Tag Archives: Noah Webster

Omit Needless Fossil Poetry

Chasing down a famous quotation today, I came across a volume in the College of Dentistry Library of the University of California, San Francisco, generously made available by Google Books. The publication is the 1896 yearly digest of Items of Interest, by The Dental Independent, which describes itself as “a monthly record of dental literature”. […]

04.05.2014 – 15:04 | By D-AW | Posted in Dictionaries and Lexicography, Linguistics | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

“Chicken scratch”, coined by Shakespeare in 1909?

In “Emily Dickinson was a Dinosaur” I conjectured that T. W. Higginson might have been riffing on the idiom chicken-scratch when he described Emily Dickinson’s handwriting as resembling the “famous fossil bird-tracks” of Amherst. Now I’m not so sure. Higginson published his essay in 1891. But chicken scratch  and variants aren’t in OED2 or OED3, nor  […]

27.07.2013 – 10:33 | By D-AW | Posted in Dictionaries and Lexicography, Etymology, Linguistics, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (2)

Noah Webster was a terrible phonologist

I’ve been in the NYPL last week looking at Noah Webster’s papers. One of his handwritten lectures reminded me of what a bad phonologist he was. Objecting to John Walker’s Critical Pronouncing Dictionary (1791), Webster singled out the grouping of p, l, t, s, k, and th (as in ‘think’) together under the epithet ‘sharp’, […]

07.05.2012 – 21:30 | By D-AW | Posted in Dictionaries and Lexicography, Linguistics, Poetry | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)