Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

The step from compiling such socially useful works for the improvement of the undereducated classes to making dictionaries of all words may seem natural. It could be accounted for by the spread of literacy, the growth of the book trade, an obsession with the making of more and more specialized glossaries, and the wish to bring all this language lore together in one place. But that would be a retrospective illusion. Intellectually, there is a huge gulf between works, however extensive, that lay down the meanings of “hard” or technical or foreign terms to help less well-educated folk, and an attempt to list all the words that are spoken by the speakers of a given language. To make that leap you have to think of the language you speak as a finite entity. “The English language” has to be conceptualized not as a social practice but as a thing in itself. That is why the history of the English dictionary is the history of the invention of a “language” in the sense that we now understand that word.

Dictionaries alone aren’t responsible for the thingification of natural languages, but they crystallized a peculiar modern view of what it means to have a language. The spread of the printed book is also a major factor in the converging circumstances and technologies that gave us the ideas that have dominated modern language study ever since, and profoundly affected our understanding of what translators do.

GPDs, from Samuel Johnson’s to Webster’s and from Brockhaus to Robert, list the words that are part of the language. In so doing they also tell us that the language we speak is a list of words. From its origin in the Hebrew Bible, the nomenclaturist understanding of what a language is was given a huge, definitive boost by the emergence of the modern typographical mind.

Which words are entitled to be listed in a dictionary that gives not a field-restricted set of words but the words of a whole language? Well, the words that people use. All of them? To the extent that is even possible, GPDs forfeit their historical claim to be instruments of improvement. That’s the arm wrestling. Laying down what words mean and how they should best be used, as was Cawdrey’s laudable plan, runs directly counter to the wider project of listing all the words people actually use with the varied meanings they may give to them. That’s why monolingual reference dictionaries have grown so impractically large. The solution to that problem is vividly illustrated by the career of one of Georges Perec’s fictional characters:

Cinoc … pursued a curious profession. As he said himself, he was a “word-killer”: he worked at keeping Larousse dictionaries up to date. But while other compilers sought out new words and meanings, his job was to make room for them by eliminating all the words and meanings that had fallen into disuse.

When he retired … he had disposed of hundreds and thousands of tools, techniques, customs, beliefs, sayings, dishes, games, nicknames, weights and measures … He had returned to taxonomic anonymity hundreds of varieties of cattle, species of birds, insects and snakes, rather special sorts of fish, kinds of crustaceans, slightly dissimilar plants and particular breeds of vegetables and fruit; and cohorts of geographers, missionaries, entomologists, Church Fathers, men of letters, generals, Gods & Demons had been swept by his hand into eternal obscurity.[50]