Mistakes and Corrections [including “Errors in English Grammars”].

Noah Webster

Mistakes and Corrections [including “Errors in English Grammars”].

New Haven

B.L. Hamlen

1837

Webster the vitriolic pedant, often in error, is on full display here, mostly attacking Lindley Murray. He was exercised about articles and conjunctions:

• “It is not true that a becomes an before a vowel.. . . It is not true that an or a is an indefinite article.”
• “How preposterous it is [for Murray] to single out the as a part of speech different from this and that.”
• “It is one of the most unaccountable things in the history of literature that the two uses of the pronoun that should not have been explained long before.”