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But what is a GAM? You might wear out your index-finger running up and down the columns of dictionaries, and never find the word. Dr. Johnson never attained to that erudition; Noah Webster's ark does not hold it. Nevertheless, this same expressive word has now for many years been in constant use among some fifteen thousand true born Yankees.
Of no country is this more true than the United States. An examination of the innumerable early biographical dictionaries with which the shelves of our public libraries are cumbered, will show that the bulk of the life sketches of the individuals therein commemorated are vague and unsatisfactory.
Where there had been some great dictionaries, Giglio's friends found two pairs of jack-boots labelled, "Lieutenant Smith," " Jones, Esq.," which fitted them to a nicety. Besides, there were helmets, back and breast plates, swords, &c., just like in Mr.
These, of course, are supplemented by geographical, biographical, bibliographical, and other dictionaries, including of course lexicons to all the languages I ever meddle with. Next to these come the works relating to my one or two specialties, and these collections I make as perfect as I can. Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only on the history of pin-heads.
Fourteen founts of Oriental types, new supplies of Hebrew, Greek, and English types, a vast stock of paper from the Bible Society, presses, priceless manuscripts of dictionaries, grammars, and translations, and, above all, the steel punches of the Eastern letters all were there, with the deeds and account-books of the property, and the iron safe containing notes and rupees.
Much stamping and gesticulation accompanied, I remember, the soliloquy of Hamlet, and our flesh crept at the witches' incantations from "Macbeth." The old cobbler delighted in Shakespeare and dictionaries, between the perusal of which he spent most of his time.
To these she added French, German and Italian dictionaries because, as she explained: "We might get lost or parted from your Uncle Bob somehow, and you never can tell what will happen in those heathen countries where the poor people cannot speak English.
Buy a couple of cheap small dictionaries of the same edition, send one to your correspondent with an intimation that he is to read up or down so many words from the one indicated when receiving a message.
Though not professing to be a scholar, he was much addicted, when writing, to the use of Greek and Latin terms, not as other people used them, but in a manner of his own, which set the authority of dictionaries at defiance; the consequence was that I was sometimes utterly at a loss to understand the meaning of the publisher.
And midwifery, decency seems to allot to them, though I am afraid the word midwife, in our dictionaries, will soon give place to accoucheur, and one proof of the former delicacy of the sex be effaced from the language.
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