Webster had declared boldly for simpler spellings in his early spelling books; in his dictionary of 1806 he made an assault at all arms upon some of the dearest prejudices of English lexicographers. Grounding his wholesale reforms upon a saying by Franklin, that "those people spell best who do not know how to spell"--/i. e./, who spell phonetically and logically--he made an almost complete sweep of whole classes of silent letters--the /u/ in the /-our/ words, the final /e/ in /determine/ and /requisite/, the silent /a/ in /thread/, /feather/ and /steady/, the silent /b/ in /thumb/, the /s/ in /island/, the /o/ in /leopard/, and the redundant consonants in /traveler/, /wagon/, /jeweler/, etc. (English: /traveller/, /waggon/, /jeweller/). More, he lopped the final /k/ from /frolick/, /physick/ and their analogues. Yet more, he transposed the /e/ and the /r/ in all words ending in /re/, such as /theatre/, /lustre/, /centre/ and /calibre/. Yet more, he changed the /c/ in all words of the /defence/ class to /s/. Yet more, he changed /ph/ to /f/ in words of the /phantom/ class, /ou/ to /oo/ in words of the /group/ class, /ow/ to /ou/ in /crowd/, /porpoise/ to /porpess/, /acre/ to /aker/, /sew/ to /soe/, /woe/ to /wo/, /soot/ to /sut/, /gaol/ to /jail/, and /plough/ to /plow/. Finally, he antedated the simplified spellers by inventing a long list of boldly phonetic spellings, ranging from /tung/ for /tongue/ to /wimmen/ for /women/, and from /hainous/ for /heinous/ to /cag/ for /keg/. A good many of these new spellings, of course, were not actually Webster's inventions. For example, the change from /-our/ to /-or/ in words of the /honor/ class was a mere echo of an earlier English usage, or, more accurately, of an earlier English uncertainty. In the first three folios of Shakespeare, 1623, 1632 and 1663-6, /honor/ and /honour/ were used indiscriminately and in almost equal proportions; English spelling was still fluid, and [Pg251] the /-our/-form was not consistently adopted until the fourth folio of 1685. Moreover, John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, is authority for the statement that the /-or/-form was "a fashionable impropriety" in England in 1791. But the great authority of Johnson stood against it, and Webster was surely not one to imitate fashionable improprieties. He deleted the /u/ for purely etymological reasons, going back to the Latin /honor/, /favor/ and /odor/ without taking account of the intermediate French /honneur/, /faveur/ and /odeur/. And where no etymological reasons presented themselves, he made his changes by analogy and for the sake of uniformity, or for euphony or simplicity, or because it pleased him, one guesses, to stir up the academic animals. Webster, in fact, delighted in controversy, and was anything but free from the national yearning to make a sensation.