23 August: Boreham on The Dictionary

Romance of a Dictionary
It was on or about August 23, 1747 that Samuel Johnson, then a young man of thirty-eight, announced his intention of compiling a massive and comprehensive dictionary. For the next few years, Johnson was dominated by an insatiable curiosity as to the etymology and significance of words, and every odd moment was devoted to notes and memoranda embodying his latest discoveries. He found it a fascinating and inexhaustible study. For, after all, the world is an enormous word-factory and its output is prodigious. Every year, almost every week, brings a new crop of words. The vast majority of these words perish almost as soon as they are born. They are coined to fit a certain occasion and, being essentially ephemeral in their purpose and character, are quickly forgotten.

Others, however, appeal to a deeper instinct. They meet an obvious need, describe a certain quality that no dictionary word described so well, captivate the popular imagination, and, as a consequence, they live. A good dictionary is, as Coleridge said, the armoury of the human mind and contains both the trophies of its past, and the weapons of its future, conquests. In his classic "On the Study of Words," Archbishop Trench has seven masterly chapters in which he shows that words are fossil poetry and petrified history and embalmed romance, and that all the ages have left the record of their tears and laughter, virtues and vices, passion and pain, in the words they have created.

The World Hoards Its Wealth In Its Words
Did not Ruskin urge his readers to delve in the dictionary like prospectors searching for gold? Just as, on the diggings, the richest nugget may ravish the eyes of the miner when he is turning over the most common clay, so, Ruskin held, the most astounding treasure may be found concealed in the heart of the most ordinary words. "When I feel inclined to read poetry," says Oliver Wendell Holmes, "I reach down my dictionary. The poetry of words is quite as beautiful as that of sentences. The author may arrange the gems effectively, but their shape and lustre have been given by the attrition of age. Bring me the finest simile from the whole range of imaginative writing, and I will show you a single word which conveys a more profound, a more accurate, and a more elegant analogy." It will be seen, then, that, properly understood and appreciated, words are jewel cases, treasure chests, strong rooms; the repositories in which the archives of the ages are preserved.

Language is obviously an evolution. There was a time when even the "Encyclopaedia Britannica" declared that our first parents received it by immediate inspiration. In view of our present knowledge of the coinage and creation of words, however, most people will feel that this can only have been true, at the most, to a very limited extent. With every momentous event in human history new words spring up like mushrooms on a misty morning. Most of these new words, as Sir Edward Cook once pointed out, are frankly onomatopoeic. They are, that is to say, mere imitations of sounds frequently heard. The deaf and dumb man imitates by means of gestures, the things that he sees. The man who is not so afflicted imitates, on the same principle, the things that he hears. And these oral imitations crystallise into permanent augmentations of the vocabulary. Philologists assure us that we should be astonished if we were to discover the number of our common words that were originally imitations of sounds heard.

Proud Product Of The Nursery And Home
A child's first ventures in articulation are, as Prof. Drummond has pointed out, frankly imitative. They call the cow a moo-moo, the dog a bow-wow, the duck a quack-quack, the rooster a cock-a-doodle-doo, the clock a tick-tick, the train a puff-puff, and so on. Nor does he drop the habit when he emerges from the nursery. In maturer years he stills speaks of the hum of the bee, the click of the gate, the whir of machinery, the chirp of the grasshopper, the twitter of the sparrows, the hiss of the snake, the boom of the cannon, the roar of thunder, the tramp of armies, and the rest. He is building up a vocabulary on that onomatopoeic principle to which Sir Edward Cook ascribes so many of the words in the dictionary.

Oddly enough most of our words come to us, not from the halls of learning, but from playgrounds and village greens. In her "Rustic Speech and Folklore," Mrs. E. M. Wright maintains that it is an egregious mistake to suppose that country people, even when quite unlettered, possess limited vocabularies. She instances one district in which the local dialect contains more than a thousand words for giving a man a thrashing, a thousand words by which one man could tell another that he was a fool, 120 names for the smallest pig of a litter, and hundreds of names for a slut. "And as for dying and getting drunk," she adds, "there is no number to be put upon the names for them." In view of this facility, possessed by the most ordinary men, it is clear that the task of Noah Webster, a century ago, represented an undertaking of no small magnitude. "Words, words, words!" moaned Hamlet in his dialogue with Polonius, and he said it as though words were things to be regarded with contumely and disdain. But if he, and those who think as he did, were to probe the matter as deeply as Samuel Johnson had to do, they would discover that, to an imaginative and adventurous mind, the manufacture of words offers a wealthy field for the play of curiosity and research.

F W Boreham

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