'I Shall at Least Discover the Coast'

 Knuff, looby, lubber, clotpoll, chucklehead, chuff, bedpresser, fopdoodle, pricklouse, pickthank, jackalent, dandiprant, jobbernowl, mooncalf, et al. 

English, like Yiddish, is blessedly rich in insults, nouns applied to those we deem dangerously (or pitifully) stupid, lazy or inept. Few such words endure for long. My spell-check software fails to recognize seven of the fourteen words cited above. Invective seems less imaginative and entertaining today, relying as it does on a small cache of predictable monosyllables. W.C. Fields in The Bank Dick (1940), in the role of Egbert Sousé (“Sousé – accent grave over the ‘e’”), uses some of the words above carrying the Johnsonian imprimatur when giving advice to his future son-in-law, Og Oggilby (“Sounds like a bubble in a bathtub”): “Don’t be a luddy-duddy! Don’t be a mooncalf! Don’t be a jabbernowl! You’re not those, are you?”

 

Johnson scholar Jack Lynch tells us 663 dictionaries of English already existed when Johnson published A Dictionary of the English Language on April 15, 1755, despite its mistaken reputation as the first in the language. What distinguishes Johnson’s Dictionary from others is its comprehensiveness, the vast number of citations (turning the book into an anthology of English literature), and the nine years of labor a single man put into creating it. Johnson is stereotyped as a finicky, moralizing prude, yet we find in his Dictionary such impolite words as fart (“wind from behind”) and turd (“excrement”). Boswell reports Johnson saying: “The difference between coarse and refined abuse is as the difference between being bruised by a club, and wounded by a poisoned arrow.”

 

Johnson defines 41,712 words. That first edition was published in two folio-sized volumes, each containing more than 1,100 pages and weighing more than twenty pounds. For this reader, language is the chief glory of the human species. That’s why I think of Johnson’s Dictionary not as an old reference book but as a celebration and a grandly ambitious undertaking. Johnson writes in “The Plan of an English Dictionary” (1747), addressed to Lord Chesterfield:

   

“When I survey the plan which I have laid before you, I cannot, my Lord, but confess, that I am frighted at its extent, and, like the soldiers of Cæsar, look on Britain as a new world, which it is almost madness to invade. But I hope, that though I should not complete the conquest, I shall at least discover the coast, civilize part of the inhabitants, and make it easy for some other adventurer to proceed farther, to reduce them wholly to subjection, and settle them under laws.”

 

Half a century ago I read in Time magazine that Dr. Oliver Sacks, whose Awakenings (1973) I had already read, would read the Oxford English Dictionary while in bed at night. The anecdote charmed me because I too read dictionaries, though not at that time the OED. We’ve learned since his death in 2015 that Sacks may have embellished some of his stories. I can’t say. But here is what he wrote in On the Move: A Life (2015):

     

“I am very bad at factual exams, yes-or-no questions, but can spread my wings with essays. Fifty pounds came with the Theodore Williams prize—£50! I had never had so much money at once. This time I went not to the White Horse but to Blackwell’s bookshop (next door to the pub) and bought, for £44, the twelve volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary, for me the most coveted and desirable book in the world. I was to read the entire dictionary through when I went on to medical school, and I still like to take a volume off the shelf, now and then, for bedtime reading.”