and some upon the rocks of Norway.”52 Put simply, much of what now constitutes that language which is distinctively “our own” has come into English from the outside.53 Even as he promises to “preserve” its “purity,”54 then, Johnson is forced to reveal that English, as it was given to him, was an impure language to begin with.
Johnson’s somewhat sidelong acknowledgement of this issue touches on a widely held common sense about the nature of modern English. English has borrowed from (“received additions from”) other languages, he has mentioned in passing, “either for the supply of its necessities, or the increase of its copiousness.” The understanding of the language implicit here was at least a few centuries old by the time Johnson wrote. Its origins lie in the fourteenth century, when English emerged as a literary language on the order of already established and more prestigious languages such as French and Latin.55 Middle English, largely derived from the Saxon branch of the Teutonic language, already understood itself as in some ways deficient in relation to the “Romance” (that is, Roman-derived) languages, not only by virtue of their cultural prestige, but also because of its own intrinsic properties. English “had yet to be standardized” as a written language and was “struggling for cultural recognition”56 alongside Latin and the European vernaculars. Most significantly, Middle English writing was marked by a “sense of insufficiency about the language’s Germanic core,” which made it less copious and, it was feared, less expressive than its more established neighbors in the Romance family.57 (Johnson is still referring, in 1747, to “more polished languages” such as French.)58 And so, starting in the latter half of the fourteenth century, the English lexicon expanded itself via incorporations from French and Latin.59 The prevailing understanding, in short, was that English had to take out loans from other languages in order to supply its own deficiency.
In one of the more peculiar and fascinating passages of the Plan, Johnson discusses this phenomenon of linguistic incorporation via an elaborate citizenship metaphor: words from another language are “foreigners” or “aliens”; to admit them formally into the idiom is to “naturalize them,” and even, in one fanciful phrase, to permit them “to settle themselves among the natives.”60 Obviously Johnson is playing out this scenario of linguistic immigration with tongue planted in cheek, but we begin to suspect that the wit has a serious core when, rather than dropping the joke, he extends it further: “Of such words, however, all are not equally to be considered as parts of our language; for some of them are naturalized and incorporated; but others still continue aliens, and are rather auxiliaries than subjects.”61 On the basis of this finer distinction between different types of linguistic “foreigners,” he develops, so to speak, an immigration policy: “Of those which still continue in the state of aliens, and have made no approaches towards assimilation, some seem necessary to be retained, because the purchasers of the Dictionary will expect to find them. Such are many words in the common law, as capias, habeas corpus, præmunire, nisi prius: such are some terms of controversial divinity, as hypostasis; and of physick, as the names of diseases.”62 Most significant here is something hiding in plain sight: the graphical code by which Johnson distinguishes “naturalized” foreigners from unassimilated “aliens.” He is already using that scheme in the passage just quoted, and explains its logic on the following page: “There ought … to be some distinction made between the different classes of words; and, therefore, it will be proper to print those which are incorporated into the language in the usual character, and those which are still to be considered as foreign, in the Italick letter.”63 In this way, the lexicographer makes his concessions to usage and practicality while still guarding the language against chaos and the collapse of the outside upon the inside.
I have already touched on many of the areas in Johnson’s thinking in which Webster found—or made—openings for his own lexicographical departures, but I have yet fully to explain the most significant: the position Johnson took in what he calls “the great orthographical contest … between etymology and pronunciation.”64 Johnson’s policy follows in part from the problem of linguistic incorporation I have just been discussing. First, he acknowledges that English is plagued by inconsistency between spelling and pronunciation, in part because of the diversity of its origins. As “alien” words entered into English, part of their “naturalization” entailed their adjustment to English construction (for example, “the change of a foreign to an English termination, and a conformity to the laws of the speech into which they are adopted”);65 but inevitably the fit will be imperfect. And by virtue of the promiscuity of its incorporations, this is a systemic rather than an occasional problem for English. Its polyglossia results in a sort of patchwork at the surface of the language. By contrast, it stands to reason that the more self-contained a language is, and the less polyglot in its origins, the more it will naturally tend towards regularity and consistency in its structure. For example, the “accuracy of the French, in stating the sounds of their letters, is well known.”66
The lexicographer of modern English thus faces a peculiarly difficult task. English is crisscrossed by “numberless irregularities, which in this Dictionary will be diligently noted.”67 In every corner of the language—and not just at the highly visible level of spelling, but also in its deeper rules of construction—Johnson keeps finding the same thing, namely, a “regular form”68 with almost as many departures from the rule as standard applications of it. Though they are “familiar to those who have always used them,” these “very frequent” exceptions do, of course, “interrupt and embarrass the learners of our language.”69 Johnson runs through an illustrative handful, including some of the same inconsistencies that English speakers today are apt to mock in their own language—“fox makes in the plural foxes, but ox makes oxen” while “sheep is the same in both numbers,” and so on in the formation of plurals, the construction of comparative and superlative adjectives, and the conjugations of verbs.70 Obviously, when every rule comes surrounded by such a large nimbus of exceptions, “rule” itself no longer enjoys its customary privilege. And since proper English “cannot be reduced to rules,” learners of the language will find that its usage “must be learned from the dictionary rather than the grammar.”71 This is more than just a deft act of self-advertisement. It is a way of staking a position in a debate about linguistic standards, and already an implicit declaration about where, if not in “rules,” those standards might reside.
“When I took the first survey of my undertaking,” Johnson wrote in one of the most famous passages in his preface to the dictionary, “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; adulterations were to be detected, without a settled test of purity; and modes of expression to be rejected or received, without the suffrages of any writers of classical reputation or acknowledged authority.”72 This description of the problem already contains, in its closing phrases, the terms of its own resolution: inconsistencies will be managed, and fixity restored, by referring the vagaries of usage to “writers of classical reputation or acknowledged authority.” This embrace of authoritative usage may sound like mere lexicographical fiat, but it also follows from Johnson’s acknowledgment that English, by virtue of its polyglot origins, “is too inconstant to be reduced to rules.”73 People learning the language cannot hope spontaneously to generate proper usage from universal laws of derivation (“from the grammar”) as they would be able to do if learning a more regular language; here, the “grammarians can give little assistance.”74 Thus, English “is not to be taught by general rules, but by special precedents; it is not in our power to have recourse to any established laws of speech; but we must remark how the writers of former ages have used the same word.”75 Nor will any “former” writers do; Johnson’s exemplary “precedents” must be drawn from what he calls “the best writers,”76 and his readers must be absolutely convinced that he knows the difference: “In citing authorities, on which the credit of every part of this work must depend, it will be proper to observe some obvious rules; such
