Samuel Johnson

When my friend first told me about Samuel Johnson's "A Dictionary of the English Language", I think what stayed iny head, is probably his most famous (seemingly anti-Scottish) definition:

Oats: A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland appears to support the people.

But there are times, where his definitions are ironic, by this i mean the play of irony is onto the author, the compiler of the dictionary, the lexicographer himself:

Dull: Not exhilaterating (sic); not delightful; as, to make dictionaries is dull work.

Lexicographer: A writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words.

His attitude towards his own work is somewhat similar to a researcher. (Do we really call ourselves researcher? Tough really, miserable students/lowly staff often identify themselves as being in research, but not being a researcher) I guess research work is interesting, sometimes engaging, but that is not to deny that it can be boring and tedious. Why stick at it? I really don't know. Maybe that's why people start to be conscious of this lingering absurdity in their research work - that all could amount to nothing.

I suppose Samuel Johnson can be considered a 17th century researcher, one of the pioneers in his field of supposedly, lexicographers. John Murray, who subsequently compiled the OED, (a remarkable feat considering the 400, 000 words in his first edition of OED, compared to Johnson's 40 000), was partly inspired by Johnson's words in his preface to the dictionary. It is quite long, but there is this part which resonates in my mind (when I have to write this bloody thesis a year ago):

When first I engaged in this work, I resolved to leave neither words nor things unexamined, and pleased myself with a prospect of the hours which I should revel away in feasts of literature [....]

I resolved to show likewise my attention to things; to pierce deep into every science, to enquire the nature of every substance of which I inserted the name, to limit every idea by a definition strictly logical, and exhibit every production of art or nature in an accurate description [....]

To deliberate whenever I doubted, to enquire whenever I was ignorant, would have protracted the undertaking without end, and, perhaps, without much improvement; for I did not find by my first experiments, that what I had not of my own was easily to be obtained: I saw that one enquiry only gave occasion to another, that book referred to book, that to search was not always to find, and to find was not always to be informed; and that thus to persue perfection, was, like the first inhabitants of Arcadia, to chace the sun, which, when they had reached the hill where he seemed to rest, was still beheld at the same distance from them.