The Harmless Drudge

JOHNSON'S DICTIONARY, A MODERN SELECTION (465 pp.)--E. L. McAdam Jr. and George Milne--Pantheon ($6.50).

Anyone who has ever used pen and ink ("the black liquor with which men write") has cause to be grateful to Dr. Samuel Johnson, who compiled what was almost the first and for a long time the best dictionary of the English language.

Before civilization became overclotted with low pragmatical fellows, a man of letters cut a fine figure in the world. None was more pompous ("splendid; magnificent; grand") than Dr. Samuel Johnson, known to his contemporaries as the Great Lexicographer, or the Great Cham of literature.

His dictionary was a prodigious ("amazing, astonishing, portentous, enormous") feat, a one-man job ("a low word now much in use") comprising 2,300 folio pages of definitions and examples accomplished in nine years (from 1746 to 1755), with the help of only six copyists. Only a fopdoodle ("a fool") or a slubberdegullion ("a paltry, dirty, sorry wretch") would deny the greatness of the work, and only one who had carried it out had the right to define a lexicographer (as Johnson did in the dictionary) as "a harmless drudge." Privately, he was not so humble. As he told his Boswell: "I knew very well what I was undertaking,--and very well how to do it,--and have done it very well."

Two Johnson scholars have now had the bright idea of compiling a selection of the great work. They, too, have done it very well. It will amuse the word buff and inform those who might be interested in what the language was like before it was run over by two centuries of social change and technological revolution.

Even those who just like to soss ("sit lazily in a chair'') will notice what a fine, manly style of address Johnsonian English really is. Johnsonian English, which has come to mean a sonorous and orotund Latinity of style, anfractuously embellished with dependent clauses like the marble ornaments of a baroque memorial in a Wren church, was as close to the farmyard, the tavern and the brawling life of London streets as it was to the Latin grammar.

"Rotgut," a word that sounds as if it were coined no later than Prohibition, meant much the same thing to Johnson; it was "bad beer" in his day. A Hollywood flesh peddler, i.e., actor's agent, has a philological ancestor in Johnson's London, where a pimp was a fleshmonger. "Bum" Dr. Johnson defined with magisterial simplicity as "the part on which we sit."

To Johnson, a flatterer was a "claw-back"; a bad doctor, a "quacksalver." Only a wantwit or a clodpate can fail to get some notion of Johnson's character in his definition of a dedication as "a servile address to a patron," or a pension as "pay given to a state hireling for treason to his country." Though Johnson is said to be the great Latinizer of English, English never did get Latinized. Today no one calls a cow pasture a "vaccary," and infants are weaned, not "ablactated."

There were a lot of things Johnson did not know. A tarantula is not "an insect whose bite is only cured by musick"; a cassowary is not a bird of prey; and only a jack pudding or zany would believe that pygmies are devoured by cranes. Whether today's lexicographers are wiser is another matter. Johnson may not have known what a masochist was (the eponymous Herr von Masoch had not yet been born to give his name to those who find pleasure in their own pain), but Lexicographer Johnson had a word for the type of man: he was a "seeksorrow."

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