The very title of Dr. Webster's Dictionary indicates a radical misapprehension as to the nature and office of such a work. He calls the result of his labors an "_American_ Dictionary of the English Language," as if provincialism were a merit. He evidently thought that the business of a lexicographer was to _regulate_, not to _record_. Sometimes also his zeal as an etymologist misled him, as in his famous attempt to make the word _bridegroom_ more conformable to its supposed Anglo-Saxon root and its modern Teutonic congeners. It never occurred to him that we were still as far as ever from the goal, and that it would be quite as inconvenient to explain that the termination _goom_ was a derivation from the Anglo-Saxon _guma_ as that it was a corruption of it; the point to be gained being, after all, that we should be able to find out the meaning of the English word _bridegroom_, having no pressing need of _guma_ for conversational purposes. We have spoken of this word only because we have heard it brought up against Dr. Webster as often as anything else, and because the disproportionate antipathy produced by this and a few similar oddities shows, that, the primary object of all writing being the clear conveyance of meaning, and not only so, but its conveyance in the most winning way, a writer blunders who wilfully estranges the reader's eye or jars upon its habitual associations, and that a lexicographer blunders still more desperately, who, upon system, teaches to offend in that kind. And it is amusing in respect to this very word _bridegoom_, that the whimsey is not Dr. Webster's own, but that the bee was put into his bonnet by Horne Tooke. Webster in these matters was a bit of a Hotspur. He thought to deal with language as the vehement Percy would have done with the Trent. The smug and silver stream was to be allowed no more wilful windings, but to run "In a new channel fair and evenly." He found an equally hot-headed Glendower, wherever there was an educated man, ready with the answer,-- "Not wind? it shall; it must; you see it doth." "You see _it doth_" is an argument whose force no theorist ever takes into his reckoning.