Quotes from Henry Hitchings

In other words, at the time of Johnson's death in 1784, and thirty years after its first publication, there were about 6,000 copies of the complete English editions of the Dictionary in circulation, in addition to a few hundred copies

Johnson was not impressed. He conceded that the letters might have made a 'very pretty' book (the faintest of faint praise), then commented, stingingly, that they 'teach the morals of a whore, and the manners of a dancing master'. 8 Here, as in the famous letter and the Dictionary's entry under 'patron', Chesterfield's errors are more lastingly preserved than any of his achievements. There

Webster was a dry, humourless man whose character we can deduce, I think, from the title of his Essay on the Necessity, Advantages and Practicability of Reforming the Mode of Spelling, and of Rendering the Orthography of Words Correspondent to the Pronunciation.

Although a tirelessly productive author, Johnson considered himself disgracefully lazy—believing that only Presto, a dog belonging to his friend Hester Thrale, might truly be thought lazier.

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.

While we are in the realm of comedy, it is worth recalling that one of the best and best-known episodes of the historical sitcom Blackadder, titled 'Ink and Incapability', confronts this very subject. Its fidelity to history is limited (Jane Austen is Johnson's contemporary, and apparently has 'a beard like a rhododendron'), but its representation of the perils of lexicography is just. The

It is telling that in the Dictionary he offers under 'bristly' this heavily edited quotation from the brilliant but erratic classicist Richard Bentley: 'If the eye were so acute as to rival the finest microscope, the sight of our own selves would affright us; the smoothest skin would be beset with rugged scales and bristly hairs.

The young Johnson was what Coleridge liked to call a 'library cormorant', a rapacious creature nesting among books.

The Dictionary's definitions of 'Whig' and 'Tory' are well known. 'Whig' is 'the name of a faction', whereas 'Tory' is 'one who adheres to the ancient constitution of the state, and the apostolical hierarchy of the Church of England, opposed to a Whig'. This leaves one in little doubt of Johnson's political allegiance.

easy'. Yet sometimes an easy word is translated into a bafflingly polysyllabic alternative. 'Rust', we are assured, is 'the red desquamation of old iron' or 'the tarnished or corroded surface of any metal', while a 'scale' is 'any thing exfoliated or desquamated'. Confusingly, when we turn to the entry for 'desquamation', we are told that it is 'the act of scaling foul bones'.

In July 2000 a court in Kalamazoo, Michigan, gave an unusually lenient sentence to José Rodriguez, a member of a street gang called the Latin Kings who had been found guilty of firebombing. According to a report in the Holland Sentinel, a local newspaper, the defendant's counsel 'noted that Rodriguez was a unique person because he reads the encyclopedia and dictionary for pleasure'.

NETWORK     Any thing reticulated or decussated, at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections JOHNSON'S

He portrays the labours of the etymologist in whimsical terms: 'In search of the progenitors of our speech, we may wander from the tropick to the frozen zone, and find some in the valleys of Palestine, and some upon the rocks of Norway'. Johnson's

he was able to laugh at his weakness for fiddly words. When he and Boswell were in the Highlands and passed through Glen Shiel, Boswell described a mountain as 'immense', but Johnson corrected him—'No; it is no more than a considerable protuberance.' NICETY     1.

To be 'subderisorious' consists of 'scoffing or ridiculing with tenderness and delicacy'—at the expense of an amatorculist, for instance.

A 'rant' consists of 'high sounding language unsupported by dignity of thought'.

The best example is boondocks. Originally in Tagalog it signified a mountain, but, when poor natives explained that they came from mountainous areas, outsiders imagined the word was a general term for any slummy or primitive place.

example, we can hear a note of doubt in his report that the word 'porcelain' is 'said to be derived from pour cent années; because it was believed by Europeans, that the materials of porcelain was matured under ground one hundred years'. In fact it comes from the Italian word porcellana, meaning 'cowrie shell'—a diminutive derived from the Latin porcus ('pig'), as the cowrie has commonly

Johnson the poet recognizes that there are times when a little scientific precision may be sacrificed in the interests of a memorable formula. Thus 'to hiccough' is 'to sob with convulsion of the stomach', while an 'embryo' is 'the offspring yet unfinished in the womb'. 'Thumb' is defined simply as 'the short strong finger answering to the other four'. A 'puppet' is 'a wooden tragedian'.

tennis' comes from the French tenez ('take it'). This dubious explanation turns out, on closer investigation, to be well founded, since early players—of 'real' tennis, not modern lawn tennis—apparently called out this word to alert the receiver that they were about to serve. Reading

A 'misdemeanour' is 'something less than an atrocious crime'. An 'uxorious' man is 'infected with connubial dotage'.

The well-known kosher has come to mean 'legitimate' or 'good quality', although it of course retains the fastidious sense 'acceptable according to the rules of Jewish dietary law as executed under rabbinical supervision'.26

Pseudodoxia Epidemica

Where the makers of modern dictionaries strive for uniformity, Johnson was quite happy to vary the size of his entries. Although some of his definitions of natural phenomena are lean, many are lengthy, even opulent, reflecting the contemporary love affair with unusual flora and fauna. Here more than anywhere he strays towards an encyclopedic approach, and the Dictionary begins to resemble, at least fleetingly, a herbal and a bestiary.