The Meaning of Everything
Page 5
For English is a language that simply cannot be fixed, nor can its use ever be absolutely laid down. It changes constantly; its grows with an almost exponential joy. It evolves eternally; its words alter their senses and their meanings subtly, slowly, or speedily according to fashion and need. Dictionaries that record and catalogue the language thus cannot ever be prescriptive; they must always be entirely descriptive, telling of the language as it is, not as it should be. Samuel Johnson's majestic Dictionary of the English Language, published first in 1755 and remaining in print for well over the century following, is a classic of this kind. It is as full a record as Johnson and the six serving men who worked with him as amanuenses for six years in cramped rooms south of Fleet Street could determine, of the entire assemblage of words that were employed by all who lived in the realm—the words used by the learned, the nobly born, the doctor, the dandy, and the divine and, most important of all, the words used by the common man of the street, the slum, the farm, and the field.
(There has long been a running argument over whether Johnson himself ever thought it desirable to fix the language in the aspic of his authority. The current view is that at first he did—that he initially espoused the conservative views of Swift and Addison and their like, and had half a mind to make a dictionary that laid down rules, just as an Academy might. In his Plan for the dictionary, written in 1747, he said he wished `to preserve the purity and ascertain the meaning of our English idiom'. But halfway through the task he realized that, in dealing specifically with the endearingly unruly monster that was English, this simply was not possible. He then, perhaps reluctantly, fell in with the dictum laid down by a predecessor lexicographer, the former Surrey ploughboy and inventor named Benjamin Martin, twenty years before Johnson began his monumental work:
The pretence of fixing a standard to the purity and perfection of any language is utterly vain and impertinent, because no language as depending on arbitrary use and custom, can ever be permanently the same, but will always be in a mutable and fluctuating state; and what is deem'd polite and elegant in one age, may be counted uncouth and barbarous in another.
And Johnson agreed. Whatever he had said in his Plan of 1747, he was not to repeat in his Preface of 1755. His aim in making the great dictionary was, he then admitted, not `to form, but to register' the language. In this way a whole new way of dictionarymaking, and an entirely new intellectual approach to the language, had been inaugurated.)
The approach that Johnson took was not to decide for himself what words meant, not (to reiterate the point) to prescribe how they should be used—but instead to let the printed record of centuries-worth of writing and literature illustrate how words had actually been used in the past, and tease from the record the variety of historic meanings, from the time each was invented and first introduced, and as their various senses shifted like silverfish over the succeeding centuries. `When I took the first survey of my undertaking,' he wrote in his famous Preface,
I found our speech copious without order, and energetick without rules: wherever I turned my view, there was perplexity to be disentangled, and confusion to be regulated. Having therefore no assistance but from general grammar I applied myself to the perusal of our writers; and noting whatever might be used to ascertain or illustrate any word or phrase, accumulated in time the materials of a dictionary which, by degrees, I reduced to method.
This was a method which Johnson perhaps honoured more in the breach than the observance. But it nonetheless set the pattern for all the best dictionaries for all time to come: no better means has ever been developed for producing as near as possible a complete record of a language.
There are essentially three sources for the words that are to be put into a new dictionary. There are those to be found in existing dictionaries (a fact which caused scores of earlier dictionary makers to cry plagiarism whenever an unusual word found in one book was then found in another published subsequently). There are words which are heard in conversation. And there are words that are to be found by a concerted trawl through the texts of literature. Johnson leant heavily on this third source— only, as it turns out, not heavily enough. For he took the unilateral decision—to save himself time and money—only to read the books that had been published since 1586, and the death of Sir Philip Sidney. Beowulf and the Canterbury Tales were not to be considered; none of the works from Caxton made it into Johnson's lists; Bede's writings were not included; nor was Domesday Book; neither were the Bibles of Wyclif and Tyndale. A mere century and a half of English literature was to provide the wellspring for his book: not a few have since expressed surprise that, despite so limited a source, so very many words made it in at all.
There were, in the end, 43,500 of them, supported by 118,000 illustrative quotations (a good number of which were amended by Johnson if he didn't like the originals). The headwords were listed alphabetically in a book that was printed in a first edition of 2,000
copies, and sold for £4 10s. 0d. a copy—a good deal of money for 1755. Realizing this, Johnson produced a second edition in 165
weekly parts, at sixpence each. This did the trick; by the end of the century every educated household had, or had access to, the great book. So firmly established did it swiftly become that any request for `The Dictionary' would bring forth Johnson and none other. One asked for The Dictionary much as one might demand The Bible, Hymns Ancient & Modern, or The Prayer Book.
Examined with the steely-eyed rigour of today, there are in Johnson eccentricities in abundance. Some of his definitions are infamously political, like `Oats: A grain which in England is generally given to horses, but which in Scotland feeds the people'. Some were reckoned libellous, as `Excise: A hateful tax levied upon commodities, and adjudged not by the common judges of property, but wretches hired by those to whom excise is paid'. Not a few were self-effacing, like `Lexicographer: A writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words'. 10
Others were simply frightful, entries that breached the lexicographer's guiding principle that in writing a definition, no word may be used that is more complex or unfamiliar than the word being defined—which was very much not the case with Johnson's definition of `Network: Any thing reticulated, or decussated, at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections'. Small wonder that Johnson collected some harsh critics—like Thomas Babington Macaulay, who was to curse him as `a wretched etymologist', and another, who wrote that `Any schoolmaster might have done what Johnson did. His Dictionary is merely a glossary to his own barbarisms.'
Dr Johnson was sufficiently brazen and self-confident not to have been distressed by such carping. But he must have taken some pleasure in hearing that his book attracted the prurient as well as the pedant. On being accused, by a genteel society lady, of failing to include obscenities in the book he replied, in a mixture of the caustic and the sardonic: `Madam, I hope I have not daubed my fingers. I find, however, that you have been looking for them.'
As the eighteenth century gave way to the nineteenth so the number of new dictionaries multiplied, each one larger and more comprehensive and more authoritative than its predecessors. Perhaps the most notable was the formidable American Dictionary of the English Language, edited by the `short, pale, smug and boastful' schoolmaster from New Hartford, Connecticut, Noah Webster.
This `severe, correct, humourless, religious and temperate' man had already enjoyed extraordinary popularity with his earlier books—his first spelling book became the best-selling volume in the United States, exceeded only by the Bible, and in its heyday it thundered off the presses at the rate of more than 500 copies an hour. As a result the word Websterian—meaning `invested with lexical authority'—rapidly entered the language, making its first appearance in print in 1790 (as it happens, a full year ahead of the similarly freighted eponym Johnsonian). And when, in 1828, and after fifteen years of solitary work, Webster completed his dictionary, 11 it was almost double the siz
e of Johnson's, with 70,000 headwords, 1,600 pages, and a preface declaring the book's solemn determination to fix and purify a language that Johnson— with his inclusion of vulgarisms and other low words—had in Webster's view dared to cheapen and to coarsen.
Noah Webster created—entirely alone—his wildly popular American Dictionary of the English Language in 1828. For years afterwards this huge volume—defining twice as many words as Johnson—even outsold the Bible.
Despite the rivalry between the two men, between their two books, and between the two languages, the value and scale of both Johnson's and Webster's work is unchallenged. And since Webster was the larger, more comprehensive, and editorially less eccentric of the pair of books, it goes without saying that even while Johnson remained in print, Webster fast became the gold standard of the lexicographers' art, and sold almost as well in England as it did back home in America.
There was one final attempt to better even these. Charles Richardson, a schoolmaster from Clapham, published in two volumes A New Dictionary of the English Language in 1837—and he did so by employing what, by the developing standards of the day, was a most curious style. He almost entirely did away with definitions— but instead showed how each word had been used by illustrating usages with quotations. He decided that there had been four distinct linguistic eras in the story of English; the first ran from 1300 to the accession of Queen Elizabeth I in 1558. The second ended with the Restoration of the Monarchy in 1660. The third and shortest period closed with the reign of the first Hanoverian monarch, George I, in 1714. And the fourth period extended into the nineteenth century—more precisely, to 1818, when Richardson's dictionary began to appear, in parts, as contributions to the multivolume Encyclopaedia Metropolitana.
Richardson endeavoured to show, for all words he included, quotations from each of the periods during which the word was known to have existed. He felt that only thus—by depicting a word's history, its biography—could the dictionary user have full and familiar knowledge of how best to employ the word himself. He considered definitions by and large to be irrelevantly prescriptive: far better to show how others had utilized the word than to insist on how it should be utilized in future. It was an approach— dictionary-making based on what were to be widely called `historical principles'—that won Richardson a deserving place in the canon of lexicographers: and it was an approach that was eventually to inform, in all its essentials, the making of the greatest dictionary of them all.
3. The Mission
And yet none of these volumes was truly good enough. Not one of them—not Johnson, not Webster, not Richardson—ever did the English language justice. Nor did any of the dictionaries, so far as the growing army of nineteenth-century philologists felt, contain all the words that made up English in its entirety. To be sure, no one could be certain just how many words were in the language. But there was a feeling abroad that the total had to be very considerably more than the 80,000 or so (Webster had listed 70,000) that even these skilled lexicographers were managing to come up with.
At first this feeling was ill defined—no more than a vague unease. But in the early summer of 1842 came the beginnings of a formal acknowledgement of it. A wealthy Oxfordshire landowner and Anglo-Saxon expert named Edwin Guest—his financial condition underlining the assertion that what was to follow would be the work, initially, of men who were both learned and leisured— established what was to be called the Philological Society. He did so with other luminaries—most notably Thomas Arnold of Rugby School and Hensleigh Wedgwood, grandson of the potter Josiah, and one of the most notable etymologists in the land. The purpose of the Society—which exists still—was to `investigate the Structure, the Affinity and the History of Languages'. Its first paper, which reportedly stimulated animated discussion among the members, was a classic of arcane enthusiasm: `The dialects of the Papuan or Negrito race, scattered through the Australian and other Asiatic islands.'
Over the coming years the energies and fascinations of the Society turned steadily towards English. In the very early days a most curious parallelism developed between philology and, rather curiously it would seem today, the science of geology—with both rocks and the language thought to have a divine origin. Once Charles Lyell had published his Principles of Geology in 1830, though, it started to become evident and more widely accepted that the earth might not, after all, have been fashioned by God—and that being so, there was a period when the study of the language alone was thought divinely blessed, a science `beyond the domain of matter'. Until more sensible ideas prevailed some while later, the geological metaphor was still employed to describe the nature of English—such as in this description by William Whewell, a founding member of the Philological Society and Master of Trinity College Cambridge.
The English language is a conglomerate of Latin words, bound together in a Saxon cement; the fragments of the Latin being partly portions introduced directly from the parent quarry, with all their sharp edges, and partly pebbles of the same material, obscured and shaped by long rolling in a Norman or some other channel.
But although dictionary-making and geology long enjoyed a curious affinity, philology itself was eventually freed from what its adherents found a frankly rather weird association—an association born out of the belief that both sciences gave support to the words of Genesis and the orthodoxy of Christianity. Fifteen years after the Society's founding, though, such philosophical wonderings had rather diminished, and the Society was busily discussing such more obviously secular matters as `Diminutives in let', `On the word inkling', and `On the derivation of the word broker' (this last discussion led by Hensleigh Wedgwood). There were papers also on the complexities of some foreign tongues—on `The Termination of the Numeral Eleven, Twelve and the equivalent forms in Lithuanian', for example, and a spirited piece on the Tushi language, which is (or was) apparently well known in the Caucasian hill town of Tzowa, and which might be regarded today as a somewhat tricky tongue for beginners, given that the Tushi for the number 1,000 is the sonorously complex form of words sac tqauziqa icaiqa.
In June 1857, while the members were gamely pausing to learn Tushi counting (cha, si, xo, ahew pxi, jetx …), three of their number—Herbert Coleridge, Frederick Furnivall, and the Dean of Westminster, Richard Chenevix Trench—set about discussing their principal concern about the English language. It was a worry that had begun to evolve from decades of undefined uneasiness, such that now at last it was a settled concern: that the dictionaries then currently in print were just not good enough. William Whewell had mentioned such a thought back in 1852, when he was still gripped by the idea that English had been handed down from the clouds. Five years later, and under the guidance of the holy xo, the ideas began swiftly to coalesce.
The Philological Society, these three men supposed, would be the body best suited to remedy the situation. And as that summer of 1857 began so they decided that their best contribution to philological inquiry would be to establish a Committee to ascertain just what words might have been left out of the English dictionaries. They would call it the Unregistered Words Committee, and its members would go out of their way to scour the literature and read newspapers and popular journals and listen to song scores and to conversation, and thereby add significantly, it was hoped, to the understanding and inventorying of the total stock of English words.
The first report of this Committee was to be announced five months later, at a meeting of the Society due to be held on Guy Fawkes Day, Thursday, 5 November 1857. There was much anticipation. Philology is by reputation a somewhat arid calling; but on that Thursday night there was a buzz of excitement from the members who filed in through the cold and foggy gloom into the London Library—a body which had long hosted the Society, in an unheated upstairs room in the premises still occupied, at the north-west corner of St James's Square.
So it was to general surprise and initial dismay that members were informed that the Report would not in fact be read that night. In its place one member of the Commi
ttee, the eminent divine Dean Trench, soon to be Archbishop of Dublin but at the time Dean of Westminster, 12 would present the first part of a paper. It was to be called `On Some Deficiencies in our English Dictionaries'.
This was the paper that finally brought substance to what had hitherto been a half-formed presentiment. This was the document which at long last defined the problem that had long nagged at the serge-clad shoulders of a score of wordsmen. This was the presentation that was to set in train the events that would lead, inexorably, to the making of the dictionary that all since Stanley Baldwin have considered to have—or which has long striven to have—essentially no deficiencies at all.
The audience, all men, most of them middle-aged, most of them resplendent in frock coats or in the astrakhan-collared capes and greatcoats and silk scarves and top hats that had comforted them against the cold yellow November fog, listened attentively to the grave Doctor as he enumerated the problems. There were, in essence, seven.
Obsolete words, for a start, were not fully registered in any dictionary thus far published. Secondly, families or groups of words were only capriciously included in these same dictionaries—some members of families made it in, some did not. Then again, such histories of words as were included in dictionaries rarely looked back far enough—the cited earliest appearances of many words was all too frequently given as far more recent than their actual inauguration, because the research had been performed too sloppily. Fourthly, important meanings and senses of words had all too often been passed over—once again, the research had too often been too perfunctory. Little heed had been paid to distinguishing between apparently synonymous words. Sixth, there seemed to be a superabundance of redundancy in all previous dictionaries—too many of them were bloated with unnecessary material, at the expense of what was really wanting. And finally, much of the literature which ought to have been read and scanned for illustrative quotations had not been read at all: any serious and totally authoritative dictionary had perforce to be the result of the reading and scanning and scouring of all literature—all journals, magazines, papers, illuminated monastic treatises, and volumes of written and printed publicly accessible works great, small, and impossibly trivial.