Word: spellers
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...National Museum last week before a battery of microphones stood 16 nervous boys and girls. They were finalists in the 13th annual Louisville Courier-Journal National Spelling Bee in which 15 other newspapers participated. They were about to produce the closest practical approximation of the "best speller in the U. S." Representative Lyle Boren of Oklahoma was standing with the judges. Morose, georgette, cited, ingenuity, questionnaire, accessible, meringue, gudgeon, insoluble, parliamentary, aphorism, olfactory and lineaments cleared the stage of all but three. Then the only remaining boy, Angelo Mangieri of Hoboken and the Jersey Observer, 14 and totally blind, tripped...
Clutching a bronze Courier-Journal plaque and a check for $500, blushing Speller Beckley confessed: "The hardest word for me was really baste...
...Ohio youth, William Holmes McGuffey, son of a Scotch-Irish Indian fighter from Pennsylvania, never set eyes on the two books which were the Eclectic Readers' precursors-the didactic Webster Blue Back Speller and the holy, fearsome New England Primer. He worked on his father's farm, did not go to school until he was 16. When Father McGuffey hacked a five-mile road through the forest to Youngstown, Ohio, Son William went there to study Latin with a clergyman. One day his devout mother knelt in her yard to pray that Son William might be educated...
...became a Citizen Fixit to the whole U. S. Because he insisted on bursting out of his own bailiwick to mend his neighbors' manners, he was not popular; but before he died the U. S. was proud of him. Even more than his Dictionary his famed blue-backed Speller (which sold nearly 100 million copies before it went out of use) knit U. S. dialects together into one more-or-less standard tongue, poured a patriotic iron tonic into the stomach of the adolescent nation...
...Noah Webster, jun., esq. (as he signed himself, to the ribald delight of his lighter-minded contemporaries) was too ambitious to be tripped by ridicule. In the era of vacillating reconstruction after the Revolution he saw his didactic chance, made it his patriotic duty. He launched his first Speller as a Yankee privateer against the King's English: "I have too much pride to stand indebted to Great Britain for books to learn our children the letters of the alphabet." A good salesman, he toured the U. S. lecturing in his book's behalf, trying-to rouse...