Dr Johnson Speaks

...Those who claim Johnson was a prescriptivist point to entries in his Dictionary like ruse, which Johnson says is "A French word neither elegant nor necessary," or scomm, "A word out of use, and unworthy of revival...

...The editors— Robert DeMaria, one of the most distinguished experts on Johnson, and the recently deceased Gwin J. Kolb, whose contributions to Johnsonian studies go back more than half-a-cen-tury—know Johnson's works and their contexts intimately...

...He went so far as to declare that he was Johnson on the English Language Vol...

...Perhaps no writer in English is better documented...

...18, The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson Edited by Gwin J. Kolb and Robert DeMaria Yale, 560 pp., $90 "willing to love all mankind, except an American...

...Johnson Speaks On language, English words, and life by Jack Lynch Samuel Johnson died 222 years ago, and in all that time there has been surprisingly little agreement about what he thought about many important questions...

...his enemy David Hume turned philosophy on its head...

...18) deserves serious attention from a wide readership...

...division, parting or seperating...

...to his detractors, he's the embodiment of everything they despise...

...It's a development that shows a new degree of sophistication coming to the study of the language...

...Why so little agreement after so many years...

...to be exposed to censure, without hope of praise...

...When Boswell tried to defend a woman who cheated on her husband, Johnson would have none of it: "The woman's a whore," he insisted, "and there's an end on't...

...It's clear that he had prescriptive intentions at the beginning of his labors: "When I took the first survey of my undertaking, I found our speech copious without order, and energetick without rules: wherever I turned my view, there was perplexity to be disentangled, and confusion to be regulated...

...He wrote that his job was not to "form, but register the language," not to "teach men how they should think, but relate how they have hitherto expressed their thoughts...

...And yet, for all its failures, Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language remains tremendously insightful and influential, perhaps the only reference work that's also a classic of English literature...

...The only way to settle this question is through careful attention to Johnson's Dictionary, his great monument to the English language...

...It's certainly not because he was hesitant to speak his mind...

...Here are some complete entries from Cawdrey's dictionary: distance, space betweene...

...The prescriptivists warn against splitting infinitives and insist that it's wrong to end sentences with prepositions...

...To be told a dulcimer is an instrument is of very little help...

...His friend Adam Smith laid the foundations for modern economic thought...

...In fact, he had few big ideas that can be called original, in his Dictionary or elsewhere...

...anatiferous means "producing ducks...

...the descriptivists see themselves as realists and their opponents as inflexible linguistic authoritarians...

...his acquaintance Benjamin Franklin was one of the most prolific inventors in history...

...And so on...

...It should be no surprise that there's no consensus...

...Things like this are useful to specialists but not to general readers...

...Johnson once said he "rejoice[d] to concur with the common reader," and this "common reader . . . uncor-rupted with literary prejudices," was his ideal audience...

...He then described in detail how he proceeded, beginning with "the perusal of our writers"—Johnson read many hundreds of works of English literature, marking them up as he went—and noting along the way "whatever might be of use to ascertain or illustrate any word or phrase...

...Volume 17, for instance, is Johnson's translation of Jean Pierre de Crousaz's Commentaire sur la traduction en vers de M. Abbe Du Resnel, de I'Essai de M. Pope sur I'homme—hardly a title to make its way onto any bestseller list...

...He wrote about politics: Some see him as a diehard conservative, others as an advocate for the policies of the modern left...

...The real reason is that his mind is one of the richest and most complicated of his era, perhaps of any era...

...Henry Fielding, one of England's greatest novelists, was "a blockhead...

...And even some of Johnson's own writings here—his "History of the English Language" and his "Grammar of the English Tongue"— will be rough going for all but the most devoted readers...

...But the real Samuel Johnson—whether prescriptive or descriptive, whether conservative or liberal—will be found only in the pages of his works...

...Other early dictionaries did the same...

...That may be inevitable...

...Every other authour may aspire to praise...

...The English language is where Johnson did some of his most important work, and debates about the significance of that work continue to this day...

...Why, then, does Johnson remain so elusive...

...he is the subject of both dissertations and books of Christian devotion...

...The two sides glower at each other across the pages of scholarly journals and editorial pages: The prescriptivists see themselves as champions of standards of propriety and their opponents as wild-eyed linguistic anarchists...

...The word thro' was "Contracted by barbarians from through" and disannul should "be rejected as ungrammatical and barbarous...

...And the appearance of this definitive edition of Johnson's writings about the English language is a good opportunity to look at these questions anew...

...The preface opens with his gloomy survey of the prospect before him: It is the fate of those who toil at the lower employments of life, to be rather driven by the fear of evil, than attracted by the prospect of good...

...Not everything came out the way he had hoped...

...Johnson, on the other hand, wasn't a "first" in anything important, including his Dictionary...

...Those works are still eminently readable, and now his writings on language are available in a more authoritative form than ever before...

...whom mankind have considered, not as the pupil, but the slave of science, the pionier of literature, doomed only to remove rubbish and clear obstructions from the paths of Learning and Genius, who press forward to conquest and glory, without bestowing a smile on the humble drudge that facilitates their progress...

...election, choice...

...Johnson has been the subject of hundreds of books and thousands of articles...

...The earliest dictionaries covered only the "hard words"— terms like adpugn (fight against), acon-ick (poisonous), and abligurition (spending too much on food and drink...

...Not all of the volumes, of course, are of equal interest outside the academy...

...When finished, it will be the first collected edition of Johnson's works since 1825...

...John Kersey's New English Dictionary, for instance, appeared in 1702...

...Cawdrey's definitions were usually no more than synonyms, and not very precise ones at that...

...a scientific instrument...

...In the years since his death, scholars have been poring over those dozens of volumes and trying to make sense of their author...

...I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to please, have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are empty sounds: I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquillity, having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise...

...Cawdrey doesn't say...

...Sugarcoating was not for him...

...Was his Dictionary fundamentally conservative or progressive...

...To put that in perspective, Moby-Dick, War and Peace, and the collected works of Shakespeare combined are just over half the length of Johnson's Dictionary...

...So which camp is Johnson's...

...And yet this "humble drudge" went on to summarize both the state of the language and the nature of his work...

...He considered the blend of Germanic and Latinate words that make up English...

...And many on both sides are eager to claim the authority of Johnson, the first great theorist of the English language, to support their cause...

...For anyone interested in the language, Johnson on the English Language will more than repay the time it takes to read...

...But while Johnson was a serious scholar, and while he has been well served by two more serious scholars, he wasn't writing only for other academics...

...To pigeonhole him as "liberal" or "conservative," "imperialist" or "anti-imperialist," forces us to be very clear about what we mean by those words, because he's almost always too complicated to fit neatly into any of our categories...

...They trace many of his arguments to now-obscure 17th-century French and Italian linguists, and they spot Johnson's occasional lapses when he transcribes Anglo-Saxon...

...Those who see him as a pioneer descriptivist, on the other hand, point to passages in the Dictionary like this: "It is not in our power to have recourse to any established laws of speech, but we must remark how the writers of former ages have used the same word"—in other words, the only guide to language is usage, not logic, not rules...

...No one had ever really attempted to solve these problems before Johnson, whose powerful intelligence qualified him to sort through all the subtle differences in senses...

...It has been asserted," he wrote, "that for the law to be known, is of more importance than to be right...

...Among these unhappy mortals is the writer of dictionaries...

...Now turn to Johnson's Dictionary...

...not in the soft obscurities of retirement, or under the shelter of aca-demick bowers, but amidst inconvenience and distraction, in sickness and in sorrow...

...And some of his best writing appears in the Dictionary and in Johnson on the English Language, especially the preface to his Dictionary and the drafts of the earlier Plan of an English Dictionary that mapped his territory before setting out...

...It's notoriously difficult to pin him down or to reduce him to sound bites...

...I laboured to settle the orthography, display the analogy, regulate the structures, and ascertain the signification of English words, to perform all the parts of a faithful lexicographer," he admitted, "but I have not always executed my own scheme, or satisfied my own expectations...

...What's important about Johnson's Dictionary isn't that it was the first, but that it was the best dictionary of its day, the most discerning and precise that had ever appeared, the one that gave more attention than ever before to teasing out minute discriminations of meaning...

...Paradise Lost, he said, "is one of the books which the reader admires and puts down, and forgets to take up again...

...He wrestled with the relationships between words and their roots...

...None ever wished it longer than it is...

...Johnson defines some 43,000 words, illustrating those words with around 115,000 quotations from great English authors, in a book that stretches to roughly three million words of text...

...He also recognized that many of his suggestions would do little good...

...as a political writer he didn't develop a Johnsonian system...

...dulcimur, instrument...

...His edition of selections from Dr...

...As a poet he didn't invent a Johnsonian stanza...

...If a musical instrument, do you blow on it, bang on it, or pluck its strings...

...It's not for lack of attention...

...He wanted to show for each word "by what gradations of intermediate sense it has passed from its primitive to its remote and accidental signification," but found this plan was "not always practicable" because "kindred senses may be so interwoven, that the perplexity cannot be disentangled, nor any reason be assigned why one should be ranged before the other...

...It's not for lack of material...

...Consider Robert Cawdrey, whose Table Alphabeticall of 1604 deserves to be called the first English dictionary...

...Johnson's published writings fill Jack Lynch is associate professor of English at Rutgers...

...Even literary masterpieces didn't escape his forceful criticism...

...In the 18 th century, lexicographers began paying more attention to common words...

...but he could be admirably direct and powerful when he chose to be...

...Many people think the hardest words to define are the obscure ones—words like ruderary or fabaceous or anatiferous...

...Even parts of this volume, it must be admitted, will be of interest mainly to specialists...

...He wrote about economics: Some see him as a champion of modern capitalism, others as an opponent of the free market...

...fabaceous means "having the nature of a bean...

...One of the perennial debates among people who discuss the language is whether it is the job of commentators to be prescriptive or descriptive...

...Besides, any proposed change to the language is bound to cause inconvenience...

...the descriptivists say such rules are artificial and old-fashioned, and a linguist should care only about the way real people speak and write...

...Reading the entire work from cover to cover, though, is the work of months, even years...

...As two scholars put it 50 years ago, "Johnson, as lexicographer, asked no questions, gave no answers, and invented no techniques which were new to Europe...

...People on all sides have the bad habit of attributing beliefs to Johnson that he never held...

...Johnson's Dictionary has just been issued in paperback...

...Is it a musical instrument...

...the descriptivists tell you the way it is...

...And the definitions they included were usually very limited...

...Johnson has a reputation for being a difficult, even a forbidding, writer...

...Johnson, famously blunt in both his writing and his conversation, loved controversy...

...He's careful to distinguish taking medicine from taking revenge, taking one's way from taking one's time...

...The subtlety and precision of his thought are both the reason people have been drawn to him for so many years and the reason they disagree even after all that careful reading...

...His conclusion was glum: "The English Dictionary was written with little assistance of the learned, and without any patronage of the great...

...Here Johnson seems to be delivering edicts, issuing verdicts on whether words should live or die...

...His famous Dictionary of the English Language appeared in two huge volumes in 1755...

...So what did Johnson think about prescription versus description...

...Change, says Hooker, is not made without inconvenience, even from worse to better...

...the lexicographer can only hope to escape reproach, and even this negative rec-ompence has been yet granted to very few...

...His entries for take, with 133 numbered senses and 363 quotations, run to more than 8,000 words...

...And even "Shakespeare never has six lines together without a fault...

...Edward Phillips's dictionary, A New World of Words, jumps from tainct to takel, Thomas Blount's Glosso-graphia goes straight from tainct to talaries...

...Nathan Bailey, Johnson's most important precursor, gave common English words more attention than most of his predecessors, but even he dispensed with all of his definitions of take in a mere 362 words...

...To his supporters, he's the embodiment of their own convictions...

...He dismissed the rebellious American colonists as "Rascals—Robbers—Pirates," who "ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging...

...to be disgraced by miscarriage, or punished for neglect, where success would have been without applause, and diligence without reward...

...There's no Johnsonian theorem, no Johnsonian method, no Johnsonian discovery...

...He includes words like calcinate ("to make salt"), calygraphie ("fayre writing"), and calliditie ("craftines, or deceit") but can't be bothered with call, cat, or catch...

...While he defines taciturnitie ("silence or keeping counsaile") and tangible ("that may be touched"), he skips over a familiar word like take...

...He recounted his efforts to reduce the notoriously inconsistent spelling of English words to something like a logical system...

...He remains a source of fascination for both professors and journalists...

...But if it's impractical to read the entire Dictionary, it's possible to read some of Johnson's most important theoretical statements about the nature of the English language...

...And his definitions are more precise than those of any of his predecessors...

...Each year sees another 150 or so titles in which he is chronicled, celebrated, abused, psychoanalyzed, and deconstructed...

...The prescriptivists tell you the way the language should be...

...Seventeenth-century lexicographers didn't see the point of defining words like cat or take...

...a legal instrument...

...Contrary to the popular myth, it was not the first English dictionary—Johnson had dozens of predecessors in English-language lexicography...

...But Johnson on the English Language (Vol...

...But these inkhorn terms are in fact some of the easiest ones to define, because once you figure out the Latin or Greek roots, you've got your answer...

...Benjamin Martin, the first English lexicographer to use numbered senses, covers 17 different senses of take in a total of 132 words...

...The experience he gained from being a careful practical lexicographer also gave him insight into how language works in general, and his comments on language show a sensitivity that was unparalleled in his day, and has few rivals in our own...

...For the curious: ruderary means "belonging to rubbish...

...already it's a major scholarly achievement...

...In political disputes he could be brutal...

...And then there are the five fat volumes of his letters and, most famously, Boswell's Life of Johnson, recording more than a thousand pages of his conversation...

...He wrote about the sexes: Some see him as a determined misogynist, others as the most devoted feminist thinker of his day...

...But defining a word like take or get or set is a real challenge...

...He's a mainstay of English literature surveys, of graduate seminars, and of professional conferences...

...dozens of volumes: A play, a few short fictions, a travel book, a stack of political pamphlets, dozens of poems, more than 50 biographies, several hundred essays, a complete annotated edition of the works of Shakespeare, and tens of thousands of definitions in his great Dictionary...

...He wrote about empire: Some see him as a devoted imperialist, others as an enemy of imperial expansion...

...it defines take this way: "to hold with one's Hand, to lay hold of"—a total of nine words...

...efficient, working, or accomplishing...

...The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson has been underway since the mid-1950s, and after half a century is finally nearing completion...