[Lexicog] Johnson's Dictionary

[Melissa Axelrod]

    <http://www.nytimes.com/>


    Johnson's Dictionary

By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
<http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?ppds=bylL&v1=VERLYN%20KLINKENBORG&fdq=19960101&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=VERLYN%20KLINKENBORG&inline=nyt-per>


Published: April 17, 2005

Two hundred fifty years ago, on April 15, 1755, Samuel Johnson published
the first edition of his Dictionary of the English Language, compiled
and written almost wholly by himself. It appeared in London in two folio
volumes. Like most dictionaries, there is a rigorous serenity in the
look of its pages. The language has been laid out in alphabetical order.
The etymologies and definitions bristle with italics and abbreviations.
The quotations that exemplify the meanings of the words present a
bottomless fund of good sense and literary beauty.

But I wonder whether anyone has ever had a more dynamic or volatile
sense of the language than Johnson did. We tend to remember him as an
older man, grown heavy, his face weighed down as much by indolence as
industry. But in April 1755 he was not yet 46. With the publication of
his dictionary, he returned from his researches into the English
language the way an explorer returns from the North Pole, with a sense
of having seen a terrain that others can see only through his account of
what he found there. Instead of a wilderness of ice, he faced what he
called, in his preface to the dictionary, "the boundless chaos of a
living speech." Instead of voyages into Arctic waters, he talks of
"fortuitous and unguided excursions into books."

It's tempting to think of a lexicographer in terms of the dictionary he
produces, and Johnson's is certainly one of the great philological
accomplishments of any literary era. But it's just as interesting to
think of what the dictionary does to the man. Johnson says, quite
simply, "I applied myself to the perusal of our writers." But reading
"our writers" to find the materials for a dictionary is unlike any other
kind of reading I can imagine. It would atomize every text, forsake the
general sense of a passage for the particular meaning of individual
words. It would be like hiking through quicksand, around the world.

Johnson lived in turmoil, and the sense of vigor he so often projected
was, if nothing else, a way of keeping order in a world that threatened
to disintegrate into disorder every day. And what was the disorder of
London to the chaos of the language? "Sounds," he wrote, "are too
volatile and subtile for legal restraints; to enchain syllables, and to
lash the wind, are equally the undertakings of pride." Johnson published
his dictionary not as the conqueror of the language but as the person
who knew best how unconquerable it really is.



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