The American Spectator

Regarding the review of James Webb’s Born Fighting by Sheila Monaghan, no quibble with her interesting review, but I do have a bone to pick with Webb’s choice to call the Scotch-Irish “Scots-Irish.” Oh, please. Is this more of the smarmy use of UK words and phrases to replace venerable American usage, such as “gone missing” for “disappeared,” or “tarmac” for “ramp”? How long will it be before we see media and university types calling gasoline “petrol,” and pronouncing lieutenant “leftenant”?

In the case of “Scotch-Irish,” the classic work is by James G. Leyburn, which he calls, oddly enough, The Scotch-Irish. It’s published by the University of North Carolina. Then there is the venerable, The Scotch-Irish in North America, by Henry Jones Ford, published by Princeton.

Dale Van Every’s classic four-volume history, The Frontier People of America, repeatedly refers to the Scotch-Irish — never the “Scots-Irish.” He notes that these were the people that Lord Dunmore referred to as “Americans” in his famous defense: “I have learnt from experience that the established authority of any government in America, and the policy of government at home, are both insufficient to restrain the Americans; and that they will do and remove as their avidity and restlessness incite them….”

David Hackett Fischer, in Albion’s Seed, says the “Scotch-Irish” — not Scots-Irish — “who came to America included a double-distilled selection of some of the most disorderly inhabitants of a deeply disordered land.”

I could go on almost endlessly, but you get the picture. Calling the good old Scotch-Irish “Scots-Irish” is historical prettifying. I hope it wasn’t Webb’s original title, but the result of some Vassar-educated editor’s hectoring.