Wednesday, April 8, 2020

Weekday Devotion With Pastor Chris


Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language was published in 1755.  It included roughly 40,000 entries, and three times that number of illustrative quotations, filling 2,300 double-column pages in two massive folio volumes.  A folio was twelve by eighteen inches – the kind of book of which one person commented “portable, if your horse be not too weak.”

     Previous dictionaries had essentially been word lists.  Johnson’s, however, “had a great writer’s love of the flavor of words, awareness of nuance, and consciousness of the way a language changes as a living thing.”  He strove to show the various ways a word had been used, and included examples from earlier writers that would illustrate their usage in specific contexts – a practice the Oxford English Dictionary would later emulate.

     In creating the dictionary, Johnson would buy or borrow standard works by English authors, read through them and underline the words he wanted to use.  He would then turn the books over to his six paid assistants who would take them and copy out on individual slips of paper the sentences in which the underlined word appeared.  After the slips were alphabetized they would go back to Johnson who would then choose the examples he wanted for each definition. 

In his wonderful book, The Club, (from which the earlier quotation was drawn) author Leo Damrosch offers a sense of what emerged.  Johnson took the word “bedpresser” for example, and defined it as “a heavy, lazy fellow.”  Then he offered an illustration drawn from Shakespeare: Prince Hal’s insult to Falstaff, “This sanguine coward, this bedpresser, this horse-back-breaker, this huge hill of flesh.”
 
     When is the last time you heard someone called a “bedpresser”?  Yet it is so immediately evocative that once you’ve heard the word and understood its meaning it’s difficult to forget.  And with that one illustration we catch a glimpse of Johnson’s extraordinary talent.

     Johnson knew the power of words.  They can nurture our spirit, delight the mind, inform our intellect and both comfort and encourage our hearts.  They are a primary means by which we communicate our hopes and dreams, and reveal to one another something of that self which lies beneath the surface. 

     In much the same way, God’s self comes to us in the gift of his Word – the words of Scripture and that One Word which is God’s Son.  Words matter, and no word matters more than that One which has come to us in Jesus.  In the midst of this crisis, may our words bring to those around us the light of his love, his presence and his grace.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was in the beginning with God.  All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.  What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.  The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” (Jn. 1:1-5)

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