![]() ![]() “Our language will be laid down,” he wrote elsewhere in the Plan, “distinct in its minutest subdivisions, and resolved into its elemental principles. As he wrote in the Plan, he proposed to write “a dictionary by which the pronunciation of our language may be fixed, and its attainment facilitated by which its purity may be preserved, its use ascertained, and its duration lengthened.” Apprised of pure English by his Dictionary, Johnson’s readers should accept the standard of clear meaning and good usage revealed there. And, importantly, though Cotgrave borrowed a culturally resonant figure to serve his purpose, Johnson invented his: Among early English lexicographers, Johnson was the first to write memorably by design he was the first to assert the cultural authority of dictionary definitions.įamously, Johnson established the conservative prescriptive goal of some (by no means all) modern lexicography. Granted, the harmless drudge is currently a more familiar figure than the nut-brown girl, especially in America. a nut-brown girle,” a literary allusion (the nut-brown girl is a figure of late medieval balladry) appropriate to a culture less cosmopolitan than Johnson’s. ![]() Well over a century earlier, in 1611, however, Randle Cotgrave, in A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues gave us “Brunette, brunet, brownish, somewhat browne. Everyone knows that Johnson defined lexicographer as ‘harmless drudge’ or, at least, they know that someone did. No horticultural definition of oats for Johnson, but rather the infamous “a grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.” Alas, for the mythographers, Johnson was not even the first English lexicographer to write a memorable definition. Johnson is admired for his witty definitions. Martin may have got the idea from Johnson’s Plan of a Dictionary in 1747, for Johnson proposed to “sort the several senses of each word, and to exhibit first its natural and primitive significance,” followed by “its consequential meaning,” and then “the remoter or metaphorical signification.” Whoever came up with it, no one doubts, in retrospect, that it was a good plan. Johnson is also often credited with introducing sense divisions into dictionary entries, but Benjamin Martin had used them in Lingua Britannica Reformata, published in 1749. Putting aside major early modern dictionaries produced in France, Italy, and Portugal, John Florio’s Italian-English dictionary, A Worlde of Wordes was, in 1598, the first at least partially English dictionary to use quotations, and by no means the last preceding Johnson. ![]() Nor was Johnson’s the first dictionary to employ literary quotations to illustrate meaning or usage. And Johnson did not write his dictionary alone: He had half a dozen assistants, and the history of lexicography tells us that assistants influence dictionary-making more than either eighteenth-century social hierarchies or the Great Author theory behind Johnson’s reputation admits. Though he gave up several years of full-time work to the Dictionary, Johnson wasn’t the first professional lexicographer: John Kersey, author of A New English Dictionary, published in 1702, probably owns that distinction. Conventional wisdom holds that Johnson single-handedly conceived and produced A Dictionary of the English Language. Johnson may well be the most celebrated lexicographer of English, yet many claims about his lexicography are exaggerated. For all the mythology, you’d think English vocabulary had sprung fully formed and irreproachable from his prominent, Augustan forehead. Johnson scholar Jack Lynch anticipated the tercentenary spirit by asserting (in the title of his recent selection) that Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language is the “work that defined the English language.” The English language was doing pretty well before Johnson got involved nevertheless, he has been taken for the Jupiter of lexicography since before his dictionary appeared in print in 1755. Though he disparaged Johnson’s style, as well as his literary and political judgment, Thomas Babington Macaulay, in the Edinburgh Review in 1831, admitted that, due to Boswell, Johnson would be “more intimately known to posterity than other men are known to their contemporaries.” We tend to presume on that acquaintance. ![]()
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