On the front page of the Thursday morning edition of The Westfield Gazette, the headline was the following:
Local 5th Grader Says, "Move over, Mr. Webster"
The newspaper article was about Nick Allen and how he was "cleverly [raising] issues about free speech and academic rules." Nick Allen and his classmates wanted to call pens "frindles." Their teacher, Mrs. Granger, had forbidden them from saying the word in class. The article referred to Nick as "the boy who invented the new word" because it had been his idea.
It had all started when Nick prepared an oral report about the origin of words and how they got in the dictionary. This started a discussion on who decides that a word means what it means. Nick realized that he could invent a word of his own. His word was "frindle." This was where the reference to Mr. Webster in the newspaper article came from. Noah Webster, Jr. was famous for compiling and publishing dictionaries in the 1800s. The Merriam-Webster dictionary became a famous and widely published book of reference.
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