Word: jefferson
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...fireworks still in their ears, an art squabble that has been busying the Washington press for several weeks suddenly made Washington realize that last week's Cherry Blossom Festival might be the last for many years to come. To honor the memory of First Democrat Thomas Jefferson (in the words of the Republican Washington Post): "A terrain world famous for its beauty would become a replica of a western mining camp. A decade would scarcely suffice to restore its present charm." Back of the battle over Washington's Tidal Basin stands the amiable, aging figure of John Joseph...
Reader Kuebler is guilty of a careless misconstruction. TIME'S words were: "President Thomas Jefferson 132 years ago decided to uphold the doctrine of 'Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute.' " Ambassador Pinckney was not the author of this phrase. The spokesman appears to have been Representative Robert Goodloe Harper of South Carolina on the occasion of a dinner given by Congress to John Marshall, just returned from France, at Philadelphia in June...
Your story of the resuscitated Jefferson, Tex. Jimplecute in the March 22 issue may be responsible for giving the eternally lively American language a much-needed new word. From such otherwise meaningless terms, applied to simple and yet characteristically American phenomena, have come such good Americanisms as gerrymander, stogie, greenback, O.K., and boondoggle. They have appeared when need arose for describing a practice or an article not described with sufficient patness by any word of the standard language. Now if Mr. Foster's Jimplecute takes hold and flourishes again, the national tongue may be enriched with a useful word...
...1870s, a Cassandra appeared on this happy scene in the person of Jay Gould, who dickered with Jefferson's soft-spoken businessmen about the possibility of putting through a branch of his Texas & Pacific Railroad to connect the city overland northeast with Texarkana and the T. & P. main line. Annoyed when the Jeffersonians would not talk his kind of turkey, the black-whiskered railroad baron clapped on his plug hat and walked out croaking a curse on the whole pack of them: "Bats will roost in your belfries, trees thrust branches through mouldering buildings, grass grow in your streets...
Through all these civic misadventures, one of the liveliest of Jefferson's four dailies was a sheet with the incomprehensible title of The Jimplecute. Colonel Ward Taylor had founded this paper in 1856 when his city was 20 years old and beginning to ride high. Its name came from the initials of the sheet's motto: "Join Industry Manufacturing Planting Labor Energy Capital in Unity Together Everlastingly." Peak Jimplecute circulation, in the 1880s, was around 5,000. A Greenbacker in a Democratic town, stanch Publisher Taylor died in 1894. The paper was continued by his son Ward...