Word: websterisms
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...Webster's Third New International Dictionary has now replaced the venerable second edition (1934) in all bookstores. Hopefully, much more time will elapse before this skimpy lexical parvenu pushes its immediate ancestor out of reference rooms and private libraries...
...dictionary suffers everywhere. William Allan Neilson's 1934 edition contains 600,000 entries, while Philip Gove's 1961 contains only 450,000. Since Gove's staff catalogued 100,000 new words this time, a quarter of a million words must have been dropped from the second edition. For years, Webster's unabridged has listed more words than any dictionary in any language. Now, because of scientific arrivistes to the English vocabulary (like pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcaniconiosis) Webster's no longer commands the serious interest of English readers, who must forever regret the loss of the convenient one-volume compendium they once relied...
...minuet and play the violin.' John Quincy Adams, after being summarily dismissed by the Massachusetts legislature from the United States Senate for supporting Thomas Jefferson, then became Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University, and then became a great Secretary of State. And Senator Daniel Webster could stroll down the corridors of the Congress a few steps after making some of the greatest speeches in the history of this country and dominate the Supreme Court as the foremost lawyer...
...novel gets much of its quality from the convoluted Jamesian style, which is hardly suited to song. Still, Composer Moore ( The Devil and Daniel Webster, The Ballad of Baby Doe) was fascinated by the story of a young Englishwoman who urges her penniless lover to start a flirtation with an ailing American heiress, hoping that the heiress, who is compared in the story to a dove, will soon die and leave him rich and free. In stripping the story to the operatic bone, Moore and Librettist Ethan Aver changed the name of the scheming suitor from Merton Densher to Miles...
...catch the Jamesian spirit, Composer Moore, 68, wrote a score that has none of the folksy American flavor of Baby Doe or Daniel Webster. It surges forward with a propulsive flow that rarely stops for set pieces or arias. The opera is also highly melodic, most effectively in Milly's Dove Song, which soars over ribbons of strings, and in a fine female duet ("He will, he must He'll be coming back" ) toward the end. For all that, Wings of the Dove suffers from a case of dramatic anemia. Composer Moore does his best to summon drama...