Jog'ger: One who
moves heavily and dully. -Dr. Johnson's English Dictionary
Samuel
Johnson was one of the great prose stylists of the English language. The last
spoken words of the seventy-five-year-old author and lexicographer, addressed
to a young girl who came to visit him during his final moments, were "God
bless you, my dear."
His
magisterial English Dictionary appeared in 1755, and for almost a century
afterwards, young people who wanted to look up a word would turn to Johnson and
they still can. Johnson's definitions are so quirky that, although long since
superseded, they're much treasured, and the Dictionary is still available.
While
many ironists today would not argue with his definition of a jogger, anybody
found running in Johnson's day would have been thought mad or bad or both. The
meaning Johnson intended was that of the line, by the English poet John Dryden,
"They, with their fellow joggers of the plough."
There
is another Johnsonian definition that is perhaps as resonant now as it was in 1755,
or indeed at the time of the Boston Tea Party-that of excise, which Johnson
took from the Puritan poet Andrew Marvell: "Excise,/With hundred rows of
teeth, the shark exceeds." Johnson's definition? "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."
Were
it not for the fact that there are so many unemployed these days, wage slaves
everywhere might go along with Johnson's job: 1) "A low, mean lucrative
busy affair"; 2) "Petty, piddling work, a piece of chance work."
He defined his own job sardonically as that of "Lexicographer: A writer of
dictionaries; a harmless drudge," although later in life he said of the
Dictionary that "I knew very well what I was undertaking, and very well
how to do it, and have done it very well."
In
the course of over two-hundred years it would be surprising, of course, if some
words had not been lost. Grum ("surly") has gone the way of gry
("anything of little value") and gulch, which today suggests Western
movies but in Johnson's time meant "a little glutton."
Johnson
himself had to stomach a lot of belly laughs from the critics of his contribution
to English when George III came to the throne and in 1762 offered him a
princely pension of £300 a year. In the Dictionary (and in his most
idiosyncratic form), Johnson had defined pension thus:
"In
England, it is generally understood to mean pay given to a State hireling for
treason to his country." But Johnson the lexicographer was also a royalist
and a realist: he pocketed the doubloons and, for once dropping his
professional disdain of foreign words, announced himself “pénètre with His
Majesty's goodness."
