Honest Abe
1
6.7
- proper noun
:
Abe el Honesto
- Everyone knows that John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald had personal motives to kill Honest Abe and JFK.
Examples
-
Honest Abe.
-
Many Americans admire Honest Abe for his integrity and leadership during the Civil War.
-
How do you think Honest Abe would do on a quiz show ?
-
The people who orchestrated this were the international bankers, and "Honest" Abe was their useful idiot.
Blog text (31) -
And what did old Honest Abe do when the centralized bankers wanted 35% in interest paid to them?
-
Honest Abe!
-
Honest Abe.
-
So Honest Abe rebuked the big centralized banking cartels and decided that the U.S. government would issue and control its own money.
-
Old "Honest" Abe secreted an expeditionary force to Ft. Sumter to get the war started.
Blog text (31) -
Conventional wisdom is that Honest Abe angered many Southerners whose economy, in large part, revolved around the legalization of slavery.
Synonyms
19
1.3
The 16th President of the United States who led the country during the Civil War and ended slavery
The 16th United States President who led the country during the Civil War and freed slaves
Surface Forms
Morphology
honest + Abe
The compound is compositionally clear: a learner who knows 'honest' and recognizes 'Abe' as a personal name can infer it refers to an Abe noted for honesty. However, the conventionalized use as a specific nickname for Abraham Lincoln (and its cultural-historical reference) cannot be derived from the words alone, so the expression is only partially predictable to learners.
Etymology
Honest Abe comes from stories about Abraham Lincoln's early life. One popular story says he worked in a shop and returned a few pennies to a customer instead of keeping them, so people called him Honest Abe to mean 'honest' and reliable.