42. Order out of chaos (part-3)

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.