'A Lexicon to Be Used By a Whale Author'

Sir Toby Belch is one of Shakespeare’s comic drunks, a vain, buffoonish glutton, distant cousin to the more enduring Sir John Falstaff. Sir Toby is milking the coffers of Sir Andrew Aguecheek, another Shakespearian lout. In Act II, Scene 3 of Twelfth Night, Sir Toby says:

“My ladys a Cataian, we are politicians, Malvolio’s a Peg-a-Ramsey, and ‘Three merry men be we.’ Am not I consanguineous? am I not of her blood? Tillyvally. Lady!” [Sings] ‘There dwelt a man in Babylon, lady, lady!’”

Much delicious nonsense to unpack here but let’s focus on a single word: “Tillyvally.” In his edition of Shakespeare, Dr. Johnson glosses the word as an “interjection of contempt.” In his Dictionary, Johnson cites the passage in Twelfth Night, another in Henry IV, Part 2, identifies the word as an adjective, offers an alternate spelling (tillyvalley) and gives this definition: “a word used formerly when any thing said was rejected as trifling or impertinent.” A polite modern equivalent: Fiddlesticks! Less polite: Bullshit!

    

The inevitable happened. Whenever I consult a dictionary, in particular Johnson’s or the OED, I’m detoured from whatever else I may have been doing and, unless I’m strong, there goes the rest of the afternoon. I browsed in Johnson among the T’s. Tachygraphy: “the art or practice of quick writing.”  Tántling: “one seized with hopes of pleasure unattainable.” Tatterdemalion: “a ragged fellow.” Thrapple: “the windpipe of any animal.” To threap: “a country word denoting to argue much or contend.” Titubation: “the act of stumbling.” Tripudiation: “act of dancing.” Tuel: “the anus.”

Reading the Dictionary, with its 42,773 words, prompts a sense of gratitude for the abundance of English. We are reassured that anything can be expressed. Ishmael concurred. Read his testimonial in Chap. 104, “The Fossil Whale,” in Moby-Dick:

    

“Since I have undertaken to manhandle this Leviathan, it behooves me to approve myself omnisciently exhaustive in the enterprise; not overlooking the minutest seminal germs of his blood, and spinning him out to the uttermost coil of his bowels. Having already described him in most of his present habitatory and anatomical peculiarities, it now remains to magnify him in an archaeological, fossiliferous, and antediluvian point of view. Applied to any other creature than the Leviathan -- to an ant or a flea -- such portly terms might justly be deemed unwarrantably grandiloquent. But when Leviathan is the text, the case is altered. Fain am I to stagger to this enterprise under the weightiest words of the dictionary. And here be it said, that whenever it has been convenient to consult one in the course of these dissertations, I have invariably used a huge quarto edition of Johnson, expressly purchased for that purpose; because that famous lexicographer's uncommon personal bulk more fitted him to compile a lexicon to be used by a whale author like me.”

The first edition of Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language was published in London on this date, April 15, in 1755.