Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

in “anyplace” and also in, say, Alexandria. He also criticized any lack of unity of time. From the point of view of common sense, the argument seems irrefutable, but Johnson contradicts him by saying that “the spectator who isn’t crazy knows perfectly well that he is not in Alexandria or anywhere else but rather in the theater, in the stalls watching a show.” This reply was aimed against the rule of three unities, which came fromAristotle, and which Boileau sustained.
    So, a commission of booksellers went to visit Johnson and proposed that he write a dictionary that would include all the words in the language. This was something new and unusual. In the Middle Ages—in the tenth century, or in the ninth—when a scholar read a Latin text and found an anomalous word that he did not understand, he wrote his translation of it into the vernacular between the lines. Then scholars would meet and create glossaries; but at first they only included difficult Latin words. These glossaries were published separately. Then they started making dictionaries. The first were Italian and French. In England, the first dictionary was written by an Italian, and called
A Worlde of Wordes
. 6 Next came an etymological dictionary, which attempted to include all words but did not deal with their meanings, instead giving the Latin or Saxon origins, or etymologies, of a word, or, rather, the Saxon or Teutonic origins. In Italy and France, academies wrote dictionaries that did not include all words. They did not want to include them all. They left out words that were rustic, dialectical,
argot
, or ones that were too technical, specific to each trade. They didn’t want to be rich in words, but rather to have a few good words. They wanted precision above all, and to limit the language. In England, there were no academies or anything of the kind. Johnson himself, who published an English dictionary the main purpose of which was to fixate the language, did not believe the language
could
be definitively fixated. The language belongs to fishermen, not scholars. That is to say, language is created by humble folks, haphazardly, but its usage creates norms of correctness that should be sought in the best writers. In his search for these writers, Johnson established a time frame from Sir PhilipSidney to writers before the Restoration, a time that coincided, he believed, with the deterioration of the language through the introduction of Gallicisms, or words of French origin.
    So, Johnson decided to write a dictionary. When the booksellers went to see him, they signed a contract. It stated that the work would take three years to complete and that he would be paid 1,500 pounds sterling, which ended up being 1,600. He wanted the book to be an anthology, to include a passage from an English classic for each word. But he could not do everything he planned. He wanted to do so much, to include for each word several passages in order to show all its different nuances. But he was not satisfied with the two volumes he published. He went back and reread the classic authors, the English ones. In each work, he noted the passages in which a word was used well, and after noting it he would put the first letter next to it. In this way he marked up all the passages that he thought illustrated each word. He had six amanuenses, and five of them were Scottish. . . . Johnson knew very little Old English. The etymologies, added later, are the weakest aspect of his work, along with the definitions. Because of his ignorance of Old English, and his inability to do the etymologies, he defined lexicographer, jokingly, as “a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge.” And he called himself a lexicographer.
    One day, one of his friends told him that the French Academy, with its forty members, had spent forty years creating a dictionary of the French language. And Johnson, who was a staunch nationalist, answered, “Forty Frenchmen to one Englishmen: the correct proportion.” And he made the same calculation with time: if the forty French people spent forty years, this meant a total of 1,600 years; that would be equivalent to the three years one Englishman would need. But the truth is that it took him nine rather than three years to complete his work, and the whole time the booksellers were depending on him to fulfill his commitment. That’s why they gave him an additional one hundred pounds.
    This dictionary was considered good until the publication ofWebster’s. 7