Johnson's dictionary

[Harold F. Schiffman]

>>From the Washington Post,

Jonathan Yardley
Amazingly enough, the first great dictionary was basically the work of one
man.

By Jonathan Yardley
Sunday, November 13, 2005; BW02

The English language, like any other, is intrinsically mutable, subject to
constant growth and change, some for better, some for worse, but all of it
inescapable. Still, in this ever-shifting linguistic universe there are
constants. Meanings and usages may evolve and alter, but their root
definitions and their proper spellings are known quantities. How are they
known? They are known because we can look them up in dictionaries, which
provide the reliable foundation to which we can always return for
information about how words are used, how they should be used, how they
are spelled.

We take this for granted. Except on those rare occasions when new editions
of existing dictionaries are issued -- the Oxford English Dictionary ,
Webster's , their many imitators and spin-offs -- we almost never think
about dictionaries, never wonder how they are put together or who is
responsible for them. The answer, of course, is that they are assembled
and edited by very large committees, by lexicographers who labor in
anonymity, credited in the finished product in long lists of contributors
but otherwise unknown.

It is difficult to imagine how it could be otherwise, given the immense
size of the language, yet the first important dictionary of the English
language was essentially the work of one man. Published in 1755, the
Dictionary of the English Language contained some 42,000 entries, with
definitions, etymologies and illustrative quotations, all of it the work
of Samuel Johnson. Yes, he had, as Henry Hitchings writes in Defining the
World , "six amanuenses, who attended to some of [the] more menial and
mechanical aspects," but the dictionary itself was Johnson's. The labor
occupied fully a decade -- Johnson at first thought he could finish it off
in three years -- and took over his life. After its completion he, and the
language, were never again the same.

The dictionary was published in the middle of the most extraordinary
century English literature has known -- the time of the Enlightenment, of
Henry Fielding and Alexander Pope and Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift and
Samuel Richardson -- and may well have been its most majestic and enduring
achievement. As Hitchings writes:

"The authority of Johnson's work has coloured every dictionary of English
that has since been compiled. In the second half of the eighteenth
century, and for most of the nineteenth, it enjoyed totemic status in both
Britain and America. When British speakers of English refer today to 'the
dictionary,' they imply the Oxford English Dictionary , while Americans
incline towards Webster's . But for 150 years 'the dictionary' meant
Johnson's Dictionary . To quote Robert Burchfield, the editor of the
supplement to the OED : 'In the whole tradition of English language and
literature the only dictionary compiled by a writer of the first rank is
that of Dr. Johnson.' Unlike other dictionaries, Johnson's is a work of
literature."

That is no exaggeration. Not merely did Johnson draw upon an incredible
variety of sources to locate and define words -- "He selected
illustrations from poetry, drama and novels, from the Bible and the
literature of divinity, from lawyers and antiquarians, from historians and
politicians, from philosophy and physics, from educational primers and
medical works" -- but he also wrote some of the most muscular, original
prose the English language has known. Again to quote Hitchings:

"Johnson's finest definitions remind us that he was a poet. They are
succinct, accurate and elegant. He is especially skilled in explaining
some of those abstract or intangible things that seem least amenable to
definition. 'Conscience' is 'the knowledge or faculty by which we judge of
the goodness or wickedness of ourselves.' A 'trance' is 'a temporary
absence of the soul.' An 'imp' is a 'puny devil.' A 'rant' consists of
'high-sounding language unsupported by dignity of thought.' Anything
described as 'tawdry' is 'meanly showy; splendid without cost; fine
without grace; showy without elegance.' An 'expletive' is 'something used
only to take up room; something of which the use is only to prevent a
vacancy.' "

Johnson could be witty and sly: "An 'uxorious' man is 'infected with
connubial dotage.' A 'coquette' is 'a girl who endeavours to attract
notice'; a 'cynic' is 'a philosopher of the snarling or currish sort.' "
He could be deft: "Johnson neatly defines 'to strut' as 'to walk with
affected dignity' . . . . A 'hope' is, among other things, 'an expectation
indulged with pleasure.' " He could be vivid and playful: "A 'bedpresser'
is 'a heavy lazy fellow'. . . . A 'giglet' is 'a lascivious girl'; an
'abbey-lubber' is someone who loiters in religious places 'under pretense
of retirement and austerity,' and 'prickhouse' is 'a word of contempt for
a tailor.' A 'fopdoodle' is 'a fool; an insignificant wretch.' "

Et cetera. Much in Johnson's dictionary is now obscure or outdated, but
the dictionary can still be read with delight; when, about four decades
ago, Samuel Johnson's Dictionary: A Modern Selection was published,
reviewers and readers welcomed it as evidence that over more than two
centuries Johnson's prose and wit had lost none of their power to inform
and entertain. Though he is now known chiefly as the speaker of delicious
and timeless aphorisms faithfully recorded by James Boswell in his
monumental The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), he was chiefly a writer of
the first rank: poet, dramatist, essayist, biographer and just about
everything else.

In 1746, though, when he contracted to compile his dictionary, he was
comparatively unknown, a resident of a place called "grubstreet,"
subsequently defined by him as "originally the name of a street in
Moorfields in London, much inhabited by writers of small histories,
dictionaries, and temporary poems; whence any mean production is called
grubstreet ." He was married, not especially happily, to a woman much his
senior and lived a hand-to-mouth existence that seemed likely to stretch
into eternity. Then Robert Dodsley, a formidable bookseller, persuaded him
to undertake the dictionary and set him on the path to the clat he enjoys
today.

Johnson seems to have approached the task somewhat lightheartedly, but
that didn't last long. He soon realized that "compiling the Dictionary
would be not just intellectually exacting but a physical labour, too . . .
there would be large books to be lugged; a multitude of quotations would
require painstaking transcription; quires of paper would have to be cut up
into copy slips." Much of that labor was done by his assistants, but
Johnson himself -- often in shaky health -- was at the center of it all,
reading in prodigious amounts, recording words he encountered, placing
everything in order, making sense of it all.

When finally published, the book was the proverbial doorstopper. "It was,
in the first place, a large, cumbersome item, weighing around twenty
pounds -- the same as a very big Christmas turkey." Eventually it would be
bound in four volumes, but it was "still unwieldy." It "is the sort of
book that has to be rested on a table or a lectern; it is not easy to lift
a volume one-handed, and only a basketball player would be able to hold it
up and open with a single hand." The initial press run was 2,000 copies
("Today this seems a modest figure, but the market was not huge") and was
"expensive to produce." It cost four pounds 10 shillings, a pittance now
but a very large sum then, evidence that "for all Johnson's avowedly
pedagogic aims, his market consisted at first of affluent, educated
readers."

Despite its price, the dictionary was received enthusiastically and
quickly began to work its way into the central place it has occupied ever
after. It did have its critics -- some objected that Johnson's sources
were primarily literary rather than popular, while others pointed out his
frequent (and inevitable) errors -- but generally it was accepted as
definitive, and Johnson was properly praised for the magnitude of his
achievement. An abridged edition was published in 1756, making the
dictionary cheaper and thus more widely available, and "the dictionary"
took its place in the language.

My own copy of the Modern Selection vanished somewhere during 40 years of
too many moves and disruptions, but the book is still in print, in a Dover
paperback. I have ordered a copy, and so should you, for it makes a superb
companion to Henry Hitchings's fine account of the dictionary's making and
the man who made it. Also recommended is John Wain's Samuel Johnson: A
Biography , the best one-volume life of the good doctor since Boswell's.
Quite simply, one can never get too much of Samuel Johnson.

Jonathan Yardley is The Washington Post's book critic. His e-mail address
is yardleyj at washpost.com.

 2005 The Washington Post Company
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/10/AR2005111001663_pf.html