. . . named for Noah Webster's birthday in 1758.
So who is Webster? He was a teacher who disliked American elementary schools. Overcrowded classrooms, with up to seventy children of all ages
crammed into one-room schoolhouses,
poorly staffed with untrained teachers, and poorly equipped with no
desks and unsatisfactory textbooks that came from England. Webster
thought that Americans should learn from American books, so he wrote three volume book called A Grammatical Institute of the English Language.
The work consisted of a speller), a grammar, and a reader. His goal was to
provide a uniquely American approach to training children.
He
complained that the English language had been corrupted by the British
aristocracy, which set its own standard for proper spelling and
pronunciation. Webster rejected the notion that the study of Greek and
Latin must come before the study of English grammar.
The Speller was arranged so that it could be easily taught to students, and it progressed by age. From his own experiences as a teacher, Webster thought the Speller should be simple and gave an orderly presentation of words and the rules of spelling and pronunciation. Webster said that children pass through distinctive learning phases in which they master increasingly complex or abstract tasks. Therefore, teachers must not try to teach a three-year-old how to read; they could not do it until age five. He organized his speller accordingly, beginning with the alphabet and moving systematically through the different sounds of vowels and consonants, then syllables, then simple words, then more complex words, and finally sentences.
The speller was the most popular American book of its time, and by 1861, it sold a million copies per year, and its royalty of less than one cent per copy was enough to help Webster in his other endeavors. Some consider it to be the first dictionary created in the United States, and it helped create the popular contests known as spelling bees.
Slowly, he changed the spelling of words, so that they became "Americanized." He chose s over c in words like defense, he changed the re to er in words like center, he dropped one of the Ls in traveler, and at first he kept the u in words like colour or favour but dropped it in later editions.
In 1806, Webster published his first dictionary, and at the age of 43, he began writing an expanded and comprehensive edition that took 27 years to complete. His hope was to standardize American speech, since Americans in different parts of the country spelled, pronounced, and used words differently. His first dictionary contained 70,000 words, of which 12,000 had never appeared in a published dictionary Unfortunately, this dictionary only sold 2,500 copies, and for the rest of his life Webster lived in debt.
For those of you who have sat in my classroom, you know how much I love looking up words, and to celebrate Dictionary Day, I am going to give you some of the new words that have just been added into the new edition of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary.
1. carbon footprint - the amount of carbon emitted by something during a given period.
2. earmark - a provision in congressional legislation that allocates a specified amount of money for a specific project, program or organization.
3. reggaeton - popular music of Puerto Rican origin that combines rap with Caribbean rhythms.
4. locavore - one who eats foods grown locally whenever possible.
5. staycation - vacation spent at home or nearby.
6. fan fiction - stories involving popular fictional characters that are written by fans and often posted on the Internet.
8. sock puppet - a false online identity used for deceptive purposes.
9. haram - forbidden by Islamic law
10. webisode - an episode especially of a TV show that may or may not have been telecast but can be viewed at a Web site.
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