Word: websterisms
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Lowell boat: stroke, Marks; 7, Locke; 6, Scott; 5, Leighton; 4, O'Conor; 3, Webster; 2, Tillinghast; bow, Eyans; cox, Boyd...
...providing a gallery in the Capitol to house "statues of two distinguished citizens from each state who were illustrious for their historic renown." Since then 35 states have made contributions to Statuary Hall. A few of the figures are known to every schoolboy (Washington and Lee from Virginia; Daniel Webster from New Hampshire; Andrew Jackson from Tennessee; Samuel Adams and John Winthrop from Massachusetts; John C. Calhoun from South Carolina; Sam Houston from Texas). Most of them, though, are second-rate politicians of the last century whose fame has already faded out of history. A few are local heroes...
...prime example of his period and place, Noah Webster (1758-1843) was a school-teacher who by zeal and persistence 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...
Connecticut-born and bred, Noah Webster was the son of a sturdy farmer, a veteran of the French & Indian Wars, who mortgaged his farm in order to send his promising son to college at Yale. The Revolution did not interrupt Noah's education: what soldiering he did was a holiday task. One summer he marched with his father and two brothers to Ticonderoga to help repel Burgoyne's invasion, was too late to see any fighting. After his graduation his father gave him an eight-dollar Continental bill (worth about two in silver) and sent...
...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...