John Witherspoon was President of Princeton in the late 18th Century, educator of, then later Revolutionary colleague with, the Founding Fathers.
He was also a stickler for grammar, as this article notes, documenting the "errors in grammar, improprieties, and vulgarisms" that Americans were adopting in their distance from the Mother Country, decrying constructions like "notifying" a person and referring to two choices as "equally as good," or how in the Middle States they used the vulgarism "once in a while," or how "accomplished" was (gasp) starting to be used as an adjective.
And, of course, there was this horrifying misuse of a perfectly good word:
"I was quite mad at him, he made me quite mad. In this instance mad is only a metaphor for angry. This is perhaps an English vulgarism, but it is not found in any accurate writer, nor used by any good speaker, unless when poets and orators use it as a strong figure, and to heighten the expression, say, he was mad with rage."
And when it came to dictionaries, he wasn't thrilled with Samuel Johnson's ground-breaking effort, given that it actually described so many of these improper uses and therefore lent them credence.
(Witherspoon's detailed complaints start here: https://books.google.com/books?id=uOq7j78iQHIC&pg=PA458)
Sometimes I know the feeling, Mr Witherspoon. Sometimes I know the feeling.
Originally shared by +Karen Conlin:
From the 18th century, a voice in the wilderness decrying the usage of "mad" to mean "angry" and the abomination of the construction "once in a while"
via Steven Pinker (@sapinker) on Twitter
Princeton Alumni Weekly: That Was Then
From a 1787 letter by John Witherspoon to St. George Tucker about Witherspoon’s ideas on education: “In the College the Trustees chuse the Teachers & make the Laws & the faculty execute them. In the School I have the Sole Right of chusing the Teachers & directing every thing that is done in it.
