"Lexicographer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... religion and morality, Miss Sedley will be found worthy of an establishment which has been honoured by the presence of THE GREAT LEXICOGRAPHER, and the patronage of the admirable Mrs. Chapone. In leaving the Mall, Miss Amelia carries with her the hearts of her companions, and the affectionate regards of her mistress, who has the honour to ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... to that condiment, and who has varnished boots, wears white gloves on Sundays, and looks out for Miss Pinkerton's school (transferred from Chiswick to Rodwell Regis, and conducted by the nieces of the late Miss Barbara Pinkerton, the friend of our great lexicographer, upon the principles approved by him, and practised by that admirable woman,) as it ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray
... circumstance that Fontana, a friend of Chopin's in his youth and manhood, Karasowski, at least an acquaintance, if not an intimate friend, of the family (from whom he derived much information), Fetis, a contemporary lexicographer, and apparently Chopin's family, and even Chopin himself, did not know the date ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... Johnson has exceeded the bounds of legitimate lexicography by the admission of vulgar and cant words. "It may be alleged that it is the duty of a lexicographer to insert and define all words found in English books: then such words as fishify, jackalent, parma-city, jiggumbob, conjobble, foutra, etc., are legitimate English words! Alas, had a native of the United States introduced such vulgar words and ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... widely propagated, had its beginning from truth and nature, or from accident and prejudice; whether it be decreed by the authority of reason or the tyranny of ignorance, that, of all the candidates for literary praise, the unhappy lexicographer holds the lowest place, neither vanity nor interest incited me to inquire. It appeared that the province allotted me was, of all the regions of learning, generally confessed to be the least delightful, that it was believed to produce neither fruits nor flowers; and that, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... papers ... now published by Dr. Hill, under the title of 'Dr. Johnson: his Friends and his Critics,' will be, to admirers of the great eighteenth century lexicographer, like the discovery of some new treasure.... It is not too much to say that it is a volume which will henceforth be indispensable to all who would form a full conception of Johnson's many-sided personality."—THE GRAPHIC, August ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell
... word more may be allowed in regard to the paper on Pestilential Disorders by Noah Webster. This was the lexicographer. Priestley thought the work curious and important, but the philosophy in it wild and absurd in the extreme. And ...
— Priestley in America - 1794-1804 • Edgar F. Smith
... more than "hands off." A live lexicographer, given to the Anglo-Saxon tongue, might add to the above definition the "laying on of hands," as well. Whatever his nom de plume means, an acquaintance with the author justifies one [15] in the conclusion that he is ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... it has been tacitly assumed, if not boldly claimed, that sentiment, passion, temperament, atoned for—even if they did not entirely replace—voice and lack of skill in the artist. But what constitutes an artist? Art has been defined by an English lexicographer as "Doing something, the power for which is acquired by experience, study or observation;" and an artist, as "One skilled in the practice of any art." The French writer d'Alembert says, "L'art s'acquiert par l'etude et l'exercice" ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... dramatist, essayist, lexicographer, dogmatist, and critic, and, in this array of professional characters, played so distinguished a part in his day that he was long regarded as a prodigy in English literature. His influence has waned since his personality has grown dim, and his ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... said, "you will remember that the time was when your natural philosophers were persecuted as wizards by Church and State. Even the mathematician is defined by an old lexicographer to be 'Magus daemonum invocator'; and I cannot forget that all that is of honor and respect to-day is but the actual ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... James Huneker, the eminent Lexicographer, as a compliment to that great and hirsutiferous playwright, has re-christened Norway "The Land ...
— This Giddy Globe • Oliver Herford
... (d. 1742), English philologist and lexicographer. He compiled a Dictionarium Britannicum: a more compleat universal etymological English dictionary than any extant, bearing the date 1730, but supposed to have been published in 1721. This was a great improvement on ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... astronomical, magical and mixed." But in what sense the "astronomical" differed from the "magical" we are not informed, nor is any light thrown upon the peculiar nature of that class designated as "mixed." In fact, the lexicographer so mixes up his definitions that, we are unable to distinguish anything in particular, ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... went to test her power was a poor Lichfield bookseller. He carried to her his little half-blind, sickly boy, who, by virtue either of her Majesty's beneficent fingers or from some other and better reason, grew up to be known as the famous author and lexicographer, ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... suppose, made no great impression on our Lexicographer; for we find that he did not alter the passage ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... frankness one may quote a short passage from Boswell's "Johnson." "To discover such weakness," said Mrs. Thrale to Doctor Johnson, speaking of the autobiography of Sir Robert Sibbald, "exposes a man when he is gone." "Nay," said the pious and great lexicographer, "it is an honest picture ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... language," he had a few suggestions to offer. The Columbian language he understood to be an elegant dialect of the English, but, he went on, "there is one remark which I would wish with deference to submit to our great lexicographer before I finish this paper. As his dictionary, I understand, is to be the dictionary of the vulgar tongue in New England, would it not be better to prefix to it the epithet Cabotian instead of Columbian? Sebastian Cabot first discovered these Eastern States, and ought ...
— The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850 • Albert Smyth
... word; he classifies it as belonging to a language known by the term "slang," of which he declares his utter disuse. And he thinks that when used at all, the word is but an ellipsis for "odd chances." This was not the opinion of the great English lexicographer, who ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 39. Saturday, July 27, 1850 • Various
... longer used by the timid. Said chiefly of words. A word which some lexicographer has marked obsolete is ever thereafter an object of dread and loathing to the fool writer, but if it is a good word and has no exact modern equivalent equally good, it is good enough for the good writer. Indeed, a writer's attitude toward "obsolete" words is as true ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... the Johnsonian period has assumed, in spite of the lexicographer's own dislike of that adjective, prodigious dimensions. After the critical labours of Malone, Murphy, Croker, J. B. Nichols, Macaulay, Carlyle, Rogers, Fitzgerald, Dr Hill and others, it may appear ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... as you lack somewhat of that snuffle of "true piety" so often engaging the Johnsonian nose, you make up the defect with possession of a wider philosophy, a better humour and a brighter, quicker wit than visited or dwelt beneath the candle-scorched wig of our old bully lexicographer. ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... blessings. It seems to me that were I a ghost I would float about on cloud banks and bathe in the splendors of the morning, instead of hiding in bat-caves all day and snooping about all night seeking an unsalaried situation at some dark-lantern seance. When America's greatest lexicographer writes me an ungrammatical message on a double-barreled slate, signs it "noeh webstur," and instructs his terrestial to deliver it to me on payment of one cart-wheel dollar, I suspect that there's something sphacelated in the psychological Denmark. Of course they may have the phonetic ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... consideration in the matter of reading than either how or when. As a question, it would be differently answered in different ages of the world. We know that Dr. Johnson once took a little girl on his knee and put her directly down again because she had not read "Pilgrim's Progress." The great lexicographer might take up and put down a good many children nowadays before he found the right one; and we need not think the worse of them on that account. We feel that even a child who had the advantage of Dr. Johnson's acquaintance ought not to be required to comprehend the Immortal Allegory. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... of dongles) included a claim that the word derived from "Don Gall", allegedly the inventor of the device. The company's receptionist will cheerfully tell you that the story is a myth invented for the ad copy. Nevertheless, I expect it to haunt my life as a lexicographer for at least ...
— THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.9.10
... The great merit of Dr. Richardson's Dictionary being the number of illustrative passages he has brought together, it is hardly fair in Mr. Swinton so often to make a show of learning with what he has got at second hand from the lexicographer. Dr. Trench could also make large reclamations, and several others. There is beside an unpleasant assumption of superiority in the book. An author who says that paganus means village, who makes ocula ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... not a little proud of his acquirements. He was excessively good-humoured, and a general favourite of the officers and ship's company, who used to amuse themselves with his peculiarities, and allow him a greater freedom than usual. But Billy's grand forte, in his own opinion, was a lexicographer. He had a small Entick's dictionary, which he always carried in his jacket-pocket, and nothing gave him so much pleasure as any one referring to him for the meaning of a hard word, which, although he could not always explain correctly, ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... that they were subterfuge, disguise, delusion, romance, evasion, pretence, fable, deception, misrepresentation; but, as I am ignorant of anything to be gained by the hiding of a God-defying outrage under a lexicographer's blanket, I shall chiefly call them what my father taught me to ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... Not conforming to standard. In matters of thought and conduct, to be independent is to be abnormal, to be abnormal is to be detested. Wherefore the lexicographer adviseth a striving toward the straiter [sic] resemblance of the Average Man than he hath to himself. Whoso attaineth thereto shall have peace, the prospect of death and ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... life, each occupation, is burdened with its own special brand of this unhappy heritage. To remove one small section of inborn ignorance is a life-work for any man. 'Ignorance, madam, pure ignorance,' was what betrayed the great lexicographer into defining 'pastern' as 'a horse's knee.' And the Doctor was right (in his admission, of course, not in his definition). Ignorance, reader, pure ignorance is what debars you from conversing fluently and intelligibly in several dialects of the ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... discovery that it is a hair-spring, and the old Anglo-Norman soul's-timekeeper will run down, as so many other dialects have done before it. I can't stand this meddling any better than you, Sir. But we have a great deal to be proud of in the lifelong labors of that old lexicographer, and we mustn't be ungrateful. Besides, don't let us deceive ourselves, the war of the dictionaries is only a disguised rivalry of cities, colleges, and especially of publishers. After all, the language will shape itself by larger forces than phonography and dictionary-making. You may spade ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... positive science! long live exact demonstration! Fetch stonecrop mixt with cedar and branches of lilac, This is the lexicographer, this the chemist, this made a grammar of the old cartouches, These mariners put the ship through dangerous unknown seas. This is the geologist, this works with the scalper, and ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... Pharmakeia. Biblical critics are inclined, however, to accept in its strict sense the translation of the Jacobian divines. 'Since in the LXX.,' says Parkhurst, the lexicographer of the N.T., 'this noun [pharmakeia] and its relatives always answer to some Hebrew word that denotes some kind of their magical or conjuring tricks; and since it is too notorious to be insisted upon, that such infernal practices have always prevailed, and do still ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... him, and he turned away. So the late Isaac Disraeli, when a youth, called at Bolt Court for the same purpose; and though he HAD the courage to knock, to his dismay he was informed by the servant that the great lexicographer had breathed his last only a ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... wrote a very friendly letter to Bayle himself, offering further explanations of disputed points. He concluded it with a paragraph of some personal interest, comparing himself the historian-philosopher with Bayle the philosophic lexicographer, and revealing by the way his attitude to philosophy, science ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... dictionaries shall be thus given, "the opposite of free." Now, readers, what is the opposite of free? Is it a state somewhere between freedom and slavery? If freedom, as a condition, has an opposite, that opposite state is indicated by this very word "doulos." So says every Greek lexicographer. I ask, if this is not wonderful, that the Holy Ghost has used a term, so incapable of deceiving, and yet that that term should be brought forward for the purpose of deception. Another remarkable fact is this: the English word servant, originally meant precisely the same thing ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... decorum.'" We know that Shakspeare must, of his own personal knowledge of the man, have been qualified to paint his character; for while the great dramatist was the early and intimate friend of the Earl of Southampton, the petulant lexicographer boasts of having for years been domesticated in the pay and patronage of that munificent patron of letters. Warburton thinks "it was from the ferocity of his temper, that Shakspeare chose for him the name which Rabelais gives to his pedant of Thubal ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... up with the growth of a language. The New English Dictionary had done the letter C before the cinematograph arrived, but got it in under K. Words of this kind are manufactured in such numbers that the lexicographer is inclined to wait and see whether they will catch on. In such cases it is hard to prophesy. The population of this country may be divided into those people who have been operated for appendicitis and those who are going to be. Yet this word was ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... respectability. All poetry was written to one measure in those days, and a Royal Academy with a lady member was inaugurated that art might become at least decent. Dictionaries began. The crowning glory of Hanoverian literature was a Great Lexicographer. ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... lamented, early in the present century, the neglect into which the works of Richardson had fallen. That neglect has not since been diminished, for obvious reasons. "Surely, sir," said Erskine to Johnson, "Richardson is very tedious." "Why, sir," was the lexicographer's reply, "if you were to read Richardson for the story, your impatience would be so much fretted that you would hang yourself, but you must read him for the sentiment, and consider the story as only giving ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman |
