Johnson, Dr. Samuel

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) is still the most famous lexicographer of the English language, and his magisterial Dictionary of the English Language (1755) remains a major monument in the history of the English dictionary, to the point that many of its definitions were carried over into the authoritative Oxford English Dictionary and acknowledged by a simple bracketed capital “J.” As Robert Burchfield, the editor of the OED Supplement , has pointed out, Johnson’s is the only English dictionary compiled by a writer of the first rank (1985, 87). The most remarkable Renaissance man of letters in his own time, he made significant contributions to all the major literary genres. Amazingly, he completed the huge work in nine years virtually single-handed, with only the assistance of six amanuenses whose sole functions were to copy out quotations, sort, and file them as part of the onerous historical method. To illustrate 40,000 headwords he amassed 116,000 citations or illustrative quotations, tending to favor the usage of the previous century and what he called, significantly, “the wells of English undefiled” (McAdam 1963, 18).

“Dictionary Johnson,” as he was called, lived through the Enlightenment, or the Age of Reason, when the virtues of rationality, order, and decorum were especially stressed. These mental and social qualities were in clear contrast with the decadence of the Restoration preceding it, and the emotional and political liberation of the succeeding Romantic era. Many of the major literary minds of the period saw the English language as being in a state of confusion and decay. These included the great satirists Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope, as well as the influential essayists Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. Swift had written as early as 1712 A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue . Daniel Defoe underlined the absurdity of the fashionable slang of the times in his essay “A Tilt at Profanity” in 1712: “at play it is G-d damn the cards; a-hunting G-d damn the hounds; they call dogs the sons of whores and men sons of bitches” (1951, 260).

In the remarkable Preface to his great work, Johnson initially saw himself as a linguistic Newton come to impose order on unruly philology: “Every language has … its improprieties and absurdities, which it is the duty of the lexicographer to correct or proscribe” (McAdam 1963, 4). But by the time he had completed his task he recognized that the language was subject to “causes of change, which, though slow in their operation and invisible in their progress, are perhaps as much superiour to human resistance, as the revolutions of the sky and the intumescence of the tide” (McAdam 1963, 25).

Johnson was a formidable personality, who was trenchant, pompous, witty, and dogmatic, qualities apparent in many of his definitions. This was a period, furthermore, in which the preferred diction was not direct and rude, but in the words of Edward Gibbon, favored “the decent obscurity of a learned language” (1854, 212). However, Johnson was by no means prudish: various anecdotes reveal that he rather relished coarse speech. When the famous actor David Garrick asked what was the greatest pleasure in life, Johnson “answered fucking and second was drinking. And therefore he wondered why there were not more drunkards, for all could drink though all could not fuck” (Hibbert 1971, 68). (Significantly, his famous biographer James Boswell noted but did not record these remarks.) After a performance of Johnson’s tragedy Irene , Garrick invited him backstage, but when invited a second time he demurred: “No, David, I will never come back. For the white bubbies and the silk stockings of your actresses excite my genitals” (Hibbert 1971, 74). He defined bubby simply as “a woman’s breast” without further comment, although it was a colloquialism.

Johnson especially condemned “cant,” the perpetually flourishing but generally unstable language of the underworld, regarding it as “unworthy of preservation” (McAdam 1963, 23). He himself defined cant as both “(1) a corrupt dialect used by beggars and vagabonds” and “(2) a particular form of speaking peculiar to some certain class or body of men.” The first is the historical sense, while the second conforms more to modern “jargon” or “in-group vocabulary” and fashionable nonsensical exaggeration. He simply omitted a number of words in the first category, like cove for a man, beak for a judge, and fence for a receiver of stolen property, even though they had been in the language for centuries and survive to this day. In the second category he noted that frightful was “a cant word among women for anything unpleasing,” that horrid was similarly so used to mean “shocking; offensive; unpleasing,” that monstrous was a “a cant term” for “exceedingly” or “very much,” and that Billingsgate was “a cant word.” Another of his usage markers was the phrase “a low word”: among terms so categorized are cajole, fuss, job, sham, plaguy, plaguily, mishmash, swop, tiff, touchy , and uppish , which are really “colloquial” rather than “low.” His hostility was thus more toward the imprecise or affected use of words than simply to their low class or to foul language.

In keeping with the sense of decorum of the time, Johnson did not include the grossest of the “four-letter” words (although his contemporary Nathaniel Bailey had). This omission is ironically acknowledged in the contemporary anecdote of two society ladies who “very much commended the omission of all naughty words. ‘What! my dears!’ Johnson mischievously enquired, ‘then you have been looking for them?’” (Beste, Memorials , cited in Sutherland 1975, 84). Although he excluded shit, cundum, frig, swive , and bugger , he included and had direct definitions of fart (“wind from behind”), piss (“to make water”), bum and arse , simply defined as “the buttocks; the part on which we sit.” None carried any usage label such as “vulgar” or “low.” He likewise defined piddle unexpectedly in the context of eating as “to pick at table; to feed squeamishly and without appetite” and defined job as “petty, piddling work.” Lousy was given an interesting class gloss: “mean; low born; bred on the dunghill,” while bitch was simply “a name of reproach for a woman.”

Concerning swearing per se , Johnson was clearly hostile to the fashionable but loose use of serious terms. He thus defined damn literally as “to doom to eternal torments in a future state,” castigating the contemporary colloquial use of damnable and damnably for “odious” or “pernicious” or “odiously” or “hatefully” as “a low and ludicrous sense.” He likewise criticized whoreson for being “generally used in a ludicrous dislike” and similarly rejected deuce in the sense of “the devil” as “a ludicrous word.” As can be seen, ludicrous is another of Johnson’s armory of condemning epithets, well exemplified in his comment on abominable: “In low and ludicrous language, it is a word of loose and indeterminate censure.” His hostile instinct was frequently right, since many of these words continued to show the semantic trend of loss of intensity. However, exclamations which had no literal meaning, like foh!, fy!, pish! , and pshaw! , were included without comment. Likewise, foutra , borrowed from French foutre , meaning “to fuck,” is defined in its euphemistic English sense: “a fig; a scoff; an act of contempt.” The definition is elucidated by the entries under to fig and fico , “an act of contempt done with the fingers, expressing a fig for you .” The gesture is explained more fully in the entry for body language.

Modern assessments of Johnson generally emphasize his shortcomings, partly by invidious comparisons with later lexicographical standards, pointing out his deficiencies in etymology, especially his ignorance of “Teutonick” or the Germanic roots of English. Criticism is leveled at his judgmental, proscriptive stance, clearly at variance with modern linguistic notions that “usage” is the dominant criterion of validity. Thus W.K. Wimsatt Jr. commented dryly: “His attempts to discourage some words by applying a kind of linguistic weed-killer, or notation of censure, were not very successful” (1959, 66). However, Robert Burchfield noted the work’s longevity and endorsed “its steady belief in the superiority of the vocabulary of the best writers, its rejection of foreign expressions and dialectal words … and its rejection of illiterate or modish vocabulary,” stressing that Johnson “set a standard of lexicography” surpassed only much later (1979, iii). It is certainly notable that Johnson’s sense of what was proper to include or exclude from his dictionary on the grounds of decency was virtually identical to that of his great successor James Murray, the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary , a century and a half later.