Webster in the Raw
Professor Kenneth Shewmaker offers five easy steps to decoding Dan's band.
When in doubt, guess "S." The odds are in your favor. According to Shewmaker, Webster had five differentways of penning an "s." "It's amazing how often the letter that puzzles you is an 's,'" Shewmaker says.
Ignore the rules of capitalization. After all, Webster did. "There was no regularity in upper and lower case," says Shewmaker, "and I'm not talking about the beginnings of sentences." Capitalized words, or at least words that look capitalized (you can never be sure with Webster), appear in the middle of his sentences.
Don't confuse blots for dots. What looks like a dotted "i" may not be one at all. This isn't Webster's fault: Bereft of modern writing tools, midnineteenth-century writers had to blot their papers, a process that sometimes caused the ink to ooze on the page into dots. What looks like a dot may just be a blot.
Watch for hidden gerunds. An indecipherable downturn at the end of a verb may be the suffix "ing3" which means that verb really isn't a verb at all. It's a noun.
Take it one letter at a time. Shewmaker and his students take a fistful of Webster's letters and read them over the course of several classes. "We go through them word by word and sentence by sentence," says the professor. '"I start"with Webster's best, which is difficult, and end up at Webster's: worst, which is very difficult." The method works. Over die years, only one of his students has been completely unable to grasp Webster-script.
