The Hindu Business Line : Hiccough is `sob with convulsion of the stomach'

These are days when think tanks are aplenty. But who is a pickthank? He is "an officious fellow, who does what he is not desired; a whispering parasite."

A recent book from Penguin takes one back by 250 years: `Johnson's Dictionary, An Anthology,' by David Crystal.

`A singularly energetick potpourri of some 4,000 of the most entertaining and historically stimulating English words and definitions from abactor to zootomy extracted from the world's foremost feat of lexicography,' announces the cover.

Let's begin with `excise', one of the two words that caused Johnson owing to the `personal definitions'.

For, excise was, to him, "a hateful tax levied upon commodities, and adjudged not by the common judges of property, but wretches hired by those to whom excise is paid."

The other word was `pension', explained thus: "Pay given to a state hireling for treason to his country".

This definition caused `vindictive merriment', when Johnson accepted a pension of £300 from the king in 1762, as one learns from a footnote in the book.

`The Plan' for the dictionary, according to Johnson, was to trace `every word to its original'.

By `not admitting any of which no original can be found,' he declared, "We shall secure our language from being over-run with cant, from being crowded with low terms, the spawn of folly or affectation, which arise from no just principles of speech, and of which therefore no legitimate derivation can be shown."

The original `preface' spoke about how `writer of dictionaries' is an unhappy mortal. "Every other author may aspire to praise; the lexicographer can only hope to escape reproach."

Johnson describes what he found on the first survey of his `undertaking', thus: "I found our speech copious without order, and energetick without rules: wherever I turned my view, there was perplexity to be disentangled, and confusion to be regulated; choice was to be made out of boundless variety, without any established principle of selection; adulteration were to be detected, without a settled test of purity... "

Delve into the anthology of the tome that made its appearance in 1755, and you'd find `crowd' defined as `a multitude confusedly pressed together'; and `futile' explained as `talkative'.

To hiccough is `to sob with convulsion of the stomach', and `matrix' meant `womb, a place where any thing is generated or formed'.

Johnson traces `pioneer' to French pedito, a foot soldier; a pioneer is "one whose business is to level the road, throw up works, or sink mines in military operations."

These are days when think tanks are aplenty. But who is a pickthank? He is "an officious fellow, who does what he is not desired; a whispering parasite."

A quote of L'Estrange goes with the entry: "The business of pickthank is the basest of offices."

Speculator, in the old dictionary, was `one who forms theories, an observer, a contemplator, a spy, a watcher.' You can't fault straightforward definitions such as: Toe, as `the divided extremities of the feet'; tongue, `the instrument of speech in human beings'; to write, as `to express by means of letters'; and yes, as `a term of affirmation'.

However, `X' has but one entry, explained this way: "A letter, which, though found in Saxon word, begins no word in the English language." Johnson was wrong on this, explains Crystal in his intro.

"In fact, there are over thirty words recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary as having occurred in English before Johnson's time."

Entertaining collection.

SayCheek@TheHindu.co.in