Notes:

Abraham Lincoln used this word in his well-known letter to Mrs. Bixby, a woman in Boston whom it was thought had lost all five of her sons in the Civil War. The letter states in part: “I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.” This letter, which has been described as “a model of purest English, rarely, if ever, surpased,” was used as the prime motivation in the film Saving Private Ryan for the extraordinary lengths the General went to in order to save Private Ryan so that his mother would have at least one son return alive from World War II.