Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary.Henry Hitchings Henry Hitchings (born 11 December 1974) is an author and critic, specializing in narrative non-fiction, with a particular emphasis on language and cultural history. . Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary. New York New York, state, United States New York, Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005. Samuel Johnson is said to be the second-most quoted person in English after Shakespeare. Some of those quotes come from his 1755 Dictionary of the English Language English language, member of the West Germanic group of the Germanic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages (see Germanic languages). Spoken by about 470 million people throughout the world, English is the official language of about 45 nations. , a volume comprising 42,773 entries. Johnson's dictionary was intended to be the English equivalent of volumes produced decades earlier by Italian and French academies. A group of publishers contacted him to produce it in three years. When reminded that it had take 40 French academies 40 years to produce theirs, Johnson replied, "Forty times forty is sixteen hundred. As three to sixteen hundred, so is the proportion of an Englishman to a Frenchman." (The dictionary took Johnson nine years to complete. The quality of definitions, the numerous senses of a term, and the quotations to illustrate usage made it the standard English Stan·dard English n. The variety of English that is generally acknowledged as the model for the speech and writing of educated speakers. Usage Note: People who invoke the term Standard English dictionary for a century and the basis for those that followed.) Some of Johnson's dictionary definitions blatantly revealed his own prejudices. For instance, his definition for "oats oats, cereal plants of the genus Avena of the family Gramineae (grass family). Most species are annuals of moist temperate regions. The early history of oats is obscure, but domestication is considered to be recent compared to that of the other ," was "A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people." In a dig at Lord Chesterfield, who welshed on financial backing for the dictionary, Johnson defined "patron" as "Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence in·so·lence n. 1. The quality or condition of being insolent. 2. An instance of insolent behavior, treatment, or speech. Noun 1. , and is paid with flattery." But Johnson also permitted as many senses of a word as he could find (a decision that had palpable consequences). For example, he ended up explaining 134 different senses of the verb "to take," which occupied five pages and about 8,000 words. The Dictionary of the English Language was an extraordinary achievement by a polymath pol·y·math n. A person of great or varied learning. [Greek polumath of the first order--Johnson also wrote essays, poems, letters, sermons, travelogues, and fictional tales. For more information about how this reference work was compiled, and a superb examination of its compiler, I recommend reading Defining the World. REVIEW BY MARTIN H. LEVINSON, PHD |
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