Word: websterisms
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...demonstrate his own friendliness, he grandly asked--nay, pleaded--that everyone visit his great state and see the unparalleled wonders of its progress. To identify his cause with the heritage of his listeners he solemnly invoked irrelevant parts of Massachusetts' history. He threw in the names of Jefferson, Webster, Washington and others, not in the context of sentences, but as stark monuments to the Americanism of his views. He intoned them with severity. He emphasized with a shaking fist...
...culture. It showed up in the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, in which the vivid language of the King James version was pruned away to make easier reading-a feat comparable to "taking apart Westminster Abbey to make Disneyland out of the fragments." Similarly, the Third Edition of Webster's International Dictionary discarded the label "erroneous" for misuse of a word, sanctions any incorrect usage as long as it is common. It calls like, for example, a synonym for as, citing as authority Art Linkletter on a TV program. Writes Macdonald: "It is felt that it is snobbish...
Relax and look up the word reverend in Webster's Third New International Dictionary (1961). You and your Protestant clergymen are hopelessly behind the times. The word reverend has graduated to the category of a noun, "rev'er-end-n-s: a member of the clergy: minister, priest, pastor . . . (saw the Reverend walking down the road)." Call me Reverend...
...Dancer in Darkness, by David Stacton. Seventeenth century Playwright John Webster's ill-fated heroine, the Duchess of Malfi, is chillfully done in, this time in silky, horrifying prose...
Eliot's powerful eleven, which averaged better than 20 points per game and yielded only two touchdowns all season as it rolled to the House football championship, will battle Saybrook College on Webster Field at 2:30 p.m. for the Harvard-Yale intramural championship...