What is the history of books that defined our English vocabulary over the past 500 years?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have been enjoying skimming through a large book which I found on the new books shelves at my friendly local public library. It is a 2024 book by Bryan A. Garner and Jack Lynch with a long title -  Hardly Harmless Drudgery: A 500-Year Pictorial History of the Lexicographic Geniuses, Sciolists, Plagiarists & Obsessives Who Defined the English Language. The list price is $65.

 

Their Introduction opens by stating:

 

“Samuel Johnson – creator of not the first English dictionary, but perhaps of the first great one – wickedly mocked his own trade when he defined lexicographer as ‘a writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words.’ But dictionaries are serious business, and the people who drudge away at them are anything but harmless. This book tells the stories of the most important English-language dictionaries and their makers.

 

Dictionaries are repositories of erudition, monuments to linguistic authority, and battlefields in cultural and political struggles. They have been announced with almost messianic fervor, decried as evidence of cultural collapse, and relied on in judicial decisions. They are works of almost superhuman endurance, produced by people who devote themselves to years or even decades of wearisome labor. As commodities in a fiercely competitive publishing business, they also can keep a company afloat for generations or sink it in a few years. Some also are beautiful objects, products of genuine innovations in typography and book design.”

 

Their chapters about Noah Webster and his critics were most interesting to me. Chapter 57 (page 177) is titled Noah Webster at His Most Compendious, and discusses his two-column 1806 Compendious Dictionary of the English Language. You can find a pdf of it at the Internet Archive. Chapter 62 (page 199) on Noah Webster’s Deeply Flawed Magnum Opus begins:

 

“Although Noah Webster produced his compact, one-volume Compendious Dictionary in 1806, this big two-volume work earned him the title Father of the American Dictionary. Released in November 1828, it was an important declaration of American identity, heralding the nation’s linguistic independence from Great Britain. It marked the biggest milestone in English lexicography between Johnson’s Dictionary (1755) and the OED [Oxford English Dictionary] (1928).

 

But even with a modest press run of 2,500 copies, retailing for $20 apiece, it failed to sell out over the next 13 years. The price was too high for most potential customers.

 

Webster’s achievement was remarkable in several respects. His wordlist, for instance, was much more comprehensive than that of earlier dictionaries. If we take the span of entries from la to laird, Webster provides 141 entries as compared to Johnson’s 84. Some 17% of his headwords – 12,000 of the total of 70,000 – hadn’t appeared in earlier dictionaries. He had mined the resources of American English to include such words as caucus, electioneer, parachute, revolutionize, safety-valve, skunk, tomahawk, and wampum. He developed his own system of recording pronunciations, which required him to have a new typeface cut to distinguish the ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ sounds of C and G.

 

Webster’s definitions, too, were generally superior to those of his predecessors. Like Johnson, he was a splitter, identifying multiple meanings of most words and breaking them out with numbered senses. His definitions were also abundantly clear. Consider the entry for mortgage. Johnson had defined it as ‘a dead pledge: a thing put into the hands of a creditor.’ For most readers, that’s wholly unenlightening. Webster provides an etymology,’Fr. mort, dead, and gage, pledge,’ and continues ‘Literally a dead pledge; the grant of an estate in fee as security for the payment of money, and on the condition that if the money shall be paid according to the contract, the grant shall be void, and the mortgage shall re-convey the estate to the mortgager’….”

 

Webster also included American spellings, as is discussed in another article in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary titled Noah Webster’s spelling wins and fails. His lack of consistency was attacked by Lyman Cobb, who is discussed in Chapter 64 (page 211) titled Lyman Cobb – Walker’s Promoter, Webster’s Tormentor. You can find Cobb’s entire 56-page pamphlet at Google Books.

 

There is a 54-minute podcast by Ron Lombard at WCNY PBS on June 12, 2024 titled Firebarn Chats, Episode 2 – The authors of “Hardly Harmless Drudgery”

 

The cartoon boy reading was adapted from here at Openclipart.