You Could Look It Up (25 page)

Their founding document declared that “The first mission of the Academy shall be to work, with all possible care and diligence, to give certain rules to our language and to make it pure, eloquent, and more suitable for treating arts and sciences,” and a dictionary was the way to accomplish that purpose. The members read their way through the best authors to produce both a chronicle and an idealized image of the French language. Once a week, a member presented a discourse on a subject the Académie chose, and together they worked to refine the French language of its impurities.

The first general editor was Claude Favre de Vaugelas, one of the original Academicians. Vaugelas had his virtues, but productivity was not among them. His obsession with correctness slowed progress on the dictionary to a crawl. He spent fifteen years working on
A
through
I
, but then died poor, his estate unable to cover his debts. Creditors seized his
papers, including the incomplete materials for the dictionary, forcing the other members to negotiate for their return. The dictionary took forty years to complete.

The Academy made a few eccentric decisions. They resolved to exclude all technical and scientific terms from the main dictionary, sponsoring a separate
Dictionnaire des arts et des sciences
, edited by Thomas Corneille, brother of the playwright. They also took a different approach to alphabetical order from that of most other lexicographers. They alphabetized not by word but by root—that is, all derived forms that share an etymological origin were put under the root word, so
invalider
‘to void, to invalidate’ appeared not in the
I
’s, but under
V
for the root
valoir
‘to be worth,’ and
canin
‘canine’ was placed under
chien
‘dog’. There is something appealingly logical about having all related words in a cluster, and the standard Latin and Greek dictionaries by Robert and Henri Estienne were organized this way. But it posed real problems for casual users who are not already masters of etymology. As one critic writes, “It was easy … to find
devoir
[
must
,
ought
] in its alphabetical place, but an initial search for such related words as
indû
[
unjustified
],
endetté
[
indebted
], and
debiteur
[
debtor
] would lead only to a cross-reference.”
6
The system, moreover, was not followed
consistently:
atourner
‘to dress’ comes from
tourner
‘to turn’, but it appeared under
A
, not
T
.
7

Another problem was a failure of execution rather than planning: the definitions were notoriously weak. The dictionary defined
homme
‘man’ simply as “animal raisonnable”;
femme
‘woman’ is “la femelle de l’homme.”
Amour
‘love’ is “sentimens de celuy qui aime” (feeling of one who loves).
8
Moreover, they did not draw their examples from actual literature, as the Accademia della Crusca had done, but invented them for the purpose:

TASTE. n. m. One of the five natural senses by which we make out flavors. Having the right taste, a delicate taste, exquisite taste, depraved taste, tired taste. it pleases the taste, tickles the taste, flatters the taste. each has his own taste, different tastes, not all tastes agree, there’s no arguing over taste.

It also means, Flavor. Meat that tastes good, tastes bad. this has an excellent taste, a fine taste, a delicate taste, an exquisite taste, a noted taste. this bread has a taste of hazelnut, this wine has a taste of earth, this gives good taste to sauces.

One says, that
A sauce is of high taste
, to say, It is salty, spicy, or vinegary.

It is also used for, Appetite. The patient begins to have a taste for wine. he begins to get his taste back. he finds nothing to his taste.

They say prov. of Something too expensive,
The cost makes you lose your appetite.

This policy, decided on as early as 1638, was meant to guarantee that there would be no errors or lapses, but it had the strange side effect of suggesting that the work of even the greatest writers did not meet the Académie’s standard of “correct” French.

The appearance of the
Dictionnaire de l’Académie françoise
in 1694 was something of a damp squib. The volumes were beautifully printed and headed by a grand frontispiece, prompting one commentator to call the book “sumptuous, unforgettable, worthy of a zenith of France.”
9
But Vaugelas’s pace was so sluggish that two rival dictionaries had come out
before it,
10
and the Académie was embarrassed by the omission of so many words that had appeared in the works of their rivals. Louis XIV himself praised the competition, not the official dictionary. Within just six months of publication, therefore, the academicians decided that, instead of turning their attention to a French grammar, they would produce a revised edition to make up for the shortcomings of the first.

With this second edition, the
Dictionnaire
began to overcome its inauspicious beginnings. The new edition brought with it some changes in policy, most notably that it followed straightforward alphabetical order, making the work accessible to a broader audience. From that time to this, the Académie’s dictionaries have gone from strength to strength. A
Nouveau dictionnaire de l’Académie françoise
appeared in 1718, a third edition in 1740, and a fourth in 1762. The international prestige of French culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries turned the
Dictionnaire
into a model for dictionaries around the world, and the Académie’s work was established by law as the official standard of the French language—a status never accorded to any dictionary in the English-speaking world. The eighth edition (1932–35) is the most recent complete
Dictionnaire
, and the Académie has been working since 1986 on a ninth edition.

How different were events two hundred miles away from the Académie’s Paris headquarters. The
Dictionnaire de l’Académie françoise
, prepared by an academy with official government sanction, was all about authority and propriety. But there was no Académie Anglaise, no Académie Britannique. Britain lagged behind the other European nations in establishing official regulatory bodies to assume control over the language.

Mythology has treated Samuel Johnson’s
Dictionary of the English Language
, published in 1755, as “the first English dictionary”—but the mythology is as wrong as can be. There had been English dictionaries generations before Johnson’s. The
Promptorium parvulorum, sive clericorum
(
Storehouse for Children or Clerics
), probably by Galfridus Grammaticus (Geoffrey the Grammarian), was written around 1440 and published in 1499; it was the first extended attempt to give Latin equivalents for an English vocabulary of about twelve thousand entries. English–Latin
dictionaries on the same plan continued to appear, including the anonymous
Catholicon Anglicum
in 1483, Richard Huloet’s
Abcedarium Anglo-Latinum
in 1552, John Withals’s
Shorte Dictionarie
in 1553, John Baret’s
Alvearie
in 1573, and John Rider’s
Bibliotheca Scholastica
in 1589. There were also dictionaries going the other way. Sir Thomas Elyot wrote the first English book with “dictionary” in its title,
The Dictionary of Syr Thomas Eliot Knyght
, a Latin–English dictionary, in 1538, and Thomas Cooper’s
Thesaurus linguae Romanae et Britannicae
followed in 1565.
11

These early dictionaries were bilingual; the first English–English dictionary, Robert Cawdrey’s
Table Alphabeticall
, appeared in 1604. On its own merits it was mediocre at best. The definitions were skimpy, and it covered just twenty-five hundred “difficult” words:

modell,
measure
,

moderate,
temperate, or keeping a meane
,

moderation,
keeping due order and proportion
:

§ moderne,
of our time

modest,
sober, demure

§ moitie,
halfe
.

molestation,
troubling
.

Once Cawdrey broke the ice, though, English dictionaries began to appear regularly, and they grew over time. Henry Cockeram’s
English Dictionary; or, An Interpreter of Hard English Words
, appeared in London in 1623. He had two separate alphabetical sequences. The first part contains “the choisest words themselues now in vse, wherewith our language is inriched and become so copious.” Next to each of these hard words “the common sense is annexed”—a translation into plain English. Cockeram informed the curious that
soporate
, for example, means “To bring asleepe.” The second half went in the opposite direction, translating “common sense” into “choicest words.” Someone who needed to speak about
dung
but blushed at using such a low word could turn to Cockeram and try out
ordure
; someone who feared
drawing near
was too common might find
appropinquation
the better choice.
Mighty
was good, but
armipotent
was better. And
rip
,
rowe
, and
rub out
were upgraded by Cockeram to
dilorigate
,
remigate
, and
deterge
.

These English dictionaries, though, lacked the authority of a national academy. English writers therefore started calling for an English academy.
12
A member of London’s Royal Society, John Evelyn, encouraged that group to get to work on “a Lexicon or collection of all the pure English words.” Jonathan Swift made waves with
A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue
, and Daniel Defoe called for an academy in his
Essay upon Projects
(1697). Between 1660 and 1730, in fact, England was riddled with proposals for an academy—but one after another they fizzled. And perhaps for this reason the great heap of dictionaries that had appeared between 1604 and 1749—twenty of them—did not seem authoritative to many people. John Dryden, writing in 1693, was direct: “we have yet no
English Prosodia
, not so much as a tolerable Dictionary.” David Hume agreed in 1741: “The Elegance and Propriety of Stile have been very much neglected among us. We have no Dictionary of our Language, and
scarce a tolerable Grammar.” And in 1747, William Warburton noted that “the
English
tongue, at this Juncture, deserves and demands our particular regard.” He lamented that “we have neither
GRAMMAR
nor
DICTIONARY
, neither Chart nor Compass, to guide us through this wide sea of Words.”
13
Despite a considerable library of English dictionaries, the world still seemed convinced that none merited the name.