning their children frees the adults, as Mr. St. Clair is
freed, from illusions, in the citizens case the illusion that the aim of the war is restoration of the old Union
rather than the development of equality, an illusion in which they would otherwise have been imprisoned
forever.
The fiery trial of the Union differs in one crucial respect from the deaths of children in 19th century fiction, and
that is that a childhood disease is a random event, whereas the trial of democracy is built into the design of
democracy itself. Democracy could not develop without this trial, and what democracy becomes under pressure
of this trial is more truly what democracy is than what it was beforehand: only the mortal pressure of civil war
forces an honest reckoning with the problem of democracy, and without what Melville called the power of a
bullet to undeceive, democracy would have settled for an illusory life, a once-born life without a new birth of
freedom. Without the violence of the war, Union-loyal Americans, Lincoln included, would have settled for
that oxymoron, a slaveholder democracy. Further, without the proper reflection on the meaning of the war,
Lincoln implies, America might settle for another oxymoron, racist democracy. The war, this is to say, is a
necessary episode in the becoming of democracy, without which democracy cannot come to fulfillment.
When we wonder whether a nation will endure we wonder rather more than merely whether it will be able to
continue. Enduring is something you do, something that requires stern strength of will; surviving is just
something that happens to you. To endure is to face down suffering; indeed, it is to continue bear the mark of
that suffering past the end of suffering. Even more than survive, the word endure registers a continuing
struggle for life, and registers also that the struggle itself is somehow transformative. Those who survive may
be exhausted and emptied by the experience, but those who endure have proven something about themselves
that otherwise might not have been expected.
Because the war is a necessary if almost fatal trauma in the growth of democracy neither side stands in a position
of moral privilege relative to the other: the nation must be tested, and North and South both have roles to play
in that test. The war is not the outcome of a malign conspiracy of slaveholders seeking to confirm themselves in
power. Nor is it a crusade by opponents of slavery against a signal evil. The war is a trial given to North and
South on account of slavery, an unavoidable although dangerous episode in the coming to be of democracy,
necessary because of their mutual complicity in slavery.
Conceiving of the war as an necessary trial of democracy also enabled Lincoln to account not only for the
meaning of the war, but also for why it was so violent, so long, and so inconclusive, for the Republic was given
to suffer until it learned to repudiate certain corrupt values slavery and inequality which it not only held
deeply but felt to be constitutive of its politics; the extended slaughter of the war was necessary to disabuse both
North and South of crippling illusions about democracy.
DEFINING AMERICAN LIFE

A third effect of Lincolns organic metaphor was to enable us to see America as an organic collective form of
life, as a nation rather than as merely a state, as something that has a biography, not just a history. A state is a
body of concrete institutions, laws, deliberative bodies, agencies of enforcement, regulation, and registration
an organization having a monopoly over the means of violence, to cite Max Webers pungent definition of the

state from Politics as a Vocation. A nation is something muddier but deeper. To a first approximation, a
nation is a people, but what makes a mass of human beings a people is hard to say.
In the 19th century, the role of making a mass of people into a nation was sometimes attributed to blood, and
more often to bloods metaphorical cousins, culture and language. Under that definition of nation, it is hard to
see that the term applies to the United States, whether in the 19th or in the 21st century. The United States has
typically imagined itself, except in eras of xenophobic frenzy such as the 1920s, or the 1850s (or the present), as
a nation of newcomers. The reason immigration can make one American is, as Lincoln argued in his 1858
Chicago speech, that political traditions in America stand in the place cultural history and language and blood
do in other nations. To be American is not a matter of blood but a matter of an idea.
When Matthew Arnold encountered the word proposition in the Gettysburg Address, he is said to have reacted
with disgust at the clash between the high biblical rhetoric of the opening phrase and the descent to the language
of legal pettifogging at its conclusion. But proposition is a word that has majesty for Lincoln, because it suggests
to him the principled drawing of a line, the definition of an identity-giving and life-risking moral stake. A
proposition is something one might nail to a cathedral door, or put ones name to, hazarding ones life and ones
sacred honor. A proposition is something one might be dedicated to.
A PROPOSITION ABOUT EQUALITY

Whatever the provenance of the word, the contrast between the organic bringing forth of the new nation, and
the metaphysical proposition to which it is dedicated, captures something of the central crux of the idea that
something like the United States can be a nation: it is made a nation not by blood or history but by an identityfounding commitment to a value, available to everyone, but given special local salience by being tested there and
then. This is why that proposition is about human equality, rather than about self-rule or limited government,
because equality is a value intended to transcend concrete political traditions and to resist being seen merely as
the upshot of a particular history and particular traditions, as, say the rights of Englishmen are. America is the
nation whose identity is created by its being in a position to test values it hopes will be found good for all
nations; its uniqueness is given to it by its calling of testing a set of values which, if they stand the test, are not
then to be seen as unique to it but as universal.
The word proposition captures the common awareness that American identity both is and is not organic. For
the immigrant, it is something chosen, but chosen in a way that has the identity-making power of something
given. For the native-born, it is something given, but is taken as if it were chosen, the fruit of agency rather than
agencys precondition. That is why the sentence uses the metaphor of baptism: the nation is dedicated to a
proposition, given its identity in that proposition, called into being as a test of that proposition, discovering its
meaning in piecing together the significance and the consequences of that proposition.
The aim of this dedication, the value Lincoln saw as at the heart of the prospective American character, is
equality, a value in fact not achieved by the United States then or now. Lincolns choice, like his choice of the
founding moment in 1776 rather than in 1787, the sweeping promises of the Declaration rather than the painful
and exacting compromises of the Constitution, was a polemical one. One could easily imagine another figure
choosing self-rule, the consent of the governed, before choosing equality. Or Lincoln could have chosen the
three inalienable rights, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Lincoln chose equality because it seemed to
him to be somehow logically prior to all of the others, because only moral equality enables one to distinguish
between self-rule as the political project of moral autonomy and self-rule as merely the habit of honor among
thieves. Only equality founds self-rule in respect for the human person; without equality self-rule is little more
than the privilege of exemption from servitude.
What the Civil War tests, Lincoln argued, is not only, as he might have said earlier, whether a government of
the people would be able to preserve its stability in the face of disagreements, or whether it must ever fracture
into ever smaller Confederacies whenever it faces a conflict. The issue was not even, as Lincoln had also said

elsewhere, only whether a minority can contest by force the majoritys fairly won power to rule, whether the
minority can claim by the bullet what it had lost by the ballot. The central issue, from which all of the other
issues depended, was whether any government was capable of making and keeping the promise of equality. As
the issue of slavery somehow underlay the issue of the tariff, of internal improvements, and of strict or loose
construction of the Constitution, so under all of the other things at stake in the war, under Union, under
political stability, under majority rule, lay the issue of racial equality.
Lincoln did not say that the equality he had in mind was racial equality. But he did not have to, since class
equality or gender equality or ethnic equality were not at the center of a great war. Freedom and equality are not
contrary values for Lincoln, for freedom as a political value depends upon the mutual acknowledgment of free
persons as free persons; freedom is agency, and agency happens only among moral equals. That is why, towards
the end of the speech, Lincoln imagined that the fruit of a victory in a war over moral equality will be a new
birth of freedom, the transformation of freedom into a deeper thing than the ability of the strong to exploit the
weak without interference by any third party. The new birth of freedom can only be a new depth of
acknowledgment, such as that later embodied in the three Reconstruction amendments to the constitution,
whose actual contents Lincoln had not yet imagined, and which the Republic had no sooner articulated than it
thoroughly betrayed.
Lincoln did not specify the particulars of the new birth of freedom, although certainly it has something to do
with the proposition that all men are created equal. The realization of a new commitment to equality, not mere
military victory, is the test of Union success in the war. We will not know who really won the war, Lincoln
argued, until we know what kind of Union emerges out of it. Lincoln did not in so many words press the issues
that were later embodied in the three Reconstruction Amendments, only the first of which could have been in
his focal attention anyway. But the test of a new birth of freedom is a stern one, and it is not certain even to this
day how close our Republic is to passing that test.