Bless you, Dr. Johnson.

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 Johnson's definitions are so quirky that, although long since superseded, they're much treasured, and the Dictionary is still available.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."

That Towering Feeling.

Who doesn’t like the Eiffel Tower ... doesn't feel affection for that gigantic, iron-filigreed symbol of a beloved Paris? For, as the French architect Le Corbusier wrote emotionally, "The tower is an indefatigable pilgrim who has criss-crossed the world. In the cities ... in the desert ... on the estuaries ... everywhere and among the humble as among the others, the tower is in everyone's heart."

Yet Alexandre Gustave Eiffel's tower wasn't always so beloved. When he began building it for the Paris Exposition of 1889, some 300 outraged artists, writers, and intellectuals signed a petition denouncing the project. They included Charles Gounod, composer of Faust; Ernest Meissonier, the painter; Alexandre Dumas and Guy de Maupassant, the writers. The criticism of the planned tower was boundless: "useless and monstrous. "a horror ... dizzily ridiculous like a black and gigantic factory chimney ... barbarous ... odious column of bolted metal." De Maupassant was particularly incensed; he later reportedly lunched often at the tower's second-floor restaurant because that was the only place in Paris where he couldn't see the hideous iron monster. 

But verbal protests didn't dissuade the exposition committee. So Eiffel proceeded to build a structure higher than any other made by man up to that time, including the Great Pyramid of Giza. And he completed it in only 2 years, 2 months, with a small labor force. 

As photographs show, he did it masterfully. The Eiffel Tower has been associated with various feelings: despair (more than 300 people have leaped to their death from it) ... derring-do (people have bicycled up its steps and climbed its sides) ... fear (thousands of people with fear of heights have run away from it in terror) ... pride (the tower was used to pick up enemy radio signals during two world wars). 

For a while during the early thirties, the Eiffel Tower even served as an electric billboard, advertising Citroen cars. And it has been sold to naive foreigners countless times. The tower has hosted a Mass ... a beauty contest for tall girls (Miss Eiffel Tower), judged by the duke and duchess of Windsor in 1939 ... political rallies ... and all sorts of zany promotional stunts. Rumors persist that the tower will soon collapse, that the tower will be dismantled and sent to a foreign country, and that it's sinking into the River Seine's marshy riverbank.

Behind all the feelings about the tower lie some fascinating details about its construction.

• Wrought iron was used because steel was too light, flexible, and costly.

• Construction required 30 draftsmen, who worked 18 months, generating 5,320 mechanical drawings that took 14,352 square feet of paper.

• The tower was designed to hold up to 10,416 people.

• Its strength comes from its voids; Eiffel realized that victory over wind could not be achieved by accumulation of strong resisting surfaces, but by reducing the supporting elements of an openwork structure until the wind had virtually nothing to seize.

• Structural work was completed in only 2 years, 2 months, compared to 36 years required for the Washington Monument.

• Only one life was lost during building, compared with 20 lives lost during building of the Brooklyn Bridge and 84 lives during building of the Quebec Bridge.

• The tower housed the world's first elevator in any skyscraper-type building.

 

A miracle at the time, the Eiffel Tower was to remain the world's tallest building for 41 years, when the Chrysler Building in New York City outreached it. Even today, the tower evokes awe and nostalgia in most people. Guarding the Seine and rising above sprawling Paris, it looks old-fashioned and somewhat awkward. But it makes us feel reassured and proud to think that humans over a century ago could have created such an impressive, durable, intriguing monument to human ingenuity.

Alexandre Gustave Eiffel startled the world with his tower, but he had created other miraculous structures during his 30 years' experience before: 

a 525 foot bridge at Oporto, Portugal, 

and a 540-foot-span Garabit viaduct over the Truyere in southern France, for many years the world's highest bridge. 

Contemporaries said he looked serene, completely self-assured; dull company, perhaps, but an engineering genius.