The value of personal effort to national development
America is a great nation today, this greatness is built
from the effort of ordinary men with extraordinary
determination, their collective effort produces the
America of today that has become the greener
pasture of the world.
Let us examine the life of one man who helped build the “American way of life”- Noah Webster. Born
October 16, 1758, West Hartford, Connecticut, U.S, Died
May 28, 1843, New Haven, Connecticut
.
American lexicographer known for his American
Spelling Book (1783) and his American Dictionary of the English Language, 2 vol. (1828; 2nd ed., 1840).
Webster was instrumental in giving American English
a dignity and vitality of its own. Both his speller and
dictionary reflected his principle that spelling,
grammar, and usage should be based upon the living,
spoken language rather than on artificial rules. He also made useful contributions as a teacher,
grammarian, journalist, essayist, lecturer, and
lobbyist.
Webster entered Yale in 1774, interrupted his studies
to serve briefly in the American Revolution, and was
graduated in 1778. He taught school, did clerical work, and studied law, being admitted to the bar in 1781. While teaching in Goshen, New York, in 1782, Webster
became dissatisfied with texts for children that
ignored the American culture, and he began his
lifelong efforts to promote a distinctively American
education. His first step in this direction was
preparation of A Grammatical Institute of the English Language, the first part being The American Spelling
Book (1783), the famed “Blue-Backed Speller,”
which has never been out of print. The spelling book
provided much of Webster’s income for the rest of his
life, and its total sales have been estimated as high as
100,000,000 copies or more. A grammar (1784) and a reader (1785) completed the
Institute. The grammar was based on Webster’s
principle (enunciated later in his dictionary) that
“grammar is formed on language, and not language
on grammar.” Although he did not always follow this
principle and often relied on analogy, reason, and true or fanciful etymology, his inconsistencies were no
greater than those of his English contemporaries. He
spoke of American English as “Federal English,”
always contrasting the superior usage of the yeoman
of America with the alleged affectations of London.
The reader consisted mainly of American selections chosen to promote democratic ideals and responsible
moral and political conduct. The absence of a federal copyright law until 1790 and
discrepancies among the state laws left the author of
a popular book open to piracy unless he exerted
strenuous efforts. Webster’s letters to various state
legislatures reflect his activity on his own behalf, and
he traveled widely, lobbying for uniform copyright laws and teaching, lecturing, and giving singing
lessons to help support himself. In 1787 he founded
the short-lived American Magazine in New York City.
This publication combined literary criticism with
essays on education, government, agriculture, and a
variety of other subjects. After his marriage in 1789, Webster practiced law in Hartford until 1793, when he
founded in New York a pro-Federalist daily
newspaper, The American Minerva, and a semi-
weekly paper, The Herald, which was made up of
reprinted selections from the daily. He sold both
papers in 1803. Webster wrote on many subjects: politics (“Sketches
of American Policy,” 1785, sometimes called the first
statement of the U.S. Constitution), economics,
medicine, physical science, and language. He noted
the living language as he traveled but with varying
degrees of approbation, according to the degree of correspondence between what he heard and what he
himself used. His early enthusiasm for spelling reform
abated in his later works, but he is largely responsible
for the differences that exist today between British
and U.S. spelling. Although he was himself assailed for
including slang and jargon in his dictionary, Webster was extremely touchy about the common taboo
words. He commented often on the vulgarity of some
of the words and citations in Samuel Johnson’s
Dictionary (1755), and in later life he published an
expurgated version of the Bible in which euphemism
replaced the franker statements of the Authorized Version. Webster moved in 1798 to New Haven, where he was
elected to the Common Council and remained active in
local politics for the rest of his life. He was a founder
of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, a
member of the Massachusetts legislature, and a
participant in founding Amherst Academy and Amherst College. In 1806 Webster published his Compendious
Dictionary of the English Language. Though it was no
more than a preparation for his later dictionary, it
contained not only about 5,000 more words than
Johnson’s dictionary but also a number of innovations,
including perhaps the first separation of i and j, and of u and v, as alphabetical entities. He started work on
the American Dictionary in 1807, acquiring at least a
nodding acquaintance with about 20 languages and
traveling in France and England in 1824–25 in search
of materials unavailable to him in the United States.
His attempts to find plausible etymologies, however, were not supported by investigation of the actual
state of linguistic knowledge. The first edition of An American Dictionary of the
English Language was published in two volumes in
1828, when Webster was 70 years old. It comprised
2,500 copies in the U.S. and 3,000 in England, and it
sold out in little more than a year, despite harsh
attacks on its “Americanisms,” its unconventional preferences in spelling, its tendency to advocate U.S.
rather than British usage and spelling, and its inclusion
of nonliterary words, particularly technical terms from
the arts and sciences. The dictionary contained about
70,000 entries and between 30,000 and 40,000
definitions that had not appeared in any earlier dictionary. Despite his frequent disparagement of
Johnson, his indebtedness to Johnson’s literary
vocabulary is apparent in both definitions and
citations. The American Dictionary was relatively
unprofitable, and the 1841 revision was not
successful. The rights were purchased from Webster’s estate by George and Charles Merriam (see Merriam-
Webster dictionary). Webster died in 1843 and was buried in a cemetery adjacent to the Yale campus. A controversialist in his
youth—quick to defend his literary efforts and to
demolish his critics—and a conservative in religion
and in politics in his later years, he was the last
lexicographer of the English language to be remembered for his personality and as a public figure
as well as for his work. An important question you
may ask yourself is
? In what ways have I added value to posterity.
? Does my career/endeavors produces something
that is beneficial to societal development.
? Does my career solve any challenge in the society.
Every society is built by human effort, civilization is an
ongoing process that is continues with every little
effort done excellently. We can all be excellent if we
choose to. Noah has done his own for America of
then, today we in the modern age can do more if we
try. I believe in you.
Cheers.
Eleas Stanley
