[Between 2011 and 2012 I contributed a weekly blog to the ‘culture blog’ The Dabbler. This covered a wide range of topics, from ‘Heroes of Slang’ to ‘London in Slang’ the ‘Seven Deadly Sins (of Slang)’ to the nationalistic ‘Slang Begins at…’ and much besides. What follows was a a little navel-gazing: just how much can we trust our dictionaries, and those who place them on our shelves
Lexicography is about demystifying, of cutting out the fanciful crap and aiming for some kind of truth. This is usually done on a local scale: the definitions and etymologies you offer. But there is a bigger picture: the dictionary itself. The mystique of the dictionary. The so-called Universal Authorising Dictionary, that non-specific but trusted protagonist of ‘Is it in the dictionary?’ ‘I’ll look it up in the dictionary’ ‘It isn’t in the dictionary’. The dictionary? There are dozens at any one time and the reality is that ‘the dictionary’ tends to be that which sits on the speaker’s shelf. Or, these days, screen. But if all are equal then some are more equal than others. From 1755 to the emergence in the 1880s of the first fascicles of what would become the Oxford English Dictionary, in the UK at least it was Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language that was the word-book of final appeal. Not for nothing did Thackeray’s rebellious Becky Sharp signify her emancipation from the schoolroom by tossing a copy from the coach that bore her away from Miss Pinkerton’s Academy for Young Ladies. The great lexicographer, as Miss P. apostrophised him, stood for linguistic authority. Miss Sharp, avatar of modernity, was unimpressed.
We are programmed to trust the dictionary, but are we sensible? The great lexicographer might equally well have been known as the great fabricator. Johnson’s book is a testament to Johnson’s personality. He was the first ‘modern’ to include quotations illustrative of ‘live’ usage in his lexicon, properly ‘citations’ (English pron., but French for ‘quotations’) and their task to back up the definitions and senses of a given word. The concept of ‘historical principles’, which is applied to any dictionary that displays the developing range of such examples, had not yet been coined. But that was what Johnson was doing. However it was Johnson’s history and Johnson’s principles. The writers on whom he drew were only to be those that he judged as the first quality. His citations showed how a word had been used, but even more important, how it had been used properly. If the writer had not quite attained Johnson’s mark, then the Doctor saw nothing wrong in tweaking the material to fit his requirements. Similarly his definitions: the concept of disinterested defining, the obliteration of the writer’s views and a given of modern dictionaries, does not seem to have worried him. The ‘big’ concepts: God, liberty, freedom, power, religion, were laid out in terms to which an Anglican Tory such as Johnson could subscribe.
Seventy years on and across the Atlantic, one finds the same thing with America’s Johnson: Noah Webster (even if his work was largely built on his distaste for The Great Cham) whose own magnum opus, the American Dictionary of the English Language, appeared in 1828. Webster’s main concern ‘was not to celebrate American life or to expand independence [but] to counteract social disruption and re-establish the deferential world order that he believed was disintegrating.’ Where Johnson was an Anglican, Webster espoused Calvinism (that it was much followed in Johnson’s unloved Scotland is probably coincident). To misunderstand the true meaning of a word was to pave the way to social disorder. Thus the dictionary takes special care with such key terms as free, equal, democrat, republican, love and laws. Freedom, other than in subjection to divine laws, was absurd; it is seen as ‘violation of the rules of decorum’ and ‘license’. Equality was out of the question, universal male suffrage a non-starter. Like Johnson’s defining of Whig and Tory, Webster set a Democrat as ‘a person who attempts an undue opposition or influence over government by means of private clubs, secret intrigues or by public popular meetings which are extraneous to the Constitution’ while Republicans were ‘friends of our representative Governments...’ As for love, ‘the love of God is the first duty of man...’ Laws existed simply to ‘enjoin the duties of piety and morality’. Injunctions towards such submissiveness can be found throughout the Dictionary. Duty, as might be presumed, is highly valued: do what you are told and ask no questions might have been Webster’s credo. As for education, it was a concept that in Webster’s world had no relation to learning; education was ‘instruction and discipline’, it would fit the young for their future stations. And while a general education was ‘important’ a religious one was ‘indispensable’. The fear of the Lord, as he often declared, quoting the Book of Common Prayer, was the beginning of wisdom.
Not every dictionary problem is down to personality. Prevailing cultural standards will have their say. Many of my predecessors found the inclusion of obscenities challenging. Among the chestnuts that gained a polish via Johnson was that of the supposed pair of ladies who accused him of including ‘naughty’ or ‘improper’ words. He denied that he had ‘daubed his fingers’, and mocked them for searching. (The mild fart is indeed there).
For all that I sometimes ponder a slang collection entitled ‘Apples and Pears and Fucking’, my hat-tip to the popular image of the lexis as rhyming slang and filth, not all slang is ‘dirty’ words but most ‘dirty’ words are listed as slang and they demand includsion. If, like my predecessor Eric Partridge, one professes due respect for the dictionary, such respect can promote absurdities. The Oxford English Dicionary of 1928 offered the word shit. Partridge took this as permission and in 1937 did the same. No blanks required. But the OED passes over slang’s adjacent shit-stirrer or shithead, for instance, and thus for these one finds Partridge preferring sh-t. No point in sneering, but one may surely laugh. Now, in the world loosely described as ‘woke’; with its idealistic premium on avoiding offence, a new rationale for censorship seems to be expanding. The slang dictionaries are untouched so far, but who can say that the blue pencil is not zeroing in.
It seems to me that Johnson’s work contains an essential paradox. In attempting to offer a didactic work, setting out definitions that conformed to a specific point of view, he might be seen as attempting to control the language. And in this he was, of course, following the example of the French Academy, whose own dictionary, the product of its members, the ‘Forty Immortals’, had taken sixty years to complete and which, in successive editions remains an exemplar of proscriptiveness. Johnson had taken just nine years to do the job and as his friend David Garrick put it ‘had beat forty French and could beat forty more’. His list of headwords – what goes in and by definition what stays out – reflects his desire to purge the lexis. It was, after all, part of his initial job description. Yet if one reads his introduction one finds a far more pragmatic figure. When I wrote my history of lexicography, I chose the title Chasing the Sun, specifically as a tribute to what seemed to me to be Johnson’s open-mindedness. Any attempt to curb the language, he suggested, was the equivalent to the futile efforts of those who climb a mountain in order to entrap the sun, only to find that the sun has moved on to the next peak. As he put it, ‘to pursue perfection was, like the first inhabitants of Arcadia, to chace [sic] the sun, which, when they had reached the hill where he seemed to rest, was still beheld at the same distance from them.’ This to me seemed the essence of descriptive lexicography, the sensible acknowledgement that language is alive and organic and cannot be pinned down between the covers of a book, however skilfully created.
So my feeling is this: every dictionary should carry some kind of lexical health warning: what you are reading here is incontrovertibly correct and wholly trustworthy – until further research improves upon it. This isn’t theory, it’s fact. I experience it every day. The realities of publication mean that at some stage you have to draw a line under your research and the language isn’t listening. It keeps moving on. Research is potentially infinite and the Internet has hugely multiplied its sources. What we find remains fluid. The essence of any ‘historical principles’ dictionary is not just looking ahead, but backwards too. I would imagine that at the very least 25% of the ‘first recorded uses’ offered when the print edition appeared in 2010 have been pushed backwards to an earlier appearance. The post-2016 online edition is revised every 90 days, it could be even more frequently. Range upon range of peaks behind which the unfettered sun, laughing at our feeble efforts at pursuit, dances mockingly ahead. Dig and dig and there’s always the possibility of finding another layer to excavate. Another Troy beneath the last.
Not so long ago a friend published a study of slang. It was filled with theories, a dignity that my marginal, disdained topic usually fails to attract. The theories needed underpinning and my work and that of my peers was liberally quoted to back them up. I cannot speak for them, but I know my own product, and I know that some of his citations – for instance a taxonomy of the terms that make up my database – should not be taken as gospel. Or rather that’s exactly what they should be taken for. A concoction created to persuade. Or in this case to awaken an audience of students who are still young enough to find amusing the enunciation of the odd obscenity within a lecture hall. The broad-brush effect is fine, it’s when the figures get quoted that I start to worry. The devil, as we know, is in the details. In the end I felt that he flattered, and may, although certainly not intentionally, have deceived. But perhaps I worry over-much.
[Taken with revisions from ‘Don’t Trust Me, I’m a Lexicographer’ in The Dabbler (thedabbler.co.uk) September 2012]