The lexical and polyglot genius

This is a long essay today, but enjoy reading it carefully, because you will be rewarded by having a complete understanding of the current problem we have now regarding Thomas Jefferson.

Exactly 201 years ago today, on November 9, 1825, at 82 years old, Thomas Jefferson sat at his desk at Monticello and wrote a remarkable letter to a British politician named John Evelyn Denison. In this correspondence, written during his final twilight years, the elderly statesman celebrated a growing revival of interest in the ancient Anglo-Saxon language. He argued passionately that this early dialect had been ruined by stuffy academics who forced it into the rigid rules of Latin and Greek grammar. Jefferson believed that by stripping away these unnecessary scholarly embarrassments and adopting a simplified spelling system, Old English could become a normal part of common school education. This specific letter highlights a hidden side of the third president that most people completely forget about. His massive achievements as a founding father often overshadow the intricate, systematic nature of his intellectual genius.

Jefferson did not look at language as a frozen relic of the past. Instead, he saw it as a living tool that must change as human knowledge grows. He was a passionate champion of "neology", which is the systematic act of inventing and introducing new words. He was also a talented polyglot who could use multiple languages from ancient history, Europe, and Native American nations. He routinely spent up to 14 hours a day reading and writing, driven by an insatiable curiosity. By studying his old letters, government papers, and his massive library, which eventually grew so large it became the foundation for the Library of Congress, capable historians have shown how Jefferson actively changed the English language while taking part in the global ideas of the Enlightenment.

Jefferson believed that a free, growing democratic society needed a growing vocabulary to explain new ideas. On August 15, 1820, he wrote a letter to his close friend John Adams to defend his ideas about language. Jefferson wrote that he loved "neology" because it was the only way to give a language copiousness, which means plentiful words, and euphony, which means a pleasing sound. He noted that dictionaries are just storage spaces for words that people already use.

The Oxford English Dictionary credits Jefferson with introducing or being the first to write down over 100 words and nearly 400 unique meanings. He did not just make up random sounds; he used his deep knowledge of Latin and Greek roots to build words that filled missing gaps in politics, science, and daily American life. For example, the Declaration of Independence’s final version has the word “unalienable” but in Jefferson’s original draft, he used the word “inalienable.” To everyday people, they are the same. But “inalienable” pairs its Latinate prefix with its Latinate root and suffix, producing a more consistent morphological structure. His mastery of English is incomparable.

His most famous and culturally important word choice appeared in his 1788 book, Notes on the State of Virginia. He wrote it to argue against a famous French naturalist named Count de Buffon. Buffon claimed that the environment in America was weak, causing animals and humans to suffer physical degeneration, which means worsening or shrinking in quality. Jefferson invented the specific word "belittle" in 1788 to fight back against this French insult and attack European claims that America causes degeneration. British critics hated it at first, calling it a vulgar Yankeeism, but it became an official word when Noah Webster put it in his 1806 dictionary. His vocabulary soon grew to help many other parts of American life through specific words he invented or popularized. As an avid fossil collector, he kept ice-age mastodon bones spread out across the floor of the White House East Room. He created the word "Megalonyx" in 1796 from Greek roots that mean giant claw to name a newly found, extinct Ice Age ground sloth after studying its fossils and presenting them to the American Philosophical Society.

He created the word "indecipherable" in 1799 by adding negative prefixes to describe messy handwriting or secret diplomatic codes that could not be decoded. He popularized the word "electioneering" during the intense presidential election of 1800 to describe the strategic work of campaigning and hunting for political votes. He invented the word "neologize" in 1801 to give an official name to the exact act of creating and introducing new words into a language. He introduced the word "lengthily" in 1816 as a new adverbial form of the word lengthy to describe speeches or written arguments that drag on way too long. His highly detailed farm logs and travel journals also show the earliest written uses of lifestyle terms like "leaf lettuce" in 1795, "Riesling" in 1788, and "rubber tree" in 1826, connecting European science with practical American farming.

Jefferson’s linguistic genius also showed in his skills as a polyglot. He studied, read, or spoke at least six major languages with high proficiency. In an August 1817 letter to publisher Joseph Delaplaine, Jefferson looked back at his education and stated that he could read Greek, Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, and English, along with its ancient radix, which means the root or structural foundation, Anglo-Saxon.

His skill level changed depending on whether he was speaking, writing, or just reading. His intense classical education in Latin and Ancient Greek started at age nine under Reverend William Douglas and Reverend James Maury. He learned to read and write both languages fluently. While Greek was purely for reading literature, he could speak Latin when he needed to, which was a standard skill in 18th-century academic diplomacy. Jefferson compiled his own distilled version of the Bible by cutting up copies of the New Testament with a razor and pasting the verses side by side in Greek, Latin, French, and English to compare the texts. To master different ideas and philosophies, he preferred to read works in their original language instead of a translation.

Jefferson was also completely fluent in French, a language he could read, write, and speak effortlessly. This skill was incredibly important when he lived overseas as the American Minister to France from 1784 to 1789, serving as his main way to talk with European thinkers and politicians during the height of the Enlightenment.

Jefferson taught himself Italian and practiced it a lot with his close friend Philip Mazzei, a physician from Tuscany who moved near Monticello in 1773. Jefferson read Italian literature deeply and spoke it comfortably, noting in his 1788 travel logs that his primary spoken languages were English, French, Italian, and Latin. His Spanish was mostly limited to reading. Jefferson claimed he taught himself Spanish in just 19 days while sailing across the Atlantic Ocean to France in 1784, using a borrowed grammar book and a copy of the novel Don Quixote. Even though he could not speak it perfectly, he knew it had massive geopolitical value for the future of the American continent, so he pushed his daughter Martha to study it.

Beyond these six main languages, Jefferson worked as a passionate comparative linguist. He treated the study of philology, which is the study of the structure and history of languages, as a window into human history and law. He studied Anglo-Saxon, or Old English, deeply because he saw it as the foundation of English law and personal freedom, and he later fought to make it an official class at the University of Virginia. He could read basic German, but he wrote in his 1788 diaries that he could not speak it well enough to have an easy conversation with locals along the Rhine Valley. In an effort that lasted over 30 years, Jefferson also collected the vocabularies of more than 50 Native American languages. He printed out matching word lists to track how tribes migrated and to figure out their historical lineages.

Tragically, a thief stole the trunk containing these papers when Jefferson moved home from Washington in 1809. Thinking the trunk contained gold, the thief broke it open, realized it was just paper, and threw the documents into the James River. Jefferson tried to rescue the mud-soaked papers from the riverbank, leaving them to dry in the Virginia sun, but decades of original linguistic research were mostly destroyed. After he died in 1826, lists of his library books also showed dictionaries and grammar guides for Arabic, Gaelic, and Welsh, proving his curiosity about the wider global human experience. When the Library of Congress purchased his world-class library, his federalist opponents complained that some of the books were not in English but in some other language they could not understand.

The link between Thomas Jefferson’s deep intelligence and the way modern historians write biographies has created a major debate about how we judge historical figures. In recent decades, a popular trend among modern scholars has been the use of retrospective psychoanalysis on people from the past. Historians frequently try to dissect Jefferson's inner thoughts, emotional anxieties, and hidden defense mechanisms to explain his political contradictions, his views on race, and his private life at Monticello. This specific strategy of using modern mental health theories to evaluate historical figures is called psychohistory or psychobiography. However, this approach faces heavy criticism from traditional scholars and philosophers. Critics argue that modern writers are fundamentally unequipped to accurately psychoanalyze an intellect of Jefferson's magnitude. They argue there is a massive cognitive and cultural gap between a 21st-century university professor and a top-tier polymath of the Enlightenment.

To understand why this historical psychoanalysis fails, one must look at the flaws of the practice itself. Clinical psychoanalysis requires real-time conversation, behavioral observation, and personal honesty from a living patient. When dealing with a historical figure, it turns into guesswork based entirely on fragmented old letters. Historians who do this often project modern therapy terms, cultural habits, and political biases backward onto a completely different time era, which is a logical mistake known as anachronism.

In Jefferson's case, biographers often mistake his emotional restraint for trauma or repression. In reality, hiding one's heavy emotions was a highly disciplined, expected habit of 18th-century Enlightenment culture. The concept of the Virginia gentleman was a famous cultural ideal. Such an individual was expected to lead their communities while displaying courtesy, fortitude, temperance, prudence, and justice toward others. Jefferson designed his private home, Monticello, with architectural features like dumbwaiters and hidden passages specifically to limit interaction with people and preserve his personal privacy. By forcing Jefferson into a modern therapeutic framework, biased historians reduce his complex, calculated philosophical choices down to mere symptoms of a personal mental illness.

The main argument against these psychobiographers is that they suffer from the arrogance of temporal proximity. This is the false belief that because we live in the modern world with advanced technology, we are automatically smarter than people from the past. When a specialized modern writer tries to map the subconscious mind of a polymath, they hit a strict cognitive ceiling. They are trying to retroactively diagnose an intellect that was structurally more complex, more widely read, and more conceptually fluid than their own. Modern cognitive researchers who study historical geniuses have retrospectively estimated Jefferson's IQ to be around 160, putting him in the absolute highest tier of human capability. Jefferson's thought processes were built on the strict, logical rules of Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and John Locke, who were the three men he considered the greatest to ever live.

This massive difference in intellectual wavelength shows up in specific ways when modern historians look at Jefferson's life. First, they misinterpret Enlightenment rationalism. Historians often psychoanalyze Jefferson’s intense obsession with tracking data, like his logs of every seed planted or his daily weather diaries, as a sign of an obsessive-compulsive need for control. They miss the point. This was not a personal neurosis; it was the literal foundation of the Scientific Revolution. Jefferson tracked nature because he believed collecting scientific data was a supreme human duty, not a psychological coping mechanism. He recorded the exact temperature at Philadelphia on July 4, 1776, right in the middle of the American Revolution, showing his lifelong commitment to tracking data over personal drama. Similarly, Jefferson wrote letters to answer scientific inquiries even in the midst of Presidential duties.

Second, they reduce his deep philosophical convictions. Jefferson lived out one of the most glaring moral paradoxes in history by authoring the words that all men are created equal while owning hundreds of slaves. Instead of grappling with this deep, tragic conflict between abstract natural law and the crushing socio-economic structures of the 18th century, psychohistorians make it small. They label it as simple cognitive dissonance or personal compartmentalization, treating a massive historical and philosophical failure as if it were just a localized mental struggle.

Third, they make errors based on speculative assumptions. This trend became highly popular in 1974 when a historian named Fawn Brodie published Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History. Brodie argued that historians should look past hard facts and look at metaphors to guess what Jefferson was thinking. For example, if Jefferson wrote enthusiastically about the beautiful architecture of France, Brodie claimed it was a subconscious psychological defense mechanism to hide repressed sexual desires. Famous traditional scholars like Dumas Malone — who spent four decades to complete his authoritative six-volume biography of Jefferson — rejected this, writing that Brodie’s work carried psychological speculation to the point of absolute absurdity. Modern authors like Annette Gordon-Reed have faced similar critiques. Analysts note that this method allows a writer to start with a psychological assumption about Jefferson, and then selectively pick historical clues to force their own theory to look right.

Ultimately, the attempt to psychoanalyze Thomas Jefferson tells us more about the biases and limitations of modern historians than it does about the mind of the third president. That does not help the student reader at all. History is most accurate when it judges a figure based on their explicit philosophy, their documented actions, and the context of their era. When scholars abandon hard text to play the role of a retrospective therapist, they inevitably fail. They cannot bridge the chasm between a conventional academic perspective and the sweeping, multifaceted wavelength of an Enlightenment genius, leaving their psychological conclusions looking less like historical truth and more like speculative fiction.

In conclusion, Thomas Jefferson’s linguistic genius was not a mere hobby, but a vital component of his visionary intellect. He recognized that a nation seeking to break free from the constraints of the Old World required a vocabulary that could match its sweeping political ideals. By introducing dozens of functional new words to the English lexicon, mastering the prominent tongues of Western civilization, and confounding the reductionist attempts of modern retrospective analysis, Jefferson ensured that the American republic could both communicate its novel identity to the world and draw directly from the deepest wells of human history.