My all-time favorite literature course in college was "The Age of Johnson." What a guy! He was an equal opportunity insulter. Dr. J zeroed on hypocrisy in the North American colonies: "drivers of Negroes." He defined oats as "feed for livestock and Scotsmen." He taught me that you arrive at adulthood when you realize that you are going to die. We need Dr. J today. Dr. Samuel Johnson fought cant at every turn. I shudder to think of his assessment of Dub if Johnson lived in our time. If this is (fair & balanced) lexicography, so be it.
It's tempting to think of a lexicographer in terms of the dictionary he produces, and Johnson's is certainly one of the great philological accomplishments of any literary era. But it's just as interesting to think of what the dictionary does to the man. Johnson says, quite simply, "I applied myself to the perusal of our writers." But reading "our writers" to find the materials for a dictionary is unlike any other kind of reading I can imagine. It would atomize every text, forsake the general sense of a passage for the particular meaning of individual words. It would be like hiking through quicksand, around the world.
Johnson lived in turmoil, and the sense of vigor he so often projected was, if nothing else, a way of keeping order in a world that threatened to disintegrate into disorder every day. And what was the disorder of London to the chaos of the language? "Sounds," he wrote, "are too volatile and subtile for legal restraints; to enchain syllables, and to lash the wind, are equally the undertakings of pride." Johnson published his dictionary not as the conqueror of the language but as the person who knew best how unconquerable it really is.
Verlyn Klinkenborg comes from a family of Iowa farmers and is the author of Making Hay and The Last Fine Time. A member of the editorial board of the New York Times, he has written for The New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, National Geographic, Mother Jones, and the New York Times Magazine, among others. His essays on rural life are a beloved regular feature in the New York Times. He lives on a small farm in upstate New York.
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