Straight From the Hart
By Joan Rowden Hart
One of the casualties of our addiction to technology and its related
gadgets is the printed dictionary. I used to keep one at my desk in
the law office and in my home office, too, and I used them almost
daily. I always wanted to be sure I was using the appropriate word
for whatever I was trying to say.
Now an entry from the Merriam-Webster’s dictionary magically appears
each day in my email both on my computer and my cell phone and I play
a game with myself to be sure I know the exact meaning and
pronunciation of the “Word of the Day”.
And when I read my Kindle, all I have to do is click on any word in
the text about which I have questions, and the pronunciation,
spelling, and all the varied meanings appear instantly on my Kindle
screen.
When I’m writing a manuscript and need to check a word I just type it
in the search box on my computer screen and all the information I need
appears immediately.
But everything still goes back to the old-fashioned printed dictionary
which we had years ago, and I was reminded of that when I noticed on
my calendar last week that Noah Webster, the “father” of the American
dictionary, was born on October 16, 1758, so this month would be the
254th anniversary of his birth.
Because he was so interested in the etymology of words, I wonder if he
ever questioned his last name, Webster, which means “female weaver”,
considering the fact that his father worked as a weaver, and I also
wonder if the name came about because we refer to a spider spinning
(or weaving) its web.
I know that many surnames did arise out of the occupation of the
person (Hunter, Farmer, Shoemaker, etc), but in this case the name was
already established before Mr. Webster chose to work as a weaver so
it would have been just a coincidence.
When his parents noticed his apparent love of learning, they allowed
him to be tutored in Latin and Greek by his Congregational pastor when
he was only 14 so that he could go on to attend Yale at age 16, and he
graduated 4 years later. He studied law under the mentorship of
Oliver Ellsworth who later became the U.S. Supreme Court Chief
Justice, and he passed the bar examination in 1781.
During the Revolutionary War he served in the Connecticut Militia. He
helped found Amherst College.
He married Rebecca Greenleaf in 1789. They were married for 54 years
and raised eight children.
Noah was not at all impressed with the schools of his day and the fact
that the textbooks came from England, and were used in American
schools even after the American Revolution, and they promoted the
pledging of their allegiance to King George.
So he wrote his own textbook, nicknamed the “Blue-Backed Speller”
because of its bright blue cover. It sold nearly 100 million copies
and for more than 100 years, American children learned to read, spell
and pronounce words using this book.
He earned a Masters Degree from Yale but always returned to his
literary pursuits. He wrote a series of articles for a prominent new
England newspaper justifying and praising the American Revolution. He
founded several small private schools, but his heart was always on
compiling and publishing a dictionary.
In 1801 he started working on defining the words Americans use, and
this included “Americanizing” the spelling. He changed “colour” to
“color”, and “musick” to “music“. He changed “waggon” to “wagon”, and
added American words like “skunk” and “squash” that didn’t appear in
British dictionaries.
He chose “s” over “c” in words like defense, and “re” to “er” in words
like center and theater. However, his efforts to change the spelling
of tongue to “tung” never quite caught on, perhaps of it’s similarity
to dung.
He was a very prolific author for many decades and published
textbooks, political essays and newspaper articles. He wrote so much
that a modern bibliography of his published works required 655 pages.
In 1800 he was elected as a Federalist to the Connecticut House of
Representatives.
He was very active in working for a revision of the U.S. Copyright
laws, and he proposed a copyright bill which was sponsored in the U.S.
Senate by his cousin, Daniel Webster.
He finally published An American Dictionary in 1828 when he was 70
years old. It contained 70,000 words, of which 12,000 had never
appeared in a published dictionary before. In order to evaluate the
etymology of words, he learned 26 languages, including Old English
Anglo-Saxon, German, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, Hebrew,
Arabic and Sanskrit.
In 1840 the second edition of his dictionary was published in two
volumes but he died only a few days after he had completed revising an
appendix to the second edition. The date was May 28, 1843.
In one of those strange quirks of timing, a former classmate of mine
sent me a quote at the time I was doing some research on this
article. The quote was by Socrates with regard to writing and
expressed his concern that once people learned to communicate through
writing that it would introduce forgetfulness “into the soul of those
who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they
will put their trust in writing,…..instead of trying to remember from
the inside, completely on their own.”
I am so glad that Socrates was proven wrong and that writing as a form
of communication took such a prominent place in the culture of the
American society, and that men like Noah Webster spent their time and
fortune in developing and improving ways that we could communicate our
thoughts with words that could be shared with everyone.
I agree with a well-known author and public speaker who once said:
When you speak, your words echo only across the room or down the hall.
But when you write, your words echo down the ages. (Bud Gardner)
By Joan Rowden Hart
One of the casualties of our addiction to technology and its related
gadgets is the printed dictionary. I used to keep one at my desk in
the law office and in my home office, too, and I used them almost
daily. I always wanted to be sure I was using the appropriate word
for whatever I was trying to say.
Now an entry from the Merriam-Webster’s dictionary magically appears
each day in my email both on my computer and my cell phone and I play
a game with myself to be sure I know the exact meaning and
pronunciation of the “Word of the Day”.
And when I read my Kindle, all I have to do is click on any word in
the text about which I have questions, and the pronunciation,
spelling, and all the varied meanings appear instantly on my Kindle
screen.
When I’m writing a manuscript and need to check a word I just type it
in the search box on my computer screen and all the information I need
appears immediately.
But everything still goes back to the old-fashioned printed dictionary
which we had years ago, and I was reminded of that when I noticed on
my calendar last week that Noah Webster, the “father” of the American
dictionary, was born on October 16, 1758, so this month would be the
254th anniversary of his birth.
Because he was so interested in the etymology of words, I wonder if he
ever questioned his last name, Webster, which means “female weaver”,
considering the fact that his father worked as a weaver, and I also
wonder if the name came about because we refer to a spider spinning
(or weaving) its web.
I know that many surnames did arise out of the occupation of the
person (Hunter, Farmer, Shoemaker, etc), but in this case the name was
already established before Mr. Webster chose to work as a weaver so
it would have been just a coincidence.
When his parents noticed his apparent love of learning, they allowed
him to be tutored in Latin and Greek by his Congregational pastor when
he was only 14 so that he could go on to attend Yale at age 16, and he
graduated 4 years later. He studied law under the mentorship of
Oliver Ellsworth who later became the U.S. Supreme Court Chief
Justice, and he passed the bar examination in 1781.
During the Revolutionary War he served in the Connecticut Militia. He
helped found Amherst College.
He married Rebecca Greenleaf in 1789. They were married for 54 years
and raised eight children.
Noah was not at all impressed with the schools of his day and the fact
that the textbooks came from England, and were used in American
schools even after the American Revolution, and they promoted the
pledging of their allegiance to King George.
So he wrote his own textbook, nicknamed the “Blue-Backed Speller”
because of its bright blue cover. It sold nearly 100 million copies
and for more than 100 years, American children learned to read, spell
and pronounce words using this book.
He earned a Masters Degree from Yale but always returned to his
literary pursuits. He wrote a series of articles for a prominent new
England newspaper justifying and praising the American Revolution. He
founded several small private schools, but his heart was always on
compiling and publishing a dictionary.
In 1801 he started working on defining the words Americans use, and
this included “Americanizing” the spelling. He changed “colour” to
“color”, and “musick” to “music“. He changed “waggon” to “wagon”, and
added American words like “skunk” and “squash” that didn’t appear in
British dictionaries.
He chose “s” over “c” in words like defense, and “re” to “er” in words
like center and theater. However, his efforts to change the spelling
of tongue to “tung” never quite caught on, perhaps of it’s similarity
to dung.
He was a very prolific author for many decades and published
textbooks, political essays and newspaper articles. He wrote so much
that a modern bibliography of his published works required 655 pages.
In 1800 he was elected as a Federalist to the Connecticut House of
Representatives.
He was very active in working for a revision of the U.S. Copyright
laws, and he proposed a copyright bill which was sponsored in the U.S.
Senate by his cousin, Daniel Webster.
He finally published An American Dictionary in 1828 when he was 70
years old. It contained 70,000 words, of which 12,000 had never
appeared in a published dictionary before. In order to evaluate the
etymology of words, he learned 26 languages, including Old English
Anglo-Saxon, German, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, Hebrew,
Arabic and Sanskrit.
In 1840 the second edition of his dictionary was published in two
volumes but he died only a few days after he had completed revising an
appendix to the second edition. The date was May 28, 1843.
In one of those strange quirks of timing, a former classmate of mine
sent me a quote at the time I was doing some research on this
article. The quote was by Socrates with regard to writing and
expressed his concern that once people learned to communicate through
writing that it would introduce forgetfulness “into the soul of those
who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they
will put their trust in writing,…..instead of trying to remember from
the inside, completely on their own.”
I am so glad that Socrates was proven wrong and that writing as a form
of communication took such a prominent place in the culture of the
American society, and that men like Noah Webster spent their time and
fortune in developing and improving ways that we could communicate our
thoughts with words that could be shared with everyone.
I agree with a well-known author and public speaker who once said:
When you speak, your words echo only across the room or down the hall.
But when you write, your words echo down the ages. (Bud Gardner)
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