A little Friday history…

… that has nothing to do with Las Vegas (except perhaps in the case of Nevada’s long-time, lone Representative in the U.S. House, Dem. Walter Baring, who referred to himself as a “Jeffersonian States’ Rights Democrat”).

I have recently enjoyed receiving daily emails from Delanceyplace.com containing interesting excerpts from a variety of books. Today’s email had an excerpt from Joseph J. Ellis’s “American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson,” and described how our third president rarely spoke in public, preferring to use the written word.

Here is Jefferson requesting that James Madison carefully review the president’s first annual address to Congress: ‘Will you give this enclosed a revisal, not only as to matter, but diction. Where strictness of grammar does not weaken expression, it should be attended to in complaisance to the purists of New England. But where by small grammatical negligences the energy of an idea is condensed, or a word stands for a sentence, I hold grammatical rigor in contempt.’ …