Of Fopdoodles and Jobbernowls

What a shame such fine words have fallen into disuse. They might come in handy ever so often when dealing with bureaucrats.

Sam Johnson (not the one who lived in Racine*) defined them, and John Carey reviews books by and about the old boy:

The Dictionary was published on April 15, 1755, and had taken eight years to compile. Johnson worked almost single-handedly, employing only half a dozen raggle-taggle copyists chosen, with typical kindness, because they were poor and starving. By contrast the French Dictionnaire had, as Johnson enjoyed noting, taken 40 scholars 55 years...

To illustrate the meanings of words, Johnson supplied 114,000 quotations from books covering every branch of learning and going back to the 16th century. Nothing remotely comparable had been done before, and it made his dictionary into a superior prototype of the internet — a bulging lucky-dip of wisdom, anecdote, humour, legend and fact. Nobody but Johnson could have done it, because nobody had read so much. A bookseller's son, he had been ravenously turning pages since childhood. Sickly, half-blind and racked by strange tics and spasms that attracted ridicule, he read to escape the pain of life...

Slavery repelled him. He took a freed slave, Francis Barber, into his house, and bequeathed him the bulk of his estate. His opinion of Americans ("I am willing to love all mankind," he confessed, "except an American") stemmed partly from the colonists' doublethink about freedom and slavery: "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?"

Good point.

Plus, he was a cat person.

* You of Alternative Geographical Awareness: Racine is south of Milwaukee, and that Sam Johnson was the head of Johnson Wax. From all accounts quite a decent fellow, but like the Sam above, lamentably deceased.