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Chapter 4 - Johnson and Language
- Edited by Greg Clingham, Bucknell University, Pennsylvania
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- Book:
- The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson
- Published online:
- 22 September 2022
- Print publication:
- 29 September 2022, pp 55-68
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Summary
This chapter interrogates critical commonplaces about Johnson’s use of and approaches to language, engaging both with lexicography and the making of Johnson’s celebrated Dictionary (1st ed., 1755), alongside his thinking on language more widely. Johnson’s interest in empiricism and data collection, alongside his deployment of metaphors of slavery and contested power, shed light on his lexicographical method, as does his innovative decision to include letters and letter-writing as a productive source of information, especially of “ordinary” use. His engagement with register and contextual use, with the intricacies of connotation alongside denotation, and with loanwords (and their influence on processes of change and assimilation) document an approach dominated not by rigidity and stasis but by a wide-ranging commitment to a language that, then and now, was marked by its “exuberance of signification.”
5 - The End of Toleration? Language on the Margins in Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language
- from Part II - Norms and Margins: A Historical Perspective
- Edited by Linda Pillière, Wilfrid Andrieu, Valérie Kerfelec, Diana Lewis
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- Book:
- Standardising English
- Published online:
- 02 March 2018
- Print publication:
- 15 March 2018, pp 89-105
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Summary
For Lord Chesterfield in 1754, Johnson’s dictionary was to emblematize the end of both 'toleration', and naturalization. The time for both was past, he declared; Johnson’s work was, in this and other respects, to be firmly distinguished form the ‘mere word-books’ which, in Chesterfield’s opinion, previous English lexicographers had produced. Johnson, as the ‘Preface’ to the published Dictionary of 1755 confirms, had indeed engaged with the remit of dictionary-making as a means of repulsing ‘unwanted foreigners’ – even if such engagement would, in reality, not be entirely in alignment with Chesterfield’s expectations of prescriptive (and proscriptive) process. This chapter examines the cross-currents of prescriptive and descriptive method in Johnson’s work, looking in detail at his engagement both with normativity and uncertainty, with censure and with the flux a living language must necessarily evince (and which the dictionary-maker might, in turn, record). Examining Johnson’s treatment of loanwords, as well as the projected regularization of spelling (also advocated by Chesterfield ), it focuses on Johnson’s interest in power as topos, and the stated limits of its legitimate use.
Chapter 18 - Dictionaries
- from Part III - Contexts
- Edited by Jack Lynch, Rutgers University, New Jersey
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- Book:
- Samuel Johnson in Context
- Published online:
- 05 June 2012
- Print publication:
- 10 November 2011, pp 157-165
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Summary
Di′ctionary. n.s. [dictionarium, Latin.] A book containing the words of any language in alphabetical order, with explanations of their meaning; a lexicon; a vocabulary; a word-book.
An army, or a parliament, is a collection of men; a dictionary, or nomenclature, is a collection of words. Watts.
By the eighteenth century the monolingual English dictionary, alphabetically organized and equipped with some form of definition for the words which it contained, was, as the lexicographer Benjamin Martin confirms, already a familiar work of reference:
It is customary among all People to make an orderly Arrangement of all the Letters used in their Language, which we call by the Greek name Alphabet; as also of all the Words and Terms which compose the same: And such a Collection or Catalogue of Words is by Us called a Dictionary.
As Johnson commented, this was in many ways to be an “age of dictionaries” (Letters, 1:79), characterized by both abundance and diversity. Small dictionaries “fit for the pocket” vied with larger multivolume works for a share of the public’s attention. Dictionaries were written for school and home, for incidental reference or systematic self-improvement, and offered information on a variety of heads. When Johnson began composing his own dictionary in 1746, Nathan Bailey’s Universal Etymological English Dictionary already contained 42,000 word entries. A new edition of Bailey appeared in 1755, containing some 65,000 words and actively competing with Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language, which had been published in April of that year.
Earlier English dictionaries
While Johnson is popularly described as the “father of the dictionary,” the reality was therefore rather different. The monolingual English dictionary can be traced to 1604, with the publication of Robert Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall, aimed at “unskilful readers” and containing roughly 2,500 “hard, usual words” such as bankerupt and rapacitie. Nevertheless, as Johnson argued in his Plan of a Dictionaryof the English Language (1747), “a very miscellaneous idea” had so far seemed to characterize English lexicography (Works, 18:30). The image of the dictionary as a remedy for educational deficits of particular kinds – able in particular to democratize the kind of polysyllabic and Latinate vocabulary which marked the classically educated “gentleman” – remained popular. The Glossographia Anglicana Nova: Interpreting Such Hard Words of Whatever Language, as Are at Present Used in the English Tongue (1707) therefore stressed its utility to those who could find themselves “not able to read a good Historian, or any Polite English Writer without an Interpreter.” Thomas Dyche and William Pardon likewise stressed the value of their own New General English Dictionary (1735) for the “Improvement of such as are Unacquainted with the Learned Languages.” “Hard words” had pride of place in most early English dictionaries, and familiar words and meanings were often neglected.
16 - Registering the language – dictionaries, diction and the art of elocution
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- By Lynda Mugglestone, University of Oxford
- Edited by Raymond Hickey, Universität Duisburg–Essen
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- Book:
- Eighteenth-Century English
- Published online:
- 06 December 2010
- Print publication:
- 24 June 2010, pp 309-338
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Summary
The eighteenth-century context
A large number of persons habitually speak of ‘the Dictionary’, just as they do of ‘the Bible’ or ‘the Psalms’; and who, if pressed as to the authorship of these works, would certainly say that ‘the Psalms’ were composed by David, and ‘the Dictionary’ by Dr Johnson' (Murray 1900: 2). As James Murray (editor of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) 1878–1915) here indicates, it is Johnson who, at least in popular belief, towers over eighteenth-century lexicography, often being accorded the status of writer of the prototypical dictionary, as well as – mythically if erroneously – of writer of the ‘first’ dictionary. In reality, of course, the centenary of the first monolingual dictionary – Cawdrey's Table Alphabeticall (1604) – was fast approaching even as the eighteenth century began. As John Marchant moreover stressed, it was ‘the Number and Variety of English Dictionaries’ which was instead more accurately to characterise this period (1760: b1r). Against the canonical pre-eminence of Johnson (the ‘stupendous Undertaking’ praised by David Baker (1764); the ‘indefatigable industry’ by which Johnson ‘from the best authorities, corrected the mistakes, retrenched the superfluities, and supplied the defects of those who went before him’), stand therefore a whole range of other works, diversified by size and price, by audience and addressees, by contents and language attitudes, as well as by their differential positioning within a genre which was by no means either monosemic or capable of being reduced to a single representative text.
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