'He Was Dull in a New Way'

“A dull country magistrate gave Johnson a long tedious account of his exercising his criminal jurisdiction, the result of which was his having sentenced four convicts to transportation. Johnson, in an agony of impatience to get rid of such a companion, exclaimed, ‘I heartily wish, Sir, that I were a fifth.’” 

Recently I endured the company of a descendant of Dr. Johnson’s tiresome judge, a person for whom storytelling was an excuse for holding his listeners hostage and torturing them. He reminded me of my father who, whenever we visited someone, on arrival promptly recited details of the route we had taken, including street names, landmarks and weather conditions. This abuse, endured throughout childhood, left me with a burning intolerance for bores, especially conversational bores. I wanted desperately to be a grownup so I wouldn’t have to be polite to such dullards.

 

Elsewhere in Boswell, Johnson says of Thomas Sheridan: “Why, Sir, Sherry is dull, naturally dull; but it must have taken him a great deal of pains to become what we now see him. Such an excess of stupidity, Sir, is not in Nature."

 

And another anecdote recounted by Boswell: “He attacked [the poet Thomas] Gray, calling him ‘a dull fellow.’ Boswell: ‘I understand he was reserved, and might appear dull in company; but surely he was not dull in poetry.’ Johnson: ‘Sir, he was dull in company, dull in his closet, dull everywhere. He was dull in a new way, and that made many people think him GREAT. He was a mechanical poet.’”

 

Johnson never uses the words we would apply to such people – bore, boring, boredom. Bore appears in his Dictionary as “the hole made by boring,” as in carpentry. His words are dull and dullness. The OED tells us the modern sense of the noun bore showed up in the nineteenth century and cites Benjamin Disraeli: “The true bore is that man who thinks the world is only interested in one subject, because he, himself, can only comprehend one.”