Dr. Johnson revisited

National Review, July 8, 1991 by Ralph De Toledano

THE conventional wisdom has it that language evolves progressively, that vocabularies hone themselves with the passage of time. But language is a lusty wench who bestows her favors and then withdraws them. Some words last for centuries; others disappear and then return with the same spelling but a different meaning. Reading Samuel Johnson's Dictionary, or that part of it which E. L. McAdam Jr. and George Milne culled for Pantheon Books in 1963, I am struck by the number of words which we consider a part of our time's slang or colloquial usage but which caught Dr. Johnson's attention-as well as others which passed into what the eighteenth century would have called the dormitory (what today we would call a mortuary). As sport for the philologist there are also those words whose meaning is at as far a remove from our own day as the Dictionary itself is. And then there are the products of Dr. Johnson's whimsy of prejudication, as when he defines oats as "a grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people."

Like ourselves, Dr. Johnson's contemporaries were at ease with such verbs as to blab, to roast (a person, as at a Friar's Club roast of a famous guest), to palm, to swap, and to grease (bribe). Flush affluent), bamboozle, horse laugh, new-fangled, hush money, chitchat, rotgut, sleezy, bubby (breast), fib, pat fit or convenient), lick (a blow), huckster, and mizmaze (which we now spell mishmash and consider of Yiddish derivation) are all in the Johnson compendium-along with many words of Latin derivation which are still with us.

But what yanked so many words from the Dictionary's meaning to ours? Why should a commoner, great or otherwise, have signified a prostitute? The castrati were well known to Dr. Johnson, yet one of his definitions for to castrate was "to take away the obscene parts of a writing." Conservative was "having the power of opposing diminution or injury." (Could the liberals have been at it even then?) A flasher in 1755 was not an exhibitionist but "a man of more appearance of wit than reality," and an exhibition a salary or a pension. For proletarian read "mean, wretched, vile" and for promiscuous, "mingled, confused, undistinguished." Essay translated to "an irregular, undigested piece, not a regular and ordered composition." A husband was an "oeconomist," indolence freedom from pain, which hugs the Latin, as does impeccable, "exempt from possibility of sin." Luggage meant "anything of more weight than value," and lunch or luncheon, "as much food as a hand can hold." As for modern, it translated to vulgar or common. And tollbooth? A prison, of course. Schrewd: having the qualities of a shrew. Smug: "spruce, but without elegance." Terse: smooth. Sophistication: adulteration, with no apology to the sophists. And teen, with much prescience: sorrow, grief.

Of the words which have not survived, to sowl ("to pull up by the ears") would have been of value to Lyndon Johnson and his beagles. Obstupefaction-"the act of inducing stupidity" -should be in every TV critic's glossary. To oppilate-to heap up obstructions-is one for the Senate. So too is slubbergullion, "a paltry, sorry wretch." Over-cloy explains itself, and so does over-office, "to lord by virtue of an office." How descriptive for a certain senator from New England is bedswerver-"one that swerves from one bed to another." Or to inquinate, to pollute or corrupt. In the political field as well are a number of words to point and clarify debate: politicaster, a petty or ignorant politician; sinistrous, perverse, wrong-headed, leftist; sermocinator, a preachifying speechmaker; tonguepad, a great talker; opiniatry, inflexibility of thought; and to threap, to argue too much.

As writers and literary critics, we could make use of such words as altiloquence, for pompous language, and ambages, a multiplicity of words or circular speech. And there is, of course, grammaticaster, a mean verbal pedant. And longanimity, "patience of offense, forbearance." For less specialized use, there is eyeservice, work "performed only under inspection"; genial, "that which contributes to procreation," which could be modernized to include medical research into the weaknesses of the genes. With no knowledge of Brooklyn, Dr. Johnson gave room to moidered-nothing to do with gang killings, but a word meaning crazed.

All this obsimathy, or late erudition, lurks in Dr. Johnson's Dictionary. To restore it to the language would make us but nocent, or guilty, of enriching a contemporary expression which limitedly accepts its handful of obscene ripostes. It would be an act of refocillation, the restoration of strength by refreshment.