![]() ![]() ![]() If (beardless) Johnson is to blame, so are journalists and cultural historians, who have cemented the profession’s status as bone-dry and monastic. In truth, the annals of lexicography abound with beardless men, many of today’s leading lexicographers are women, and the makers of dictionaries are a fairly worldly bunch – as likely to be into American criminal slang as they are to be obsessed with tracking 19th‑century uses of the word “plimsoll”. Johnson alleged that “to make dictionaries is dull work”, and this self-deprecating line has proved tenacious: mostly we think that dictionaries are necessary yet unexciting, and that the people who make them are the same – men with beards (but no tattoos) who wear shoes that look like Cornish pasties. W hat does the word “lexicographer” call to mind? A toiling collector of verbiage? A harmless drudge, absorbed in tracing the origins of vocabulary? Both of those images come courtesy of Samuel Johnson, who in the 1750s compiled what is regarded as the first good dictionary of English. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |