When Marsh sent out his appeal for American Readers, what wasknown as the ‘Dictionary War’ had been waging for some time between twoleading lexicographers, Noah Webster and Joseph Worcester. Worcester hadbeen Webster’s assistant on his American Dictionary of the English Language(1828) but, a superior philologist to Webster,

glorified Worcester,

it is not art itself that people are turning from. People are turning away “from the traditional delivery mechanisms” (Cohen, 2013)