'Smiling Pick-thanks and Base News-mongers'

Words are worlds. They sit there like Ozymandias, dense with latent power and history. Learning a new one is like going back to school. Take pickthank, a noun composed of two common English words, dating from the fifteenth century. Here is Dr. Johnson’s definition: “an officious fellow, who does what he is not desired; a whispering parasite.” Now you have a new understanding of Twitter, online trolls, the office gossip and American politics. The OED fleshes out the picture: “A person who curries favour with another, esp. by informing against someone else; a flatterer, a sycophant; a telltale.” Both dictionaries cite the prince in Act III, Scene 2 of Henry IV, Part 1: 

“. . . many tales devised,

which oft the ear of greatness needs must hear,

By smiling pick-thanks and base news-mongers.”

 

Johnson published A Dictionary of the English Language on this date, April 15, in 1755. Almost unimaginably, it was an eight-year, one-man job, not composed by committee. (Yes, he hired six amanuenses, five of them Scots, and paid their wages out of his own pocket.)  He chose which words to include -- 42,773  of them in the first edition – defined them, speculated on their etymologies and illustrated their usage with some 114,000 quotations. While composing it, Johnson called his Dictionary “a vast sea of words.”

 

In the first biography of Robert Browning, published in 1891, Alexandra Orr reports: “When the die was cast, and young Browning was definitely to adopt literature as his profession, he qualified himself for it by reading and digesting the whole of Johnson’s Dictionary.” (Life and Letters of Robert Browning, Vol. 1.) In his 1974 biography of Johnson, John Wain repeats the story and comments:

 

“If modern young poets would do the same, we should have to endure far less shoddy thinking and approximate writing.”