Friday November 9, 2007
What is the language but its users?
By RALPH BERRY
IN the TV sitcom Blackadder III, Dr Johnson’s manuscript dictionary is accidentally used to stoke up a fire. Panic. Blackadder decides to write up a dictionary himself, aided by the faithful Baldrick. “I’m quite pleased with ‘dog’,” says Baldrick, pausing before supplying his definition: “Not a cat.”
Yes, very funny. But actually, Dr Johnson himself was aware of the principle that words should not be defined by an opposite. And on occasion, he didn’t follow it. Among the 10 senses Johnson gives of sweet are “not salty” and “not sour”. Cold means “not hot”, low means “not high”, and poor means “not rich”.
Johnson is coping with the hardest part of dictionary-making: capturing the essence of what a word is.
This is obviously true of taste-sensations. Notoriously, wine lists go in crazed pursuit of the right word. From my first list to hand, I find “deep, saturated plum/purple colour is accompanied by lead pencil liqueur-like notes intermixed with sweet red and black currants, plums and cedar”.
Next comes “satiny-textured and fleshy ? a feminine, graceful wine”. Then comes “firm yet ripe personality”. So now you know what wine tastes like. But these prose poems take us well beyond the scope of proper definitions.
As Johnson well understood, the words that are hardest to define are common, everyday ones.
How does one deal with time? Colours are bafflingly difficult. Johnson accepted that the way to define certain ideas is to identify an object in which the property can be seen. So red is “of the colour of blood”.
I checked this against a dictionary which after a scientific start – “the colour seen at least-refracted end of spectrum” – soon takes refuge in “blood, rubies, and glowing coals”. Johnson is appealing to the reader’s experience of a word.
Experience can only take us so far, though. And the meaning of words tends to slide across partitions. Take, say, campanology. Is this a difficult word? No, merely rare. It means “the study of bells, bell-ringing”. When you know that, you know everything that matters in the definition.
And now what about play? That’s an easy word, and you think you know what it means? I doubt it. The Oxford English Dictionary gives 36 senses to that simple word.
The large issue of definitions remains on the table. Johnson gave two main responses. The first is etymology. Each word should be traced to its origins, if possible, and its development recorded. This seems sound, but in practice there are many pitfalls. It is not possible to search out the origins of all words. Johnson admitted, for example, that he could not find a satisfactory etymology of gun (we are no better off today).
Many derivations are disputed: people still argue about posh (is it really “port out, starboard home”?). Then, the origin might weigh unduly on the later sense. For us, candid means “frank”, but Johnson gave as the first sense “white”, because that is what the Latin candidus means.
And words may slip their moorings. We have no difficulty with chauffeur, but it is curious to reflect that the word originally meant “stoker”, one who heats up the car. The word is rooted in the technology of the 1890s.
The other main feature of Johnson’s dictionary, and this was completely original, is its base in literature. The words are illustrated by examples from the literature of the previous 200 years.
We might think that Johnson would start with a word – any word – and then look for examples in published writings. Not so. Johnson read a huge number of texts (necessarily skimming many), marking down the key words, which his helpers copied into large notebooks.
He started with the books, not the alphabet. A great deal of the material is poetry, with favoured authors including Pope, Swift, Collins. At bottom, Johnson’s interest was in literature rather than language.
For those who want to know more of Johnson’s great work, I recommend the excellent Dr Johnson’s Dictionary: The Extraordinary Story of the Book that Defined the World by Henry Hitchings (John Murray, 2006).
A giant principle emerges from Johnson’s approach. A dictionary of English commemorates the language as it has been written and spoken, rather than laid down and fixed by experts. Authority lies in practice.
This approach is now completely accepted: R.W. Burchfield’s Modern English Usage quotes from reputable writers and journals, such as J.M. Coetzee, Iris Murdoch, the Chicago Tribune. Prose dominates these illustrations, with only a few from poets.
Johnson’s immense learning is now transformed into an electronic database. But his approach still commands the language. In Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, the Roman tribune asks of the citizens, “What is the city but the people?” Dr Johnson would ask, “What is the language but its users?”
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