Introduces the concept of freedom of speech and the legal and social constraints on speech. Free speech is often framed as absolute, but in practice our speech is limited by laws – bans on obscenity, threats, even entire languages. Other social forces hedge our speech as well: parents and teachers attempt to steer our speech; employers tell us what to say and what not to say; and groups of friends set norms and exact punishments for speech behavior in social settings. In all, as speakers and writers we contend with explicit and implicit rules about what we can and cannot say.

The chapter explores efforts to answer how a community premised on a dislocation from the past, but comprised of people who bring with them their own pasts, locates itself in time. How does a community constituted by other pasts not simply blur into those pasts? I argue that in both Rome and the United States a particular type of Stranger, the corrosive Stranger, is constructed in response to this question. The corrosive Stranger is not defined against some preexistent purity, but is used to construct an imagined purity that gives a community a genealogy that distinguishes it from other communities and also posits a notion of true belonging that is different from juridical membership. I look at the different efforts by Cato the Elder, Cicero, and Varro for the Romans and then by Noah Webster for the United States to craft a genealogy of national identity that is defined against the threats of the corrosive Stranger. I then look at attempts by W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington to confront the burden of memory reflected in the Stranger marked by race who carries America’s own memory.

Noah Webster’s first dictionary, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language (1806) was the first significant dictionary by an American. His blue-backed speller, The American Spelling Book (1783) was already, after the Bible, the most popular book ever published in America. So his authority and reputation on matters linguistic were already firmly established in the public mindset by the time he published An American Dictionary of the English Language in 1828. It became a blueprint for how Americans might embrace their linguistic differences from Britain and use them to define a national identity. Webster’s dictionary beckoned a new era in national dictionaries beyond British shores. In addition, his lexicographic practice pioneered innovations in methodology that anticipated mainstream dictionary practice in twentieth-century America. This essay investigates Webster’s important contribution to English lexicography and the standardisation of American English, and compares it with the work of his competitor Joseph Worcester whose Comprehensive Pronouncing and Explanatory English Dictionary (1830) sparked vehement accusations of plagiarism in what became known as ‘the dictionary wars’. The chapter highlights the contribution of other American lexicographers such as Isaac Funk and Edward L. Thorndike, Willian Dwight Whitney, William A. Craigie, Calvert Watkins, Mitford M. Mathews, Frederic G. Cassidy, and Philip Gove.

This chapter focusses on Avis rescuing the faltering dictionary project after Lovell's unexpected death in 1960, after only two years at the helm of the project. It explores the intellectual background of Avis at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, where he met his future wife Faith Hutchison, who was one of the most educated women in all of Canada at the time. It traces Avis' academic socialization to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he was trained and surrounded by the best linguists and dialectologists of their day. Avis, just like Lovell, died relatively young of a heart attack, and there are a number of further parallels and differences between the two men that are highlighted. Parallels between Avis and Lovell on the one hand and Noah Webster and Henry L. Mencken, the American spokespeople for linguistic autonomy, round off the chapter.