Friday, April 15, 2005
A Harmless Drudge?
Today is Leonardo da Vinci's birthday. It is also the 250th anniversary of the publication of one of the most celebrated works in the English language, Dr Samuel Johnson's Dictionary. Beryl Bainbridge describes the importance of this truly remarkable book:
For more than half a century the English intellectual world had been mortified by the lack of a major English dictionary. The great national dictionaries had been produced by Italy and France, the former in 1612 and the latter completed in 1700. It seemed impossible that anyone in England could tackle the magnitude of such a task. A schoolmaster called Nathan Bailey had made a good attempt in 1721, but it dealt primarily with the origin of words. Some definitions were on the casual side, for example, "Horse - beast well-known". Johnson supplies five definitions, including "Joined to another substantive it signifies something large and coarse, as in horse-face".
In all, he defined more than 40,000 words, illustrating their meanings by the inclusion of 140,000 quotations drawn from writings in English from the middle of the Elizabethan period down to his own time.
Apart from the sheer scope of the work, what made Johnson's Dictionary such a landmark in the study of the language? Henry Hitchings answers the question:
One of [the Dictionary's] most important features was the use of illustrative quotations to buttress the definitions. Johnson saw that it was not enough to say what words meant; he had to show them in use.
To make this possible, he scoured the literature of the previous 200 years for suitable passages. In fact, this was where he began. Rather than dreaming up a colossal wordlist and then looking for examples of each word, he began with the illustrations and worked backwards from there. So, for instance, he came across a sentence of John Locke's in which Locke wrote of the "bugbear thoughts" which "once got into the tender minds of children, sink deep, so as not easily, if ever, to be got out again". Drawing on this - and on five other quotations, from four other authors - Johnson could distil the essence of the word and conclude that a "bugbear" was "a frightful object; a walking spectre, imagined to be seen; generally now used for a false terror to frighten babes".
This emphasis on finding source material and using it as evidence was, in British lexicography at least, an innovation, and it has been influential. The practice continues to this day in the Oxford English Dictionary.
Of course, no celebration of Johnson would be complete without mention of his devoted biographer, James Boswell. Here's Bainbridge again:
In any week in the broadsheets, in parliamentary debates, in discussion programmes on both radio and television, the remark "as Dr Johnson once said" frequently occurs, followed by a pithy and erudite quotation. The curious fact is that but for a young and often inebriated Scottish lawyer called James Boswell, the name of Samuel Johnson, Dictionary or not, would have been forgotten long ago; few people have read a word of the poems or essays. Boswell's biography of the "Good Doctor", whom he met in 1763, is a work of genius, so real, so modern in its immediacy, that its subject remains untouchable to this day.
For more than half a century the English intellectual world had been mortified by the lack of a major English dictionary. The great national dictionaries had been produced by Italy and France, the former in 1612 and the latter completed in 1700. It seemed impossible that anyone in England could tackle the magnitude of such a task. A schoolmaster called Nathan Bailey had made a good attempt in 1721, but it dealt primarily with the origin of words. Some definitions were on the casual side, for example, "Horse - beast well-known". Johnson supplies five definitions, including "Joined to another substantive it signifies something large and coarse, as in horse-face".
In all, he defined more than 40,000 words, illustrating their meanings by the inclusion of 140,000 quotations drawn from writings in English from the middle of the Elizabethan period down to his own time.
Apart from the sheer scope of the work, what made Johnson's Dictionary such a landmark in the study of the language? Henry Hitchings answers the question:
One of [the Dictionary's] most important features was the use of illustrative quotations to buttress the definitions. Johnson saw that it was not enough to say what words meant; he had to show them in use.
To make this possible, he scoured the literature of the previous 200 years for suitable passages. In fact, this was where he began. Rather than dreaming up a colossal wordlist and then looking for examples of each word, he began with the illustrations and worked backwards from there. So, for instance, he came across a sentence of John Locke's in which Locke wrote of the "bugbear thoughts" which "once got into the tender minds of children, sink deep, so as not easily, if ever, to be got out again". Drawing on this - and on five other quotations, from four other authors - Johnson could distil the essence of the word and conclude that a "bugbear" was "a frightful object; a walking spectre, imagined to be seen; generally now used for a false terror to frighten babes".
This emphasis on finding source material and using it as evidence was, in British lexicography at least, an innovation, and it has been influential. The practice continues to this day in the Oxford English Dictionary.
Of course, no celebration of Johnson would be complete without mention of his devoted biographer, James Boswell. Here's Bainbridge again:
In any week in the broadsheets, in parliamentary debates, in discussion programmes on both radio and television, the remark "as Dr Johnson once said" frequently occurs, followed by a pithy and erudite quotation. The curious fact is that but for a young and often inebriated Scottish lawyer called James Boswell, the name of Samuel Johnson, Dictionary or not, would have been forgotten long ago; few people have read a word of the poems or essays. Boswell's biography of the "Good Doctor", whom he met in 1763, is a work of genius, so real, so modern in its immediacy, that its subject remains untouchable to this day.
