The Information - James Gleick [26]
All that time, he collected words (“collect, gather”). He published two instructional treatises, one on catechism (“catechiser, that teacheth the principles of Christian religion”) and one on A godlie forme of householde government for the ordering of private families, and in 1604 he produced a different sort of book: nothing more than a list of words, with brief definitions.
Why? Simpson says, “We have already seen that he was committed to simplicity in language, and that he was strong-minded to the point of obstinacy.” He was still preaching—now, to preachers. “Such as by their place and calling (but especially Preachers) as have occasion to speak publiquely before the ignorant people,” Cawdrey declared in his introductory note, “are to bee admonished.” He admonishes them. “Never affect any strange ynckhorne termes.” (An inkhorn was an inkpot; by inkhorn term he meant a bookish word.) “Labour to speake so as is commonly received, and so as the most ignorant may well understand them.” And above all do not affect to speak like a foreigner:
Some far journied gentlemen, at their returne home, like as they love to go in forraine apparrell, so they will pouder their talke with over-sea language. He that commeth lately out of France, will talk French English, and never blush at the matter.
Cawdrey had no idea of listing all the words—whatever that would mean. By 1604 William Shakespeare had written most of his plays, employing a vocabulary of nearly 30,000, but these words were not available to Cawdrey or anyone else. Cawdrey did not bother with the most common words, nor the most inkhorn and Frenchified words; he listed only the “hard usual” words, words difficult enough to need some explanation but still “proper unto the tongue wherein we speake” and “plaine for all men to perceive.” He compiled 2,500. He knew that many were derived from Greek, French, and Latin (“derive, fetch from”), and he marked these accordingly. The book Cawdrey made was the first English dictionary. The word dictionary was not in it.
Although Cawdrey cited no authorities, he had relied on some. He copied the remarks about inkhorn terms and the far-journeyed gentlemen in their foreign apparel from Thomas Wilson’s successful book The Arte of Rhetorique.♦ For the words themselves he found several sources (“source, wave, or issuing foorth of water”). He found about half his words in a primer for teaching reading, called The English Schoole-maister, by Edmund Coote, first published in 1596 and widely reprinted thereafter. Coote claimed that a schoolmaster could teach a hundred students more quickly with his text than forty without it. He found it worthwhile to explain the benefits of teaching people to read: “So more knowledge will be brought into this Land, and moe bookes bought, than otherwise would have been.”♦ Coote included a long glossary, which Cawdrey plundered.
That Cawdrey should arrange his words in alphabetical order, to make his Table Alphabeticall, was not self-evident. He knew he could not count on even his educated readers to be versed in alphabetical order, so he tried to produce a small how-to manual. He struggled with this: whether to describe the ordering in logical, schematic terms or in terms of a step-by-step procedure, an algorithm. “Gentle reader,” he wrote—again adapting freely from Coote—
thou must learne the Alphabet, to wit, the order of the Letters as they stand, perfectly without booke, and where every Letter standeth: as b neere the beginning, n about the middest, and t toward the end. Nowe if the word, which thou art desirous to finde, begin with a then looke in the beginning of this