Quotes from Henry Hitchings

He began work on the second volume on 3 April 1753, and seemed newly energized. 'O God who hast hitherto supported me,' he could write in his diary, 'enable me to proceed in this labour & in the Whole task of my present state', so that 'when I shall render up at the last day an account of the talent committed to me I may receive pardon for the sake of Jesus Christ'.14

Initially, 2,000 copies were printed. Today this seems a modest figure, but the market was not huge: as late as the 1790s Edmund Burke estimated the reading public at below 100,000.

Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus (1741), a scurrilous burlesque, written mostly by John Arbuthnot, that poked fun at Grub Street twittishness. He chose this indelicate item because it was a source of interesting words like 'chicanery', 'confidant', 'troglodyte' and 'piazza', and even the distinctly modern-sounding 'skylight'.

He got Strahan to print fifty advertisements to be run in 'country papers', along with 250 showcards for booksellers' windows. Although none of this was expensive, the final account that Strahan presented was for more than £800, a sum that was not fully paid off until almost four years later. The

The total cost of printing was £1,239. 11s. 6d. In addition to Johnson's £1,575, at least £1,500 was spent on paper—a large, though not freakish, figure, since the purchase of paper was usually reckoned to account for half the cost of publishing a book. Still, this meant the outlay was in the region of £4,500.

In his eyes Hobbes, who had savaged the Church in Leviathan (1651), was unambiguously wicked, and excluding him was a pleasure. He told his friend Thomas Tyers that he had 'scorned' to quote Hobbes 'because I did not like his principles'.6 Among the texts he did cite, however, was John Bramhall's 1658 Castigations of Mr Hobbes, a book now known, if at all, for having been praised by T. S. Eliot. For

together they breakfasted on 'Venison and Chockalatte'

the linguist David Dalby suggests that the use of bad and wicked to convey positive rather than negative feelings originates in African languages such as Bambara, where there are 'frequent uses of negative terms … to describe positive extremes'. Dalby traces the habit of saying uh-huh to the same source.6 Another

Chinese porcelain was popular, too. The word comes from the Italian for a cowrie shell; literally, porcellana was a 'little pig', and the connection seems grounded in the glossy shell's resemblance either to a pig's back or to a sow's glisteningly crinkled vagina.35

snapdragon', which is 'a kind of play, in which brandy is set on fire, and raisins are thrown into it, which those who are unused to the sport are afraid to take out; but which may be safely snatched by a quick motion, and put blazing into the mouth, which being closed, the fire is at once extinguished'.

In a truly dreadful moment of lexical perversion, the US military's deployment of troops on the island of Grenada in October 1983 was presented as a 'pre-dawn vertical insertion'.

Longinus's text had recently been the subject of a detailed commentary by William Smith, and it was soon to be further popularized in Britain by Burke. Yet Johnson was suspicious, and not just because he considered the word 'sublime' a barbarous import. The theory threatened to unite aesthetics and psychology. As Napoleon would remark, 'Du sublime au ridicule il n'y a qu'un pas.' It had already resulted in a flood of meretricious poetry

The style of bathing suit we now know as the bikini existed before then, but got its name only when the designer Louis Réard chose to use it to draw attention to a collection he was showing a few days after the bomb test. Bikini, we might argue, should have become a word to sum up the devastation that a nuclear weapon can cause; instead it became a word for a skimpy piece of beach attire. One

The verb 'to install' is spelt thus, but 'to reinstal' with a single /. Such anomalies were his to resolve. His failure to do so has proved lasting: it is thanks to Johnson that the opposite of ''moveable' is commonly written 'immovable', and thanks to him, too, that one person can 'deign' to do what another 'disdains' to do. Of

1. One who countenances, supports, or protects. Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery JOHNSON'S

The dachshund, so strongly associated with Germany, became a 'liberty pup' during the First World War, and after it the increasingly popular German Shepherds were renamed Alsatians in light of persisting anti-German feeling. During the same period frankfurters and sauerkraut were relabelled as 'hot dogs' and 'liberty cabbage'.

FROM AN EARLY date Johnson's intellectual interests were fostered in the family bookshop. It was there that he learned the geography of both company and solitude—in the society of his father's customers, and in the privacy of his reading. In 1706 Michael bought the library of the late William Stanley, ninth Earl of Derby, which comprised almost 3,000 volumes.

Karel apek used robota, a Czech noun related to the German noun Arbeit and meaning 'forced labour', to signify a new type of 'artificial' being, assembled like a car and programmed to be of service to humans.14 This choice of word was inspired by a conversation with his brother Josef, a painter of the cubist school. It would become an emblem of the future's potential. The

Boswell goes into greater detail: 'His mind resembled the vast amphitheatre, the Coliseum of Rome. In the centre stood his judgement, which like a mighty gladiator, combated those apprehensions that, like the wild beasts of the arena, were all around in cells, ready to be let out upon him.

I can remember being surprised to find that kiosk is Turkish – as may be the card game bridge – and that berserk, like geyser and narwhal, is Icelandic: it seems to derive from the name of the bearskin coats worn by the fiercest Norse warriors.

He declined to point out 'what appear to us as defects', on the grounds that 'most of them will be obvious' and he had no wish 'to feed the malevolence of little or lazy critics'.1

The pidgin English exclamation chop chop replicates the Chinese kwai kwai.)

On his trip to the Hebrides with Boswell in 1773, he used the word 'depeditation' in reference to the actor Samuel Foote, who had suffered a broken leg. Like a Scrabble player, Boswell challenged this, and Johnson admitted he had made the word up, before adding mischievously 'that he had not made above three or four in his Dictionary'. Horace

More enduringly significant than the European influence of the Dictionary was its influence across the Atlantic. The American adoption of the Dictionary was a momentous event not just in its history, but in the history of lexicography. For Americans in the second half of the eighteenth century, Johnson was the seminal authority on language, and the subsequent development of American lexicography was coloured by his fame. America's