Dr. Johnson Speaks On language, English words, and life.
by Jack Lynch
01/01/2007, Volume 012, Issue 16
Johnson on the English Language
Vol. 18, The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson
Edited by Gwin J. Kolb and Robert DeMaria
Yale, 560 pp., $90
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.
He wrote about politics: Some see him as a diehard conservative, others as an advocate for the policies of the modern left. He wrote about empire: Some see him as a devoted imperialist, others as an enemy of imperial expansion. He wrote about economics: Some see him as a champion of modern capitalism, others as an opponent of the free market. He wrote about the sexes: Some see him as a determined misogynist, others as the most devoted feminist thinker of his day.
Why so little agreement after so many years? It’s not for lack of material. Johnson’s published writings fill 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. 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. Perhaps no writer in English is better documented.
It’s not for lack of attention. In the years since his death, scholars have been poring over those dozens of volumes and trying to make sense of their author. Johnson has been the subject of hundreds of books and thousands of articles. Each year sees another 150 or so titles in which he is chronicled, celebrated, abused, psychoanalyzed, and deconstructed. He’s a mainstay of English literature surveys, of graduate seminars, and of professional conferences. He remains a source of fascination for both professors and journalists; he is the subject of both dissertations and books of Christian devotion.
It’s certainly not because he was hesitant to speak his mind. Johnson, famously blunt in both his writing and his conversation, loved controversy. Sugarcoating was not for him. 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.” In political disputes he could be brutal. He dismissed the rebellious American colonists as “Rascals–Robbers–Pirates,” who “ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging.” He went so far as to declare that he was “willing to love all mankind, except an American.” Even literary masterpieces didn’t escape his forceful criticism. Henry Fielding, one of England’s greatest novelists, was “a blockhead.” Paradise Lost, he said, “is one of the books which the reader admires and puts down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is.” And even “Shakespeare never has six lines together without a fault.”
Why, then, does Johnson remain so elusive? The real reason is that his mind is one of the richest and most complicated of his era, perhaps of any era. It’s notoriously difficult to pin him down or to reduce him to sound bites. 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. 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.
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. His famous Dictionary of the English Language appeared in two huge volumes in 1755. Contrary to the popular myth, it was not the first English dictionary–Johnson had dozens of predecessors in English-language lexicography. In fact, he had few big ideas that can be called original, in his Dictionary or elsewhere. There’s no Johnsonian theorem, no Johnsonian method, no Johnsonian discovery. As a poet he didn’t invent a Johnsonian stanza; as a political writer he didn’t develop a Johnsonian system. His friend Adam Smith laid the foundations for modern economic thought; his enemy David Hume turned philosophy on its head; his acquaintance Benjamin Franklin was one of the most prolific inventors in history. Johnson, on the other hand, wasn’t a “first” in anything important, including his Dictionary.
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.”
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. The earliest dictionaries covered only the “hard words”–terms like adpugn (fight against), aconick (poisonous), and abligurition (spending too much on food and drink). Consider Robert Cawdrey, whose Table Alphabeticall of 1604 deserves to be called the first English dictionary. 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.
Other early dictionaries did the same. Edward Phillips’s dictionary, A New World of Words, jumps from tainct to takel, Thomas Blount’s Glossographia goes straight from tainct to talaries. Seventeenth-century lexicographers didn’t see the point of defining words like cat or take. And the definitions they included were usually very limited. Here are some complete entries from Cawdrey’s dictionary:
distance, space betweene.
division, parting or seperating.
dulcimur, instrument.
efficient, working, or accomplishing.
election, choice.
And so on. Cawdrey’s definitions were usually no more than synonyms, and not very precise ones at that. To be told a dulcimer is an instrument is of very little help. Is it a musical instrument? a scientific instrument? a legal instrument? If a musical instrument, do you blow on it, bang on it, or pluck its strings? Cawdrey doesn’t say.
In the 18th century, lexicographers began paying more attention to common words. It’s a development that shows a new degree of sophistication coming to the study of the language. John Kersey’s New English Dictionary, for instance, appeared in 1702; it defines take this way: “to hold with one’s Hand, to lay hold of”–a total of nine words. Benjamin Martin, the first English lexicographer to use numbered senses, covers 17 different senses of take in a total of 132 words. Nathan Bailey, Johnson’s most important precursor, gave common English words more attention than ost of his predecessors, but even he dispensed with all of his definitions of take in a mere 362 words.
Now turn to Johnson’s Dictionary. His entries for take, with 133 numbered senses and 363 quotations, run to more than 8,000 words. He’s careful to distinguish taking medicine from taking revenge, taking one’s way from taking one’s time. And his definitions are more precise than those of any of his predecessors. Many people think the hardest words to define are the obscure ones–words like ruderary or fabaceous or anatiferous. (For the curious: ruderary means “belonging to rubbish”; fabaceous means “having the nature of a bean”; anatiferous means “producing ducks.”) 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. But defining a word like take or get or set is a real challenge. 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.
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. One of the perennial debates among people who discuss the language is whether it is the job of commentators to be prescriptive or descriptive. The prescriptivists tell you the way the language should be; the descriptivists tell you the way it is.
The prescriptivists warn against splitting infinitives and insist that it’s wrong to end sentences with prepositions; the descriptivists say such rules are artificial and old-fashioned, and a linguist should care only about the way real people speak and write. 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 descriptivists see themselves as realists and their opponents as inflexible linguistic authoritarians. 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.
So which camp is Johnson’s? It should be no surprise that there’s no consensus. 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 word thro’ was “Contracted by barbarians from through,” and disannul should “be rejected as ungrammatical and barbarous.” Here Johnson seems to be delivering edicts, issuing verdicts on whether words should live or die.
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. 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.”
The only way to settle this question is through careful attention to Johnson’s Dictionary, his great monument to the English language. Reading the entire work from cover to cover, though, is the work of months, even years. 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.
To put that in perspectie, Moby-Dick, War and Peace, and the collected works of Shakespeare combined are just over half the length of Johnson’s Dictionary. 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 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 Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson has been underway since the mid-1950s, and after half a century is finally nearing completion. When finished, it will be the first collected edition of Johnson’s works since 1825; already it’s a major scholarly achievement. Not all of the volumes, of course, are of equal interest outside the academy. Volume 17, for instance, is Johnson’s translation of Jean Pierre de Crousaz’s Commentaire sur la traduction en vers de M. Abbé Du Resnel, de l’Essai de M. Pope sur l’homme–hardly a title to make its way onto any bestseller list. But Johnson on the English Language (Vol. 18) deserves serious attention from a wide readership.
Even parts of this volume, it must be admitted, will be of interest mainly to specialists. 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-century–know Johnson’s works and their contexts intimately. 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. Things like this are useful to specialists but not to general readers. 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 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. Johnson once said he “rejoice[d] to concur with the common reader,” and this “common reader . . . uncorrupted with literary prejudices,” was his ideal audience. Johnson has a reputation for being a difficult, even a forbidding, writer; but he could be admirably direct and powerful when he chose to be. 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.
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; to be exposed to censure, without hope of praise; to be disgraced by miscarriage, or punished for neglect, where success would have been without applause, and diligence without reward.
Among these unhappy mortals is the writer of dictionaries; 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. Every other authour may aspire to praise; the lexicographer can only hope to escape reproach, and even this negative recompence has been yet granted to very few.
And yet this “humble drudge” went on to summarize both the state of the language and the nature of his work. 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 wthout rules: wherever I turned my view, there was perplexity to be disentangled, and confusion to be regulated.” 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.”
He recounted his efforts to reduce the notoriously inconsistent spelling of English words to something like a logical system. He wrestled with the relationships between words and their roots. He considered the blend of Germanic and Latinate words that make up English.
Not everything came out the way he had hoped. “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.” 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.”
He also recognized that many of his suggestions would do little good. Besides, any proposed change to the language is bound to cause inconvenience. “It has been asserted,” he wrote, “that for the law to be known, is of more importance than to be right. Change, says Hooker, is not made without inconvenience, even from worse to better.” His conclusion was glum: “The English Dictionary was written with little assistance of the learned, and without any patronage of the great; not in the soft obscurities of retirement, or under the shelter of academick bowers, but amidst inconvenience and distraction, in sickness and in sorrow. . . . 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.”
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. So what did Johnson think about prescription versus description? Was his Dictionary fundamentally conservative or progressive?
People on all sides have the bad habit of attributing beliefs to Johnson that he never held. To his supporters, he’s the embodiment of their own convictions; to his detractors, he’s the embodiment of everything they despise. That may be inevitable. But the real Samuel Johnson–whether prescriptive or descriptive, whether conservative or liberal–will be found only in the pages of his works. Those works are still eminently readable, and now his writings on language are available in a more authoritative form than ever before. For anyone interested in the language, Johnson on the English Language will more than repay the time it takes to read.
Jack Lynch is associate professor of English at Rutgers. His edition of selections from Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary has just been issued in paperback.
