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Contents contributed and discussions participated by Ariel Szuch

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Ariel Szuch

Lynch, "How Johnson's Dictionary Became the First Dictionary" - 0 views

andromeda.rutgers.edu/...firstdict.html

shared by Ariel Szuch on 22 Nov 10 - Cached
  • ESTC tells me there were 663 English books published before 1755 with the word "dictionary" in the title; Robin Alston's monumental bibliography tells me Johnson's is the 177th printing of a general monolingual English dictionary; if we exclude subsequent editions and reprints, looking only at the first printing of each title, it's the twenty-first general monolingual English dictionary. And yet, to the world at large, it remains number one.
  • Macaulay, for instance, famously called it "the first dictionary which could be read with pleasure." 1
  • For him, "first" means primus inter pares — first in our affection, if not in our chronologies.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • I call it "the first 'standard' dictionary," I say it's the first to make extensive use of illustrative quotations, and I quote Allen Reddick's claim that "Johnson's Dictionary was the first to attempt . . . to determine its meanings according to word usage as it was encountered in the works of the authors in the language" — related to, but not exactly the same as, the first to include extensive illustrative quotations.
  • If it's possible to say anything uncontroversial about Johnson's prescriptivism, it would be that Johnson is more prescriptive than most modern lexicographers, but also less prescriptive than most of his contemporaries expected him to be. I'd remind you, though, that a dictionary needn't be prescriptive in its intentions to provide a definitive standard; it's possible to be authoritative without being authoritarian. The OED, perhaps the most thoroughly descriptive major dictionary ever completed, is today routinely used prescriptively. A search of LexisNexis or similar databases for the phrase "according to the Oxford English Dictionary" is instructive: linguistic scolds routinely turn to it for authoritative guidance on what's right and wrong, even though its editors from Murray through Simpson explicitly disavowed any such intention.
Ariel Szuch

Renaissance Humanism - 0 views

www.historyguide.org/...humanism.html

renaissance humanism

shared by Ariel Szuch on 11 Oct 10 - Cached
  • Expansion of trade, growth of prosperity and luxury, and widening social contacts generated interest in worldly pleasures, in spite of formal allegiance to ascetic Christian doctrine. Men thus affected -- the humanists -- welcomed classical writers who revealed similar social values and secular attitudes.
  • Perhaps the most we can assume is that the man of the Renaissance lived, as it were, between two worlds. The world of the medieval Christian matrix, in which the significance of every phenomenon was ultimately determined through uniform points of view, no longer existed for him. On the other hand, he had not yet found in a system of scientific concepts and social principles stability and security for his life. In other words, Renaissance man may indeed have found himself suspended between faith and reason.
  • Humanism embodied the mystical and aesthetic temper of a pre-scientific age.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • It did not free the mind from subservience to ancient authority.
  • They shifted authorities rather than dismissed them
  • The intellectuals of antiquity
  • were primarily interested in a happy, adequate, and efficient life here on earth. Hellenic philosophy was designed to teach man how to live successfully rather than how to die with the assurance of ultimate salvation.
  • Humanism directly and indirectly revived the pagan scale of virtues.
  • Erasmus
  • The first place must indeed be given to the authority of the Scriptures; but, nevertheless, I sometimes find some things said or written by the ancients, nay, even by the heathens, nay, by the poets themselves, so chastely, so holily, and so divinely, that I cannot persuade myself but that, when they wrote them, they were divinely inspired, and perhaps the spirit of Christ diffuses itself farther than we imagine; and that there are more saints than we have in our catalogue.
  • Another humanist trend which cannot be ignored was the rebirth of individualism
  • The leading intellectual trait of the era was the recovery, to a certain degree, of the secular and humane philosophy of Greece and Rome.
  • Individualism and the instinct of curiosity were vigorously cultivated. Honest doubt began to replace unreasoning faith.
  • the spirit of individualism to a certain degree incited the Protestant revolt, which, in theory at least, embodied a thorough application of the principle of individualism in religion.
  • Ariel Szuch on 11 Oct 10
     
    This was an excellent and concise overview of humanism and some of its major ideas.
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