'Such a Homely and Useful Word'

Noah Webster famously scolded his fellow lexicographer, Samuel Johnson, for including “vulgar and cant words” in his Dictionary of the English Language (1755). Webster claimed “his work contains more of the lowest of all vulgar words than any other now extant.” Don’t rush to Johnson's big book looking for fuck. Among Webster’s examples of Johnson’s vulgarisms are jiggumbob, fishify and conjobble. Webster boasts that he has removed two-thirds of Johnson’s low-class words. Why not all of them, I wonder?

Johnson defines jiggumbob as “a trinket; a knick-knack; a slight contrivance in machinery.” Our counterpart might be thingumabob or thingamajig, meaning an object for which we’re unable to find a precise term.  Fishify, not surprisingly, Johnson defines as “to turn to fish: a cant word” and cites its use in Romeo and Juliet. Mercutio, playing off Romeo’s name, says: “Without his roe, like a dried herring. O flesh, flesh, how art thou fishified.” A linguistically complicated insult. For conjobble, Johnson gives “to concert; to settle; to discuss. A low cant word.” The OED uses Johnson’s definition. It sounds to my ears like a verb meaning “to perpetrate a con job.”

Guy Davenport, in “More Genteel than God” (Every Force Evolves a Form, North Point Press, 1986), describes Wester’s An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828) as “the Republic’s absolute arbiter of spelling and usage.” His essay begins as a review of Richard M. Rollins’ The Long Journey of Noah Webster, but as is usual with Davenport, he takes a sui generis approach to his subject. He makes clear that Webster was a crank, a religious fanatic and a thoroughly unpleasant human being, and that these qualities are reflected in his lexicography. Davenport reports Rollins was surprised to find Webster “so curmudgeonly a reactionary, so sanctimonious a fundamentalist, [and] so smug a pessimist.” Davenport objects to Webster turning lexicography into a hypocritical holy war:

 “Such a homely and useful word as piss, which was good enough for the King James Bible and Dr. Johnson, was cast by Webster into outer dark, along with other `low’ words known to everybody but henceforth banned by moral arrogance.” Here, by the way, is Johnson’s definition of the verb “to piss”: “To make water.” And the noun: “Urine; animal water.” Hot stuff.

On a shelf in my office at home is the broken-spined copy of Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language Unabridged I received as a gift in 1973. It contains piss as well as pissant, piss away, pissed (“angry, disgusted,” “drunk”) and pissed off. In other words, Webster’s lexical progeny bowed to common sense and common usage. I still find, however, a conspicuous lacuna between fuchsite and fucoid. Isn’t that still the first word you look up in a new dictionary?