`Johnson Loved Them All'

One of the minor compulsions of my youth was to record every new word I encountered in print or conversation, particularly if it was polysyllabic or sounded exotic to my Midwestern ears. This was not self-improvement but love of new sounds combined with the pleasure I’ve always taken in precision. “Celerity,” which I learned in eighth-grade Latin, is different from speed, swiftness and alacrity, and “paucity” is not the same as fewness (which hardly sounds like a word) or dearth. Samuel Johnson, author of A Dictionary of the English Language, shared my enthusiasm. According to his latest biographer, Peter Martin:

“One waggish commentator once remarked that Johnson wrote the Rambler to make the Dictionary necessary and the Dictionary to explain the Rambler. A few examples from the Dictionary: dealbation, digladiation, dodecatemorion, enneatical, slubberdegullion, immarcessible, impennous, repullulate, sciomachy, capitation, tentiginous, conterraneous, dapatical, fabaceous, furacious, gemelliparous. Johnson loved them all.”

I knew only three of the words Martin cites (impennous, capitation, fabaceous) and made partial sense of a few others because of their Latin roots, but my spell-check software recognized only capitation. Here are the rough definitions, in order, drawn from several dictionaries: bleaching or whitening; strife or bickering; a twelfth of something; occurring once in every nine times; a filthy, slobbering person; unfading; having no wings; to bud again; fighting with a shadow or any mock contest; a system of payment for each customer served, rather than by service performed; lustful; belonging to the same country; sumptuous in cheer; like a bean; likely to steal; producing twins.

With his customary bluntness, Johnson defines digladiation as “a combat with swords; any quarrel or contest,” and slubberdegullion as “a paltry, dirty, sorry wretch.” Among the pleasures of reading writers as various as Robert Burton, Coleridge, Hart Crane, William F. Buckley and Alexander Theroux is their revelry in rare words. In high school, I learned sesquipedalian from Buckley’s newspaper column. In Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary, Henry Hitchings writes of the great book:

“…it abounds with curious words: some amusing because of their sheer unusualness, others because they suggest ideas or practices that sound thoroughly droll. Some are funny because they seem ludicrous and overinflated; others are obsolete but rewardingly succinct ways of capturing a particular trait or malady – or indeed, as Johnson might put it, a `dignotion’ (`distinguishing mark’).”