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On Dictionaries
ByBy Patrick
Ernest Weekley's 1924 article on the role of the lexicographer provides context for this post. An excerpt:
We now know that the duty of the lexicographer is to record and not to criticize, that refined speech and elegant speech are the delusions of a mistaken optimism, and that the only people who now speak English with any approach to historical correctness are the few surviving agricultural laborers who are old enough to have escaped the devastating effects of the Elementary Education Act. Johnson's Dictionary went far to accomplish, in the eighteenth century, what the Italian and French Academies had unsuccessfully attempted in the seventeenth. It is, of course, as hopeless for the lexicographer to try to stem the flowing tide of new words and expressions as it was for Mrs. Partington to keep out the Atlantic with a mop, but Johnson's authority was so unparalleled that Boswell's description of him as 'the man who had conferred stability on the language of his country' had, for some time at any rate, an element of truth.
