Call it misrepresentation: “Indian,” the name given to Native Americans; “America,” a name still appropriated to denominate the United States; “Lake George,” a name imposed on a lake “robbed,” Cooper writes, of “its original appellation of ’Horican‘”; “We, the people,” an inclusive term that excluded more people than it included; “person held to service,” the euphemism for a slave in the Constitution. The names of a people, the names on the land, the words of the Constitution all testify to a nature “disturb'd” by names and to the hold that the word has had over fact in a country invented by a declaration, governed by a constitution, and defended, in the words of Washington Irving's Mustapha Rub-a-Dub Keli Khan, “vi et lingua, that is to say, by force of tongues” (ILA, 144).

In several of the Salmagundi letters attributed to Mustapha and in The History of New York, Irving probes the nexus between word and act, language and violence, misrepresentation and tyranny in the American logocracy. Every man who has “the gift of the gab” in this state becomes “a soldier outright” (ibid.).