The Great Lexicographer
The title of this chapter sounds dull enough. A dictionary is not generally thought to be lively reading and perhaps we may feel that a man who deliberately set out to write one must have been a dry-as-dust old fellow who went out of his way to explain short and simple words by means of long and complicated phrases more difficult than the words themselves.
Well, there is no doubt that Johnson did use long words. He had been brought up on classical authors and, like other writers of the period, often used words of many syllables derived from the Greek or Latin, when simpler words would have done as well.
Boswell is the same. He does not say "many times in his later life" but "upon innumerable occasions in his subsequent life." Or look back at page 24, where he finds it "melancholy to reflect that Johnson and Savage were in such extreme indigence." Why couldn't he have found it "sad to think that they were so poor"?
Long words were the fashion of the time and to do Johnson justice, we must try to put ourselves back in his century.
Nowadays, we have no trouble in finding dictionaries, whether we want an exhaustive work of reference or a handy volume for the pocket.
But in Johnson's day it was different.
Such dictionaries as had previously appeared were vocabularies of "hard words" only, not of words in general. The only attempt to produce a dictionary containing all English words was that compiled in 1721 by one Nathaniel Bailey, but it contained very little illustration of the use of words. There was, in fact, no dictionary which attempted either to fix the language or to illustrate the different meanings of a word by quotations from English writers. Johnson began to consider whether he might not produce one himself.
"The year 1747" says Boswell "is distinguished as the epoch, when Johnson's arduous and important work, his Dictionary of the English Language, was announced to the world, by the publication of its Plan or Prospectus. How long this immense undertaking had been the object of his contemplation, I do not know. I once asked him by what means he had attained to that astonishing knowledge of our language, by which he was enabled to realise a design of such extent, and accumulated difficulty. He told me, that 'it was not the effect of particular study; but that it had grown up in his mind insensibly.'"