His dictionary was full of shortcomings. He allowed many spelling
inconsistencies to be perpetuated—deceit but receipt, deign but disdain, hark but
hearken, convey but inveigh, moveable but immovable. He wrote downhill with
one 1, but uphill with two; install with two l's, but reinstall with one; fancy with
an f, but phantom with a ph. Generally he was aware of these inconsistencies,
but felt that in many cases the inconsistent spellings were already too well
established to tamper with. He did try to make spelling somewhat more sensible,
institutionalizing the differences between flower and flour and between metal
and mettle—but essentially he saw his job as recording English spelling as it
stood in his day, not changing it. This was in sharp contrast to the attitude taken
by the revisers of the Academe Franglais dictionary a decade or so later, who
would revise almost a quarter of French spellings.There were holes in Johnson's erudition. He professed a preference for what he
conceived to be Saxon spellings for words like music, critic, and prosaic, and
thus spelled them with a final k, when in fact they were all borrowed from Latin.
He was given to flights of editorializing, as when he defined a patron as "one
who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery" or oats as a grain that
sustained horses in England and people in Scotland. His etymologies, He defined a garret as a "room on the highest floor in the
house" and a cock loft as "the room over the garret." Elsewhere, he gave
identical definitions to leeward and windward, even though they are quite
obviously opposites.
Even allowing for the inflated prose of his day, he had a tendency to write
passages of remarkable denseness, as here: "The proverbial oracles of our
parsimonious ancestors have informed us, that the fatal waste of our fortune is
by small expenses, by the profusion of sums too little singly to alarm our
caution, and which we never suffer ourselves to consider together." Too little
singly?
I would wager good money that that sentence was as puzzling to his
contemporaries as it is to us. And yet at least it has the virtue of relative brevity.
Often Johnson constructed sentences that ran to 250 words or more, which sound
today uncomfortably like the ramblings of a man who has sat up far too late and
drunk rather too much port.
Yet for all that, his Dictionary of the English Language, published in two
volumes in June 1755, is a masterpiece, one of the landmarks of English
literature. Its definitions are supremely concise, its erudition magnificent, if not
entirely flawless. Without a nearby library to draw on, and with appallingly little
financial backing (his publisher paid him a grand total of just £1,575, less than
£zoo a year, from which he had to pay his assistants), Johnson worked from a
garret room off Fleet Street, where he defined some 43,000 words, illustrated
with more than 114,000 supporting quotations drawn from every area of
literature. It is little wonder that he made some errors and occasionally indulged
himself with barbed definitions.
He had achieved in under nine years what the forty members of the AcademieFrancaise could not do in less than forty. He captured the majesty of the English
language and gave it a dignity that was long overdue. It was a monumental
accomplishment and he well deserved his fame.
But its ambitious sweep was soon to be exceeded by a persnickety
schoolteacher/lawyer half a world away in Connecticut. Noah Webster (1758-
1843) was by all accounts a severe, correct, humorless, religious, temperate man
who was not easy to like, even by other severe, religious, temperate, humorless
people. A provincial schoolteacher and not-very-successful lawyer from
Hartford, he was short, pale, smug, and boastful. (He held himself superior to
Benjamin Franklin because he was a Yale man while Franklin was self-
educated.) Where Samuel Johnson spent his free hours drinking and discoursing
in the company of other great men, Webster was a charmless loner who
criticized almost everyone but was himself not above stealing material from
others, most notably from a spelling book called Aby-sel-pha by an Englishman
named Thomas Dilworth. In the marvelously deadpan phrase of H. L.
Mencken, Webster was "sufficiently convinced of its merits to imitate it, even to
the extent of lifting whole passages." He credited himself with coining many
words, among them demoralize, appreciation, accompaniment, ascertainable,
and expenditure, which in fact had been in the language for centuries. He was
also inclined to boast of learning that he simply did not possess. He claimed to
have mastered twenty-three languages, including Latin, Greek, all the Romance
languages, Anglo-Saxon, Persian, Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, and a dozen more.
Yet, as Thomas Pyles witheringly puts it, he showed "an ignorance of German
which would disgrace a freshman," and his grasp of other languages was equally
tenuous. According to Charlton Laird, he knew far less Anglo-Saxon than
Thomas Jefferson, who never pretended to be an expert at it. Pyles calls his
Dissertations on the English Language "a fascinating farrago of the soundest
linguistic common sense and the most egregious poppycock." It is hard to find
anyone saying a good word about him.
Webster's first work, A Grammatical Institute of the English Language—
consisting of three books: a grammar, a reader, and a speller—appeared between
1783 and 1785, but he didn't capture the public's attention until the publication
in 1788 of The American Spelling Book. This volume (later called the
Elementary Spelling Book) went through so many editions and sold so many
copies that historians appear to have lost track. But it seems safe to say that there were at least Soo editions between 1788 and 1829 and that by the end of the
nineteenth century it had sold more than sixty million copies—though some
sources put the figure as high as a hundred million. In either case, with the
possible exception of the Bible, it is probably the best-selling book in American
history.
Webster is commonly credited with changing American spelling, but what is
seldom realized is how wildly variable his own views on the matter were.
Sometimes he was in favor of radical and far-reaching changes—insisting on
such spellings as soop, bred, wimmen, groop, definit, fether, fugitiv, tuf, thum,
hed, hilt, and tung—but at other times he acted the very soul of orthographic
conservatism, going so far as to attack the useful American tendency to drop the
u from color, humor, and the like. The main book with which he is associated
in the popular mind, his massive American Dictionary of the English Language
of 1828, actually said in the preface that it was "desirable to perpetuate the
sameness" of American and British spellings and usages.