The Unfixed Language

This thread follows the book’s contrast between attempts to regulate English and a dictionary that ultimately records usage, change, and disagreement instead of fixing the language.

increasingBearing stren­gth in each eventdecreasing

The Search for Hard Words

Early English Dictionaries A Partial Beginning Robert Cawdrey’s A Table Alphabeticall offered an early monolingual English dictionary, but it focused on difficult and unfamiliar words rather than the whole vocabulary. Its stated purpose was to help readers understand challenging language encountered in books and sermons, not to map ordinary speech in all its forms. The book belonged to a tradition that often treated the dictionary as a guide to elevated vocabulary. Many early word-books collected impressive or obscure terms, while common words and everyday meanings received less attention. The resulting record of English was necessarily selective. A Growing Expectation As later dictionaries expanded, readers increasingly wanted a fuller account of the language. The question was no longer merely how to explain difficult words, but how to represent the entire word-stock, including humble, common, regional, and disappearing forms. That demand contained a tension that the book repeatedly explores. Dictionaries could be used to teach and dignify a language, yet any selection of what counted as proper English risked excluding the very variety a comprehensive record was meant to preserve.

Johnson’s Ambition and Limits

The Great Cham’s Dictionary A Project of Definition Samuel Johnson undertook his Dictionary amid calls from prominent writers to establish and protect English. Some advocates hoped that a national authority could stabilize spelling, pronunciation, and vocabulary, preventing the language from changing or deteriorating. Johnson produced a work of extraordinary reach, drawing examples from literature and distinguishing numerous senses of common words. His entries could be witty and personal as well as scholarly, and his use of quotations gave readers a richer view of how words worked in context. The Limits of Fixing Yet the book explains that Johnson came to recognize the difficulty, and perhaps the undesirability, of permanently fixing a language shaped by custom. A word’s status could change with time, and what one period regarded as elegant another might regard as obsolete or uncouth. Johnson’s Dictionary thus occupies a transitional position. It answered the demand for a commanding account of English, but the language’s continuing mutability challenged the idea that any dictionary could finally prescribe its limits.

The Historian Against the Critic

Recording Rather Than Ruling Trench’s Challenge Richard Chenevix Trench challenged the assumption that dictionary-makers should judge words as good or bad. He argued that a lexicographer’s proper role was historical: to record words that had achieved a recognized life in the language, not to decree which expressions speakers ought to use. That principle resisted the model of a small, authoritative body imposing uniform rules. Trench’s proposed dictionary would document the history of each word, including obsolete forms and meanings that might look mistaken or unfashionable to later readers. Change as Evidence The historical approach did not make the dictionary neutral in every possible sense; editors still had to choose evidence, organize senses, and define what counted as a meaningful use. But it changed the purpose of those choices. They were meant to explain the record rather than discipline it. The book presents this shift as a central intellectual change in English lexicography. A dictionary could become an account of linguistic change rather than a monument to a supposedly permanent standard.

Protagonists in the Plural

Usage Challenges Authority A Grammar Dispute The Dictionary’s entry for protagonist used literary examples that supported a plural form. Henry Fowler’s Modern English Usage, by contrast, insisted that the word should be singular, reasoning that a drama could have only one chief personage if the term were interpreted strictly. The disagreement exposed the difference between a tidy rule and the evidence of actual usage. Writers had used the plural, and the Dictionary’s quotation-based approach made that usage visible even when a prominent commentator objected to it. Evidence Over Prohibition A later supplement added further examples, including a sentence by Shaw, and clarified that the word could be used in the plural in ordinary English. The Dictionary did not resolve the question by appealing to a committee’s authority; it presented evidence and explained how a word’s meaning could extend beyond its original theatrical setting. The episode illustrates the book’s larger claim about language. A dictionary may influence usage, but it cannot make a living word obey a rule that speakers and writers have repeatedly ignored.

A Changing Standard

Authority Without Stasis Later Editions The second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary integrated the original volumes with later supplements, and subsequent digital forms made the expanding reference work easier to consult. These developments extended the historical record rather than restoring the idea that English could be permanently settled. The book notes criticism of the Dictionary’s Victorian assumptions, including its social and cultural biases. Such criticism did not erase its importance, but it showed that even a vast record of language could reflect the perspectives and limitations of the people who compiled it. The Record Remains Open The Dictionary’s continuing revision embodies a productive contradiction: it is treated as an authority, yet its entries can be challenged by new research and changing usage. Antedated quotations, new senses, and new words can alter the account without making the earlier work meaningless. The theme resolves not in a final rulebook but in an ongoing record. English remains larger than any single reference work, and the Dictionary’s strongest claim to authority lies in its willingness, at least in principle, to acknowledge evidence that complicates its own earlier conclusions.

1604

1746–1755

November 1857

1928, reconsidered in 1981

1989 and the online era