C20: named after Waldo F. Jones, inventor in a science-fiction story by Robert Heinlein
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When most people think of the foundational figures in American environmentalism, they likely conjure up such wistful white Transcendentalists as Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Louisa May Alcott.
From Salon • Jun. 19, 2026
Ralph Waldo Emerson declared that Brown would “make the gallows as glorious as the cross.”
From Slate • Apr. 2, 2026
Other American paragons of virtue who were publicly opposed at the time: William Lloyd Garrison, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Frederick Douglass.
From Los Angeles Times • Feb. 6, 2026
As Ralph Waldo Emerson saw it, Brown’s death on the scaffold turned him into a “new Saint awaiting his martyrdom, and who, if he shall suffer, will make the gallows glorious like the cross.”
From The Wall Street Journal • Nov. 9, 2025
He found the stricken rider distracting himself from his pain by firing off aphorisms from Ralph Waldo Emerson—“Old Waldo”—at the nurses.
From "Seabiscuit: An American Legend" by Laura Hillenbrand
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
