Word: birthrights
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Tidelands is as fighting a word in Texas as Alamo was more than a century ago. Texans feel that the U.S. Government is rustling them out of their birthright. Texas was a sovereign nation which entered the Union voluntarily, and by the terms of the annexation agreement of 1845, she was allowed to retain control of her public domain, which, Texans say, stretches 10½ miles out into the Gulf of Mexico. Other coastal states claim the offshore oil under general provisions of the U.S. Constitution. The fact that Texas tidelands as yet have produced practically...
...himself an American historian of absolutely first rank, a shrewd political observer, and an old sourpuss. Democracy, republished this week for the first time in a quarter-century, is one of the two novels Adams wrote in his lifelong expostulation with a nation that failed to give him his birthright. Though the U.S. has achieved success and power far beyond Adams' gloomy dreams,* Democracy, first published anonymously in 1879, is still just about the best satire ever written about the Government of the U.S. "The Prairie Giant." The business of the book is, outwardly, to describe the adventures...
...says the hero of Devil's Advocate, looking back almost 40 years, the U.S. elected to the Presidency a man "whose twisted mind stands out against the black background of history like a conflagration." By his "Machiavellian villainy," the workers were induced to sell their birthright of freedom for a mess of security, the farmers were bribed with subsidies into fatted acquiescence, the middle class was almost obliterated...
...Francis Bacon, which entitles a barrister to take precedence in court, prevents him from acting against the Crown without special royal permission. The first American to receive the title: British-born Judah P. Benjamin, onetime Secretary of State of the Confederacy, who fled to England in 1865, reclaimed his birthright as a British subject, and was made Queen's Counsel...
...course of his labors, Editor Mathews restored to a number of words their proper birthright. Though the Oxford Dictionary contends that demoralize is French, Mathews tracked it down to Noah Webster, who used it in a pamphlet on the French Revolution and carefully noted in the margin that he was coining the word. In his own dictionary, Webster also noted the word congressional. But since he attributed it to a man named Barlow, the Oxford editors assumed he meant the 17th Century English bishop. The word was proved an Americanism when Mathews unearthed a letter from Webster...