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.
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