Jeff Koons and the use of American English

The first attempt to standardize the American English variety and formalize its linguistic differences compared to those of British English was made by Noah Webster, an American lexicographer and writer, who wrote An American Dictionary of the English Language in 1828.

This dictionary was immediately recognized as the best work of the period concerning linguistic research because it provided 70,000 words with excellent definitions and meaning analyses. But the first important work published by Webster in 1783 was A Grammatical Institute of the English Language, which included an American English spelling handbook.

In 1787 the title was changed to The American Spelling Book and finally, in 1829, to The Elementary Spelling Book which was also known informally as The Blue-backed Speller because of its blue binding102. Webster was a strong proponent of the American spelling and already before 1790 he experimented several reforms in this linguistic area. The reasons for his reformist spirit were philological but mainly nationalistic, because he strongly sustained that the independent United States should not look to Great Britain as a linguistic model.

Concerning the spelling differences between AmE and BrE, they can be reduced to a few rules and they are mainly of systematic nature103. Among these spelling differences, the most important ones regard the American spellings -or where BrE has –our, as in favor, humor, labor, and the AmE –er where BrE has –re, for instance in words such as center, kilometer and liter. Some examples of these spelling peculiarities of the American English variety can be highlighted thanks to some statements extracted from Jeff Koons’ written interviews: