Word: webster
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...Never Died. The determined and generally erratic Provincetown Playhouse is again busy with a wild experiment. From the pen of Charles Webster, an actor, they have produced a play about a man who discovers the secret of eternal life. This secret is not a matter of potions and glands; it is rather some spiritual understanding of the future so satisfying that the casual troubles of the world do not wear out the body. All this comes out in the last half of the play. The first half is a murder mystery very much like that in any Broadway mystery play...
HILDA YOUNT ERTEL Williamsport, Pa. TIME regrets that the use of "it" should injure the feelings of a parent. Webster's International Dictionary seems to furnish plenty of authority when it says: "It is now used only of an inanimate object or of an animate one in which sex is disregarded...
...Edward Stevens Sheldon, who died on October 16 of this year, devoted the greater part of his mature life to investigation of the sources of our English vocabulary, having change of that department in successive revision of Webster's Dictionary, now called the International. Into such study he carried that unusual blend of divination, balance, and minute discrimination which characterized both his linguistic research and his literary judgments. None was more original than he, none more rigidly selfenitical. Hence the enduring character of his achievement...
...Webster's New International Dictionary says that as a verb "pander" may mean "to cater," which is about the sense in which it was used in the passage cited. As a noun Webster says it may mean "an intermediary; an interagent," but adds that this meaning is "rare...
...poet that ever lived delighted in amassing such curious, half-forgotten sounds; not even Francis Thompson had so great a vocabulary of rare and archaic terms. . . . The explanation here is simpler. Nathalia collects words the way a boy of her age collects postage stamps; she had thumbed Noah Webster's work (in various editions) and made a glossary of her own. The dictionary is her playbox and she knows exactly where every odd toy is concealed...