On this Day..

• In 1793,

Marie Antoinette was beheaded. The busty

French queen, who’d had one man sentenced to 50 years in prison because he’d wolf-whistled her. Was sentenced at

4:30 this morning and went to the scaffold at

11 a.m. As she climbed the steps the crowd roared “Bravo!,” but as she neared the block she got some small revenge when she ‘accidentally’ stepped on the executioner’s foot. “Monsieur,” she said with bitter irony, “I beg your pardon.”

• In 1758, all-time best-selling lexicographer Noah Webster was born in West Hartford, Connecticut. His father had to mortgage the family farm to get him through Yale, but it was worth it! Webster’s “blue-backed speller” has sold more than 10 million copies, and in its first sell-out year of publication “An American Dictionary of the English Language” was bought by even more people in Britain than it was in America. Today anyone can use the title “Webster’s,” but in his own day Webster brought so many lawsuits to protect his work that he became known as “the father of copyright.” Strongly disapproving of “vulgarities” and “improper words,” he set himself the mammoth task of censoring the Bible, and in 1833produced a completely expurgated version – with several whole chapters cut out!

─ from Today’s The Day by Jeremy Beadle (Signet)