LEXICOGRAPHER,
n. A pestilent fellow who, under the pretense of recording some
particular stage in the development of a language, does what he can to
arrest its growth, stiffen its flexibility and mechanize its methods.
For your lexicographer, having written his dictionary, comes to be
considered "as one having authority," whereas his function is only to
make a record, not to give a law. The natural servility of the human
understanding having invested him with judicial power, surrenders its
right of reason and submits itself to a chronicle as if it were a
statute. Let the dictionary (for example) mark a good word as "obsolete"
or "obsolescent" and few men thereafter venture to use it, whatever
their need of it and however desirable its restoration to favor—whereby
the process of impoverishment is accelerated and speech decays. On the
contrary, the bold and discerning writer who, recognizing the truth that
language must grow by innovation if it grow at all, makes new words and
uses the old in an unfamiliar sense, has no following and is tartly
reminded that "it isn't in the dictionary" —although down to the time of
the first lexicographer (Heaven forgive him!) no author ever had used a
word that was in the dictionary. In the golden prime and high
noon of English speech; when from the lips of the great Elizabethans
fell words that made their own meaning and carried it in their very
sound; when a Shakespeare and a Bacon were possible, and the language
now rapidly perishing at one end and slowly renewed at the other was in
vigorous growth and hardy preservation—sweeter than honey and stronger
than a lion—the lexicographer was a person unknown, the dictionary a
creation which his Creator had not created him to create.
