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Samuel Johnson
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synonyms: wobblebottom ???
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► definition
Definition:an English writer who made lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer.After nine years of work, his A Dictionary of the English Language was published in 1755. It had a far-reaching effect on Modern English and has been described as "one of the greatest single achievements of scholarship" (possibly by people who feared the wrath of his pen...).
painting: By Joshua Reynolds - Tate Gallery. Copy held by Pembroke College, Oxford. Public Domain
► uses
Uses:
George: Ah, Dr. Johnson! Damn cold day!
Johnson: Indeed it is, sir -- but a very fine one, for I celebrated last night the encyclopaedic implementation of my pre-meditated orchestration of demotic Anglo-Saxon.
George: Nope -- didn't catch any of that.
Johnson: Well, I simply observed, sir, that I'm felicitous, since, during the course of the penultimate solar sojourn, I terminated my uninterrupted categorisation of the vocabulary of our post-Norman tongue.
BBC. Blackadder, Season 3, Ink and Incapability
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However, it would not be amiss to commit that page of inanity to the power of cremation; and let not his fondest idolaters confide in its indiscerptibility. In painting the sentiments and the scenes of common life, to write English which Englishmen cannot read, is a degree of insolence hardly known till now, and seems to be nothing but the poor refuge of pedantic dullness.
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As if to prove Samuel Johnson’s adage that “patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels,” all of these violations of the Constitution occur under the blanket pretense that they are emergency measures necessary to preserve the American Way of Life.
Sinclair Lewis. It Can't Happen Here
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'Take your Dictionary, for example. What a useful work a Dictionary is! What a necessary work! The meanings of words! Without Doctor Johnson, or somebody of that sort, we might have been at this present moment calling an Italian-iron, a bedstead. But we can't expect a Dictionary—especially when it's making—to interest Annie, can we?'
Charles Dickens. David Copperfield (1850)
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Thus, while in the life the great whale's body may have been a real terror to his foes, in his death his ghost becomes a powerless panic to a world. Are you a believer in ghosts, my friend? There are other ghosts than the Cock-Lane one, and far deeper men than Doctor Johnson who believe in them.
Herman Melville. Moby Dick
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