Path: ...!eternal-september.org!feeder3.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail
From: Ross Clark <benlizro@ihug.co.nz>
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Samuel Johnson born (18/9/1705)
Date: Wed, 18 Sep 2024 22:42:33 +1200
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
Lines: 54
Message-ID: <vcear3$1fg6$1@dont-email.me>
Reply-To: r.clark@auckland.ac.nz
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Injection-Date: Wed, 18 Sep 2024 12:42:44 +0200 (CEST)
Injection-Info: dont-email.me; posting-host="97d18001dadc5ca5dae53848a20f629e";
	logging-data="48646"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org";	posting-account="U2FsdGVkX18rlWeCKvZmRL41BYzD8VklCnQC7ckErUM="
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101
 Thunderbird/52.9.1
Cancel-Lock: sha1:Kv3FzRSyTEBrSkgm5z2fjAKny3o=
X-Mozilla-News-Host: news://news.eternal-september.org:119
Content-Language: en-GB
Bytes: 3724

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Johnson

"...made lasting contributions as a poet, playwright, essayist, 
moralist, literary critic, sermonist, biographer, editor, and 
lexicographer. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography calls him 
'arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English history'."

But it's the lexicography that we're here to celebrate. The first really 
comprehensive dictionary of English (in two volumes, 1755), product of 
about ten years' work, with a small team of assistants.
It's the definitions that Crystal most admires. He put together an 
anthology of them for Penguin Classics for the 250th anniversary. I 
haven't seen this; I have an earlier "selection" by McAdam & Milne 
(1982). By now there's quite a bit of it accessible online:

https://johnsonsdictionaryonline.com/#
and links at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Dictionary_of_the_English_Language

He gives few etymologies and very little information on pronunciation -- 
perhaps for the same reason Henry Sweet a century later thought it was 
hopeless to try to give pronunciations in the OED.

It is often said that English spelling has changed very little since 
Johnson's time. But he was not an innovator in this area:

"Johnson was not at all interested in reform but rather chose what he 
regarded as the most common spellings.
He was also concerned that homographs — different words that are spelled 
the same, eg bow (the weapon, etc) and bow (to bend the upper body) — 
could lead to misunderstandings. He therefore chose alternative 
spellings to reflect differences in meaning, such as stile (steps over a 
barrier) and style (of art, writing, etc). Before compiling the 
Dictionary, he himself had written '…the rules of stile, like those of 
law, arise from precedents…' (Plan of a Dictionary, 1747). However, one 
effect of all this was to make learning to spell English words even more 
difficult."

https://www.spellingsociety.org/history#/page/9

One example of a bad choice by Johnson which has been discussed here (or 
on a.u.e.) is the very peculiar spelling of "ache". It seems to have 
been influenced by his belief that the word was of Greek origin. 
Recently I have come across a couple of other examples of how Johnson's 
etymological misapprehensions influenced his spellings for the worse.
Can't find them right now.

Crystal's pick for a Johnsonian definition to exemplify "brevity, 
fulness and perspicuity":

Sorry
Grieved for something past. It is generally used of slight or casual 
miscarriages or vexations, but sometimes of greater things. It does not 
imply any long continuance of grief.