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A couple of centuries later, some ambitious Yalies dreamed of imposing their linguistic views on the public, too. In the 1780s, a young Noah Webster, styling himself as “the prophet of language to the American people,” became fixated on shaping and capturing American English. After decades bogged down in various other pursuits (including feuding with Alexander Hamilton, editing a newspaper, publishing a book that advocated for phonetic spelling, and supporting Benjamin Franklin’s efforts to replace the letters C, J, Q, W, X, and Y with new ones), Webster published an American Dictionary of the English Language in 1828, at the age of 70. His dictionary was an achievement, Fatsis notes, but “far from perfect,” rife with suspect etymologies and quirky phonetic spellings. In 1844, shortly after Webster’s death, the Merriam brothers, a pair of eager publishing upstarts, nabbed the rights. Along with some scholarly associates, they set about editing and improving the sloppy original, predicting—rightly—that the dictionary could be a major commercial endeavor.