Yes, Jack Lynch, professor of English at Rutgers University, is in urgent need of a decent haircut, but apart from that, I could listen to him for almost as long as it would take to "read" Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language.
Published in 1755 and two volumes and 2,300 pages thick, it marked a milestone in the English language which had more desperate needs for standards than Jack Lynch has for a haircut. Although now that I look at it again, he must have let his hair grow in honour of the good doctor.
No English dictionary before it had devoted so much space to everyday words and been so thorough in its definitions. It had 42,773 entries and 140,871 definitions. It defined the English language for the next 150 years, until the arrival of the "Oxford English Dictionary". It was used by Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, Wordsworth and Coleridge, the Brontes and the Brownings, Thomas Hardy and Oscar Wilde. And it even became the subject of this hilarious sketch by Blackadder:
My favourites?
Backfriend, noun: a friend backwards; that is, an enemy in secret.
Cynanthropy, noun: a species of madness in which men have the qualities of dogs.
Mouth-friend, noun: one who professes friendship without intending it.
Shapesmith, noun: one who undertakes to improve the form of the body, a.k.a. a personal trainer.
Urinator, noun: Johnson defined a urinator as “a diver” or "one who searches underwater". We might not agree today, but he wasn’t wrong: urinator derives from urinari, a Latin word meaning “to dive.
I have a good friend in Cooktown - or is he just a "mouth-friend"? - who is a great "urinator"; but enough of this, I'm off to see my "shapesmith".
