'Of This Word I Know Not the Meaning'

There’s something bracing about voluntary, unapologetic admissions of ignorance. Most of us are fabulators, substituting speculation and fraud for wrought-iron certainty. Not knowing feels more shameful even than being wrong, and it’s easily disguised, in conversation especially.  

Dr. Johnson famously mis-defined pastern in the first edition of his Dictionary: “the knee of an horse.” According to an anecdote told by Frances Reynolds and collected in Johnsonian Miscellanies (ed. George Birkbeck, 1897), a lady asked Johnson “before a large company at dinner” and “in a very audible voice” how he came up with so inaccurate a definition. “Ignorance, Madam, ignorance,” he replied. When Johnson revised his Dictionary he corrected the pastern entry: “that part of the leg of a horse between the joint next the foot and the hoof.”

 

Even more revealing of Johnson’s pride-embattled sense of intellectual humility is his definition of stammel: “Of this word I know not the meaning.” That an eighteenth-century, pre-digital Englishman should occasionally be stumped in the process of defining 42,773 English words accompanied by some 114,000 citations is hardly surprising. The OED fills in the blanks. In the seventeenth century, stammel meant “a coarse woollen cloth, or linsey-woolsey, usually dyed red; an under-garment of this material, worn by ascetics.” Later it came to mean “the shade of red in which the cloth was commonly dyed.”