Open Writing

My wife suffers from word aversion with some terms including this one, since it sounds like a rural expression from our youth for expectorated phlegm.

However, loogy is a legitimate baseball slang expression and a not-very-good acronym for Left-handed One Out Guy. Left-handed batters fare worse statistically against left-handed pitchers, and loogys often are substituted into ballgames to counter a dangerous single left-handed hitter.

Richelieu would have been outraged, for he founded l’Academie francaise, the French Academy, in 1635 “to give exact rules to our language.” The 40 members of the outfit are known as “the Immortals,” a title they cherish that comes from their motto, “To immortality.”

Richelieu got the idea of creating these language police from the Italians in Florence who in 1583 founded the Accademia della Crusca, or Academy of Chaff. That interesting moniker stems from the group’s main function: winnowing out the chaff words from their language. In fact, their emblem is an ornate sieve for “straining out corrupt words.”

The way languages live and grow in the real world, however, such restrictive pursuits inevitably lead to the censors’ frustration and limited usage outside their countries. English has no counterpart to the Immortals and the Chaff hunters, and our vibrant, inclusive language is better able to meet the international lingual needs of the world.

The Immortals nominate their own replacements. There have been 719 since Richelieu started that ball rolling, and it took 40 Immortals working 55 years to produce the first great French dictionary, “le Dictionaire francaise,” and the Florentine Chaff hunters needed 30 years to complete their “Vocabolatio.”

Samuel Johnson wrote the first great English language dictionary by himself in 1755 after eight years labor. Johnson’s “Dictionary of the English Language” ran to 2,300 pages, contained 42,773 entries, and he included more than 100,000 quotations to illustrate his definitions.

Johnson had some idiosyncrasies, too. He wasn’t above altering famous quotations so they’d better suit particular definitions, and he enjoyed trotting out fancy words. “Cough,” for example, is “a convulsion of the lungs, vellicated by some sharp serosity,” and “rust” is “the red desquamation of old iron.”

Other definitions are little masterpieces of succinctness, like “rant: high sounding language unsupported by dignity of thought,” “strut: to walk with affected dignity,” and “thumb: the short, strong finger answering to the other four.”

You can find more in our library’s copy of Henry Hitching’s “Defining the World: the Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary.”

Library patrons also can see the library’s 1765 edition of Johnson’s dictionary by asking a reference librarians to unlock the antiquarian case in which it’s kept. There you’ll encounter words Johnson found socially unacceptable, such as “budge,” “gambler,” and “ignoramus,” and others he deemed rude and vulgar.

The work is peppered with terms he included because they were curious. An “amatorculist, for instance, is “a little insignificant lover,” and a “bedpresser” was “a heavy lazy fellow.” And he defined “dull” as “Not exhilaterating (sic), not delightful; as ‘to make dictionaries is dull work.’”

I wrote a few weeks ago about words my wife despises, especially “dollop,” and noted it wasn’t included in Daniel O’Brien’s article “6 Innocent Words That Need to Be Banned.” So I must note O’Brien recently wrote a subsequent piece titled “5 Innocent Words etc.,” which does include “dollop.”

“Every time I say this word,” O’Brien wrote, “I feel like I’m trying to swallow my lips.”

“Rural,” “ointment,” and “phlegm,” also made his list. While the term doesn’t bother him, O’Brien included “panties” after receiving “a flood of emails and private messages” asking why it was excluded from his original list.

“You will never see me as disappointed,” he said, “as I was the day I came to work and found 136 emails with ‘panties’ as the subject line and realized, ‘Oh. They’re talking about the article.’”

I like all those words and many others. Of course, librarians believe in freedom of thought and expression, and stand in constant opposition to the Immortals and Chaf hunters.

As Sam Adams said, “How strangely will the Tools of a Tyrant pervert the plain Meaning of Words!”