There was a fashion 20 or 30 years ago for criticising Johnson as too prescriptive in his criteria for usage, as if the language could be burnished and set in amber. But Johnson’s Plan for the dictionary and its Preface, both included here, read as a model of good sense. Johnson mildly points out that if Milton had been able to resort to such a dictionary he would not have confounded his scorpion and his ellops. (Johnson insisted the ellops or elops was a fish, not a serpent; the OED tactfully says it can be either, though it cites only Milton for the sense of ‘serpent’). Curiously, Dr Lynch includes neither word in his selection.
They were heroes, those dictionary- makers, and a hero-worshipper after my own heart is R. W. Holder, who, in the spirit of L. T. C. Rolt on Brunel and Telford, tells the stirring tales of Johnson, Noah Webster, Peter Mark Roget, George Smith (the Victorian sparkling tablewater magnate who made the Dictionary of National Biography happen), James Murray of the OED and Joseph Wright.
Wright, the compiler of the great English Dialect Dictionary, is perhaps the most extraordinary of all, for he did not learn to read till he was 15, working as a Bradford wool-sorter. With an amazing memory and tenacious energy he acquired language after language. He was a tough man who never forgot his childhood poverty, despising overcoats and sleep. Yet he melted in love (and became the subject of his widow’s two-volume biography, quoting from too many love letters), and mourned the loss of their two children.
Dr Holder, also a Samuel Smiles- ish figure, successfully managed an engineering company, edited The Oxford Dictionary of Euphemisms and has 14 grandchildren. The press of the University of Bath, where he was pro-chancellor until 1996, should have corrected his slip (which anyone could make) of using hebdomonal in error for hebdomadal. Johnson defines it snappily: ‘Weekly’. Encarta/Bloomsbury says flaccidly, ‘Occurring on a weekly basis’.
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