lexicographer

• “We now know that the duty of the lexicographer is to record and not to criticize, that refined speech and elegant speech are the delusions of a mistaken optimism, and that the only people who now speak English with any approach to historical correctness are the few surviving agricultural laborers who are old enough to have escaped the devastating effects of the Elementary Education Act. Johnson's Dictionary went far to accomplish, in the eighteenth century, what the Italian and French Academies had unsuccessfully attempted in the seventeenth.”

  On Dictionaries

• “If you know the word lexicographer, there’s a better-than-even chance you also know Samuel Johnson’s self-mocking definition of it: “a writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification ofwords.””

  The Volokh Conspiracy » 2007 » September

• “If you know the word lexicographer, there’s a better-than-even chance you also know Samuel Johnson’s self-mocking definition of it: “a writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words.””

  The Volokh Conspiracy » Guestblogging Dictionary Myths (Pt 4):

• “Jonathon Green, the leading slang lexicographer of our time.”

  languagehat.com

• “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.”

  INTERNET WIRETAP: The Devil's Dictionary, by Ambrose Bierce (1993 Edition)

• “Jesting at himself he defined 'lexicographer' as 'a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge. ”

  A History of English Literature

• “For example, he defined "lexicographer" as "a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge.”

  Capitol Hill Blue - The oldest political news site on the Internet

• “If Dr Samuel Johnson were given the chance to join the web 2.0 generation and post a video definition of his favourite word on the internet, he may have chosen "lexicographer".”

  Telegraph Blogs

• “(believed to be some kind of lexicographer), when, in an article published that day, he uttered the fateful words: "Aleotoric music.”

  Verbatim: VERBATIM: The Language Quarterly Vol IX No 3

• “Erin McKean is a Chicago-based lexicographer who writes at the blog A Dress A Day.”

  Tetris Dress

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