Books, Arts & Manners: A World of Words

Johnson’s Dictionary and the Language of Learning, by Robert DeMaria Jr. (North Carolina, 303 pp., $25)

Thomas Carlyle claimed that “Had Johnson left nothing but his Dictionary, one might have traced there a great intellect, a genuine man.” Since then, the “genuine man” has sometimes obscured the “great intellect.” We tend too often to dismiss the Dictionary with clichés, so that nearly everyone knows Samuel Johnson’s definitions of lexicographer (“a harmless drudge”) and network (“anything reticulated or decussated, at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections”) and oats (let’s twit the Scots) and Whig (them too) and pension and so on. But such an understanding of the Dictionary is as misleading as it is shallow.

JT

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J. O. Tate

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Johnson’s Dictionary and the Language of Learning, by Robert DeMaria Jr. (North Carolina, 303 pp., $25)

Thomas Carlyle claimed that “Had Johnson left nothing but his Dictionary, one might have traced there a great intellect, a genuine man.” Since then, the “genuine man” has sometimes obscured the “great intellect.” We tend too often to dismiss the Dictionary with clichés, so that nearly everyone knows Samuel Johnson’s definitions of lexicographer (“a harmless drudge”) and network (“anything reticulated or decussated, at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections”) and oats (let’s twit the Scots) and Whig (them too) and pension and so on. But such an understanding of the Dictionary is as misleading as it is shallow.