ADVOCATE: to plead in favor of
Benjamin Franklin may have been a great innovator in science and politics, but on the subject of "advocate" he was against change. In 1789, he wrote a letter to his compatriot Noah Webster complaining about a "new word": the verb "advocate." Like others of his day, Franklin knew "advocate" primarily as a noun meaning "one who pleads the cause of another," and he urged Webster to condemn the verb's use. Actually, the verb wasn't as new as Franklin assumed (etymologists have traced it back to 1599), through it was apparently surging in popularity in his day. Webster evidently did not heed Franklin's plea. His famous 1828 dictionary, An American Dictionary of the English Language, entered both the noun and the verb senses of "advocate."
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