In 1811 Ambrose Bierce in his Devil’s Dictionary described any dictionary (excluding his own) as “a malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language”.
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Over the past 20 years several people have asked me many questions about the words, in the English language.
One in the past few weeks came from “Max” who said I have often remarked about “my big dictionary”.
“It must be huge,” he said.
My dictionary comprises 20 large volumes and when I bought it many years ago I think it was selling for about $5000.
To be fair, my family bought it for my birthday and was given a discounted price, but it still cost a few thousand dollars.
Dictionaries as we now know them have been with us for at least 600 years. I have what is named The First English Dictionary dated 1604, by Robert Cawdrey.
Cawdrey said his first edition was “a table alphabeticall, conteyning the true writing and understanding of hard words”.
So a dictionary didn’t set out to publish all the words in our language, just in Cawdrey’s case “the hard words”.
I am sure Bierce had a devil of a time with his 1811 dictionary.
The first “proper” dictionary was that put out by Samuel Johnson. He was a bit of a humourless man who regarded some of the greats of the English language as his neighbours and drinking partners who had just as many problems as he had.
I went to his house in Gough Square, just off Fleet Street, London, many years ago.
I knocked on the door of the little cottage with a cat on the front mat, but nobody answered. A week later I knocked on the door again and nobody answered. So I went to the four-storey building next door.
An old man answered my knock and I explained that I wanted to look through Johnson’s house. “Sure, come on in,” he said. Johnson lived in the four-storey building, not the little cottage.
Johnson spoke many times of the superiority of the English and - how should I say it because I have been castigated about this — Johnson had little time for the Scots.
He said on one occasion, “The finest prospect a Scotchman ever sees is the high road that takes him to England.”
He didn’t think much of the Irish either. “The Irish are fair people; they speak ill of everybody.”
And his views of the French? “A Frenchman must always be talking. An Englishman talks only when he has something to say.”
His dictionary says of oats: “A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.”
My big dictionary says the word dictionary goes back to 1526 in writing, but no doubt people were speaking about the word dictionary before that.
These days we don’t worry about spelling, or even grammar. Our computer does much of it for us. It even puts a little green line under our mistakes.
My big dictionary was published by Oxford. The completion of this dictionary was a monumental task that took more than 50 years.
Dictionaries weren’t always compiled by fine, upstanding citizens. The Dictionary of American Underworld Lingo was compiled by Bad Bill, Hal the Rebel, Jojo and the Colonel, whose occupations included armed robber, terrorist and purse snatcher.
In case anybody thinks I have tried to belittle Samuel Johnson – he wasn’t such a bad bloke really.
One of his most trusted advisers was called Barber.
www.lauriebarber.com
