Dr. Johnson Revisited

THE conventional wisdom has it that language evolves progressively, that vocabularies hone themselves with the passage of time. But language is a lusty wench who bestows her favors and then withdraws them. Some words last for centuries; others disappear and then return with the same spelling but a different meaning. Reading Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary, or that part of it which E. L. McAdam Jr. and George Milne culled for Pantheon Books in 1963, I am struck by the number of words which we consider a part of our time’s slang or colloquial usage but which caught Dr. Johnson’s attention—as well as others which passed into what the eighteenth century would have called the dormitory (what today we would call a mortuary). As sport for the philologist there are also those words whose meaning is at as far a remove from our own day as the Dictionary itself is. And then there are the products of Dr. Johnson’s whimsy of prejudication, as when he defines oats as “a grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.”

Mr. Toledano, a longtime NR contributor, is a syndicated columnist and the author of 19 books. He is currently at work on an auto-biography.

RT

About the Author

Ralph de Toledano

THE conventional wisdom has it that language evolves progressively, that vocabularies hone themselves with the passage of time. But language is a lusty wench who bestows her favors and then withdraws them. Some words last for centuries; others disappear and then return with the same spelling but a different meaning. Reading Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary, or that part of it which E. L. McAdam Jr. and George Milne culled for Pantheon Books in 1963, I am struck by the number of words which we consider a part of our time’s slang or colloquial usage but which caught Dr. Johnson’s attention—as well as others which passed into what the eighteenth century would have called the dormitory (what today we would call a mortuary). As sport for the philologist there are also those words whose meaning is at as far a remove from our own day as the Dictionary itself is. And then there are the products of Dr. Johnson’s whimsy of prejudication, as when he defines oats as “a grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.”

Mr. Toledano, a longtime NR contributor, is a syndicated columnist and the author of 19 books. He is currently at work on an auto-biography.