Word: mcguffeys
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...coat and stovepipe hat, a tall young man slouched in the saddle one fall afternoon in 1826 while his horse ambled into the little village of Oxford, Ohio. Even as he rode he read, and his saddlebags bulged with volumes of Livy and Horace, Ovid and Xenophon. William Holmes McGuffey, newly appointed professor of ancient languages at Oxford's Miami University, was exactly the type of sobersided teacher the fledgling university wanted. Last week, in a high-ceilinged room of Miami University's Alumni Library, 300 members of the McGuffey Society came to dedicate a museum...
...President's week had a lighter side, too. He pored over the famed McGuffey Readers, of which he had read only the first in school. An admirer had sent him a set of the six readers as a gift. He would find that the hero in a number of the old favorites is named Harry...
...such, he was a completely individualistic and often baffling combination of Daddy Warbucks, Captain Midnight, Scrooge and Salesman Sam. A product of McGuffey's Reader and the International Correspondence Schools, he had a fierce faith in God and in the attitudes and platitudes (an honest day's work for an honest day's pay) of the last century. He was a living, brave and battered testimonial to his credo...
Robert Houghwout Jackson, onetime Attorney General, collector of McGuffey's Readers, ardent horseman, an eloquent, incisive writer who, when he dissents, dissents in vitriol; considered by corporation lawyers to be the most consistent of the justices...
...yardsticks were developed by educators who wanted to improve on McGuffey. Gunning simply measures the number of words per sentence (a good average for newspaper stories: 16-20), the number of abstract words per 100 words, etc. He has no concern with felicity of phrase, or the worth of what a man is trying to say. Last week, after surveying editorials in half a dozen big U.S. papers, Gunning told what he found: "Most editorial writers seem to confuse dignity with pomposity. Their marathon sentences, foggy words and abstractions put their pieces completely out of reach...