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February 04, 2008
A is for American
I found this to be an especially interesting piece of literature. I love learning about quirky pieces of history like that. In fact, when i'm not doing work, i can often be found watching the history channel, so to find out about the interesting relationship between Morse and Webster fascinated me. There was so much I didn't know about them, including the interesting fact that both made their innovations because of their patriotism. There was just so much about both of them that I never new, for instance that Webster wrote the whole dictionary himself and that Morse was a painter, and seemingly created Morse code on a whim! It is interesting to look in retrospect, and see all the unintentional impacts these innovations have made on our lives. Morse code, originally intended for day to day communications between families and to potentially unify the world, is now mostly used by the government to send messages, often during wartime. However, it did lay the foundation for other inventions such as the telephone. The Webster dictionary was also originally intended to help unify the nation by giving it it's own "American language." And perhaps he did accomplish this, but how many of these spellings which he designated for our language actually stuck? Now it is mostly just used to find definitions for words, and spelling is often simply handled by a word processor placing a squiggly red line under the misspelled word. It makes one wonder which of today's technologies may someday achieve different purposes.
Posted by btrues at February 4, 2008 10:56 PM