Having recently acquired a facsimile copy of Noah Webster\u27s dictionary, I found myself growing curious about the use of the long, or cursive s, which looks like an f except the crossbar does not extend to the right

Berryman, George R.

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i lists in ested, con-the Latin ne five vowels. tters: the ab­=r so) , adop-III t lAOUE , Dictiona ry 14) . Lee Croft had the same etter TOKA-most dict­)rrowings. :mann has ing that many last decade bets do not rsh on the ,ugust 1975 =hensive­:ial features) that the to warrant Ld not be in­ture. And lce East­nunciations, ecessarily. FILIPINO, mguage of A MYFTERIOUS UFAGE GEORGE R. BERRYMAN St. Augustine, Florida Having recently acquired a facsimile copy of Noah Webster's dictionary, I found myself growing curious about the use of the long, or cursive s, which looks like an f except the crossbar does not ex­tend to the right. ­The long s, I learned, was a modification of the Roman s, which was deemed unsuited to rapid writing, and thus was gradually changed to the f shape. In handwriting, it doe sn t t look as much like an f as it does in type. Printers were said to dislike it because of the possibil­ity of confusing the two letters. It was gradually phased out in the nineteenth century. In 1786, Benjamin Franklin wrote: 11 The round s begins to be the mode, and in nice printing the long s is rejected entirely. 11 John Bell of London is supposed to be the first publisher to discard the long s entirely - - in his edition of The British Theate r. published in 1775.- Yet, it was still being used in 1806 when Noah Webster published the first edition of his A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language. (He used English in the title, but Englifh in the text. ) Although the round s was used generally in capitalization, it was sometimes replaced by-a doubled lower - case f, explaining why some English family names start with ff, (In my International Who's Who for 1966- 67, howeve r, Sir Arthur Frederic Br own10w Horde is listed alphabetically, not under the s I' s. but the fl s. Wonde r how he pro­nounce s his last name?) About the only thing I have been able to e stabli sh is that the long s was never used at the end of a word. For a while I thought that in the case of a doubled s, the first would be'long and the second round. Then I ran across this string on page 193 of Noah Webster's work: Misfhape, Mifsile, Misfion, Misfionary. Miffifippi. Mifsive, Mifsletoe. Miffpeak (Yes, Noah left the fourth s out of Mississippi.) Did the typesetters grab whateve r form of s carne to hand, 0 r is there some rule to ex­plain these various uses? Pel\haps some reader can clear this up for me, or suggest a suitable reference work. 

A Myfterious Ufage

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A Myfterious Ufage

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