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constructing a dictionary upon this principle arose during the second
quarter of the 18th century. It was imagined by men of letters--among
them Alexander Pope--that the English language had then attained such
perfection that further improvement was hardly possible, and it was
feared that if it were not fixed by lexicographic authority
deterioration would soon begin. Since there was no English "Academy," it
was necessary that the task should fall to some one whose judgment would
command respect, and the man who undertook it was Samuel Johnson. His
dictionary, the first edition of which, in two folio volumes, appeared
in 1755, was in many respects admirable, but it was inadequate even as a
standard of the then existing literary usage. Johnson himself did not
long entertain the belief that the natural development of a language can
be arrested in that or in any other way. His work was, however,
generally accepted as a final authority, and the ideas upon which it was
founded dominated English lexicography for more than a century. The
first effective protest in England against the supremacy of this
literary view was made by Dean (later Archbishop) Trench, in a paper on
"Some Deficiencies in Existing English Dictionaries" read before the
Philological Society in 1857. "A dictionary," he said, "according to
that idea of it which seems to me alone capable of being logically
maintained, is an _inventory of the language_; much more, but this
primarily.... It is no task of the maker of it to select the _good_
words of the language.... The business which he has undertaken is to
collect and arrange _all_ words, whether good or bad, whether they
commend themselves to his judgment or otherwise.... _He is an historian
of_ [the language], _not a critic._" That is, for the literary view of
the chief end of the general dictionary should be substituted the
philological or scientific. In Germany this substitution had already
been effected by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in their dictionary of the
German language, the first volume of which appeared in 1854. In brief,
then, the modern view is that the general dictionary of a language
should be a record of all the words--current or obsolete--of that
language, with all their meanings and uses, but should not attempt to
be, except secondarily or indirectly, a guide to "good" usage. A
"standard" dictionary has, in fact, been recognized to be an
impossibility, if not an absurdity.

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