Samuel Johnson in 1775, by Joshua Reynolds, reading, with no little consternation, Boswell's unpublished, other biography of him.With the emergence of monsters reimagined into classic literature – Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Sense and Sensibility and Sea-Monsters, and the upcoming Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter – it’s easy to forget that during full moons, Samuel Johnson, the most distinguished man of letters in English history, grew hirsute, lustful, and howled. Samuel Johnson, Werewolf?No. As told by his amanuensis, James Boswell, it is the book he dared not publish in his lifetime from a manuscript long thought apocryphal or lost, The Other...
New Online Dictionary For Word Mavens
In the beginning there was the Word.But without a dictionary no one knew how to spell it, pronounce it, how to use it in a sentence, if there was another word that was its opposite or meant the same thing, or where the word came from. In short, the whole story of the word was unavailable to the speaker. For the writer, fugetaboutit; tough enough to carve out those cuneiforms, you had to wing it on spelling and all the rest.Thence wrote Samuel Johnson his dictionary. Then Noah Webster. The Oxford English Dictionary followed. (Yes, I know I’m leaving out...