[Lexicog] What is a lexicographer?

[Mali Translation]

Who can give a definition of what a lexicographer is and does?
Here is a start with a definition by the American author
Ambrose Bierce. Ambrose Bierce was a friend of Mark
Twain. While both were humorists, Bierce was more known for
his caustic wit.

Fritz Goerling

LEXICOGRAPHER, n.
A pestilent fellow who, under the pretense of recording some
particular stage in the development of a language, does what
he can to arrest its growth, stiffen its flexibility and
mechanize its methods. For your lexicographer, having written
his dictionary, comes to be considered "as one having authority,"
whereas his function is only to make a record, not to give a law.
The natural servility of the human understanding having invested
him with judicial power, surrenders its right of reason and
submits itself to a chronicle as if it were a statue. Let the
dictionary (for example) mark a good word as "obsolete" or
"obsolescent" and few men thereafter venture to use it, whatever
their need of it and however desirable its restoration to favor
-- whereby the process of improverishment is accelerated and
speech decays. On the contrary, recognizing the truth that
language must grow by innovation if it grow at all, makes new
words and uses the old in an unfamiliar sense, has no following
and is tartly reminded that "it isn't in the dictionary" --
although down to the time of the first lexicographer (Heaven
forgive him!) no author ever had used a word that was in the
dictionary. In the golden prime and high noon of English speech;
when from the lips of the great Elizabethans fell words that
made their own meaning and carried it in their very sound; when
a Shakespeare and a Bacon were possible, and the language now
rapidly perishing at one end and slowly renewed at the other was
in vigorous growth and hardy preservation -- sweeter than honey
and stronger than a lion -- the lexicographer was a person
unknown, the dictionary a creation which his Creator had not
created him to create.



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