Word Play: The man who defined English

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Today is Friday, April 11th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Myrna Brown.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Finally today, Word Play with George Grant.

Today, the tale of a dictionary-maker with a sharp mind, dry wit, and very little patience for French.

GEORGE GRANT: Samuel Johnson was one of the most important English writers of the 18th century. He remains one of the most quoted prose stylists in the English language. It has long been traditional to refer to the second half of the 18th century as the Age of Johnson. Even so, he is best remembered not so much as a writer but as a conversationalist—mostly due to the account of his life written by James Boswell, his ne’er-do-well travel companion. Many of Johnson’s most memorable quotations come not from his works but from his biographer’s recollection of his conversations: Johnson quipped, “Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those whom we cannot resemble,” and “Language is the dress of thought.” He said, “When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully,” and “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”

Born in 1709, the son of a failed village bookseller, Johnson struggled throughout his early life against the ravages of poverty. Though he demonstrated a precocious mind and a prodigious literary talent, he was unable to complete his education at Oxford. Instead, he began his lifelong labors as a freelance writer in London for various newspapers, magazines, journals, and book publishers. He was phenomenally prolific and adept at virtually every genre—from criticism, translation, poetry, and biography to sermons, parliamentary reports, political polemics, and dramatic stage plays.

When he was nearly fifty, he was commissioned to produce a dictionary. Over the course of the next seven years, he single-handedly took on the task of comprehensively documenting English usage—which when completed, set the standard for dictionaries ever afterward. The first edition contained 42,773-words. Each was not only succinctly defined, but illustrated with quotations from classic literature by Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, and a host of others. When completed the dictionary was universally regarded as the pre-eminent lexicographical and etymological work.

Though it was largely academic, Johnson also introduced into it a good bit of humor. For example, he defined excise as “a hateful tax levied upon commodities and adjudged… by wretches hired by those to whom excise is paid.” Oats, he said, was “a grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.” A sock was defined as “something put between the shoe and foot.” And a lizard was “an animal resembling a serpent, with legs added to it.”

Johnson did not regard French loanwords as proper for English usage. He omitted most of them—including champagne and bourgeois. Those that he did include were often hilariously derided. Finesse was dismissed as “an unnecessary word creeping into the language.” Ruse was dubbed “a French word neither elegant nor necessary.” And monsieur, he said, was “a term of reproach for a Frenchman.”

Tellingly, Johnson defined a lexicographer as “a harmless drudge that busies himself in tracing the original and detailing the signification of words.” But that tracing and detailing set the standard for every dictionary that would follow, from Noah Webster’s and James Murray’s to William Collins’ and Thomas Nelson’s. Each labored in the shadows of that great “harmless drudge.”

I’m George Grant.

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