fountainhead
b'\\n \\n \\n Merriam-Webster\'s Word of the Day for July 11, 2024 is:\\n \\n \\n fountainhead • \\\\FOUN-tun-hed\\\\ • noun Fountainhead is a word usually encountered in literary contexts that refers to the origin or source of something. // Ragtime, popularized by such performers as Scott Joplin and Eubie Blake, is considered one of the musical fountainheads of jazz.
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\\u201cIn Marbury, in 1803, Chief Justice John Marshall proclaimed, \\u2018It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.\\u2019 There, the Supreme Court, for the first time, declared an act of Congress unconstitutional and \\u2018entirely void.\\u2019 Because the Court implied that its own authority to interpret the Constitution is superior to that of the other branches, the case is the fountainhead of judicial supremacy.\\u201d \\u2014 Jeannie Suk Gersen, The New Yorker, 5 Jan. 2023
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In Walden, widely considered Henry David Thoreau\\u2019s masterwork, the poet-philosopher extolled one major\\u2014nay, transcendent\\u2014perk of being an early bird: \\u201cMorning air! If men will not drink of this at the fountainhead of the day, why, then, we must even bottle up some and sell it in the shops, for the benefit of those who have lost their subscription ticket to morning time in this world.\\u201d Thoreau was using fountainhead in its figurative sense\\u2014referring to morning as the \\u201corigin\\u201d of the day to follow\\u2014while also paying homage to its literal meaning, \\u201cthe source of a stream\\u201d (the earliest sense of fountain being \\u201ca natural spring\\u201d). As someone who spent two years living, writing, and meditating in a cabin, Thoreau was nothing, after all, if not thorough.
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