Except myself is not right. It should be Ed and me.

You are correct. Thank you.

Do you know if there are other published versions of Noah Webster's work? They sound fascinating.

As noted, Noah Webster. Daniel was a Congressman, Senator, and Secretary of State. He was most famous in his own time as a lawyer. He argued the Dartmouth College v. Woodward case (landmark) before the US Supreme Court.

Daniel Webster was a strong state's rights advocate. He sought an interpretation of the Constitution that would allow nullification. Failing that, however, he refused to condone the Hartford Convention which argued for the secession of New England from the United States over the War of 1812. The Webster-Ashburton Treaty set the current border with Canada. (We had wanted it to be the St. Lawrence River.) That laid the ground for the State of Maine to be created from the northern part of Massachusetts.

I have a facsimile edition of the Noah Webster dictionary. I bought it from a Christian firm with e-gold that earned writing content for a libertarian website. I have relied on it when discussing the "true meaning" of the Constitution, Declaration, and other documents. I realize that a full lifetime separates the Dictionary from those, but it is closer than any modern dictionary. I also like his etymologies.

Yes.

Noah Webster?

There wasn't any humor, and I am aware that Paine wrote Common Sense. I was referring to the fact that Webster's Dictionary wasn't available back then and yet the people of that time had extensive vocabularies and elocution such that few in our day can even understand them any longer. Common Sense was very popular at the time of its writing and preceded the Constitution where Webster's Dictionary wouldn't even be published until nearly 50 years after the ratification of the Constitution.

"Waiting on cashier."
This is the South. It would say waiting for in the Midwest, but we never see it b/c the cashier would be moving fast. You'd hear him say the word "you-wanna-beg-for-that?" and then he'd be on to the next customer. Just say "thanks", and he'll say, "Ye-becha."

It's a joke, but there's some truth to things moving much slower in the South. I don't just belittle it. I actually admire their patience.

"common error: "whenever" in place of "when."
This is only heard in the South. I never hear it in the Midwest. Our favorite error is ending sentences with prepositions: "You're coming with? Okay, where's your coat at?" From Germanic roots we confuse yet/still, lend/borrow, and like/as.

The things that stand out from my time in Florida are whenever/when, anymore/now, double modal verbs (e.g. I might could...), and fixing to / immediately going to. That last one is actually useful. Fixing to is sooner than going to.

We all agree in the US, though, on the need for less, okay, fewer grammatical mistakes.

Today, I swiped my card at a cash register. After agreeing to pay, I saw on the screen
Waiting on cashier.

I do not understand the humor. Thomas Paine, not Daniel Webster, wrote Common Sense. (Daniel Webster had an illustrious career, and is highly regarded by today's conservatives.)

Thanks back. I just requested the book from my public library.

It may be considered archaic, but it is still in use. Or maybe it is just me; I still use it. As in Wend your way through the crowd at the mall.

Thanks. Did you ever read the book about grammar, Woe Is I? I think it is by Patricia O'
Connor. She deals with such nonsense as the
horror of split infinitives.

No, I do not mean "mend". "Wend" is an archaic
word meaning "go". Just to make sure, I looked
it up in The American Heritage Dictionary. (And,
although I do not remember that the Dictionary
listed it as "archaic", it is pretty obvious.)

I will certainly agree that technological advancement is driven primarily by the desire to enable ourselves to be lazy! We only gain leisure time (ironically) through hard work.

In language, what we gain through proper grammar and a larger vocabulary is precision and efficiency in language, I agree. I was reading Common Sense and it dismays me that we have lost so much of the clear and precise language of our Founding Fathers. I dare say that the majority of the grade school-educated of that time could run circles around the vast majority of college-educated in our day - even though Daniel Webster's work wouldn't become popular for several decades!

I saw that error in a Naval Institute headline, put a pair of red lips on it, and posted it to the Spirit Board at work.

In notice the same thing. I believe that it is "muscle memory" acting ahead of conscious thought.

I have just about given up not typing "goto" for "go to" because it is so deeply engrained:
ON SWITCH(1) GOTO ROUTINE(1)
IF KOUNT = 0 GOTO TO END

Thanks for the reminder errors can be honest mistakes. I recently came to understand that the rule against split infinitives is improper to English. It comes from Latin grammar, wherein splitting an infinitive is impossible. The rule is the result of trying to force English to follow the rules of Latin. Feel free to happily split your infinitives.

And yet ease of life is one of the attributes of civilization. So-called "primitive" languages, such as those of the Native Americans, tend to have more complicated grammars. Even our Russian cousins have some ancient hold-overs, such as two different plurals: dual (just two) and plural (more than two). Hungarian and Finnish have over a dozen cases, from the usual six through adessive, inessive, progressive... English has three: nominative, objective, possessive.

But we have a rich vocabulary, perhaps the largest on the planet.

It might be argued that in order to achieve a truly free society, we need to re-instantiate a more complex grammar, such as that of Ancient Greek with not just one, but two aorist cases. After all, politics rests on ethics, and ethics depends on epistemology. Improve the thinking, and we improve the behaviors.

As much as I agree with the intent, I must point out that the same argument could have been made by Shakespeare, Chaucer, or the anonymous bards who sang Beowulf. Languages change. The word nest is a contraction for "nether-sitten" because a nest sits down upon the branches. The root for "nurse" is "daughter-in-law" in Proto-Indo-European, which you could argue is a misuse of the word when applied to medical care. I can give very many similar examples, OK?

You feel strongly that it is true. (See also my comments below on "whenever" an error that goes back a couple of generations, at least. https://www.galtsgulchonline.com/post... )

Yesterday, I heard another example of a common error: "whenever" in place of "when." This is not new. My brother pointed out to me a generation or two ago that a friend of ours made that mistake all the time, seldom saying "when" and too often saying "whenever."