The Information - James Gleick [28]
Meaning comes into the dictionary in its definitions, of course. Cawdrey’s crucial models were dictionaries for translation, especially a 1587 Latin-English Dictionarium by Thomas Thomas. A bilingual dictionary had a clearer purpose than a dictionary of one language alone: mapping Latin onto English made a kind of sense that translating English to English did not. Yet definitions were the point, Cawdrey’s stated purpose being after all to help people understand and use hard words. He approached the task of definition with a trepidation that remains palpable. Even as he defined his words, Cawdrey still did not quite believe in their solidity. Meanings were even more fluid than spellings. Define, to Cawdrey, was for things, not for words: “define, to shew clearely what a thing is.” It was reality, in all its richness, that needed defining. Interpret meant “open, make plaine, to shewe the sence and meaning of a thing.” For him the relationship between the thing and the word was like the relationship between an object and its shadow.
The relevant concepts had not reached maturity:
figurate, to shadowe, or represent, or to counterfaite
type, figure, example, shadowe of any thing
represent, expresse, beare shew of a thing
An earlier contemporary of Cawdrey’s, Ralph Lever, made up his own word: “saywhat, corruptly called a definition: but it is a saying which telleth what a thing is, it may more aptly be called a saywhat.”♦ This did not catch on. It took almost another century—and the examples of Cawdrey and his successors—for the modern sense to come into focus: “Definition,” John Locke finally writes in 1690, “being nothing but making another understand by Words, what Idea the Term defin’d stands for.”♦ And Locke still takes an operational view. Definition is communication: making another understand; sending a message.
Cawdrey borrows definitions from his sources, combines them, and adapts them. In many case he simply maps one word onto another:
orifice, mouth
baud, whore
helmet, head peece
For a small class of words he uses a special designation, the letter k: “standeth for a kind of.” He does not consider it his job to say what kind. Thus:
crocodile, k beast
alablaster, k stone
citron, k fruit
But linking pairs of words, either as synonyms or as members of a class, can carry a lexicographer only so far. The relationships among the words of a language are far too complex for so linear an approach (“chaos, a confused heap of mingle-mangle”). Sometimes Cawdrey tries to cope by adding one or more extra synonyms, definition by triangulation:
specke, spot, or marke
cynicall, doggish, froward
vapor, moisture, ayre, hote breath, or reaking
For other words, representing concepts and abstractions, further removed from the concrete realm of the senses, Cawdrey needs to find another style altogether. He makes it up as he goes along. He must speak to his reader, in prose but not quite in sentences, and we can hear him struggle, both to understand certain words and to express his understanding.
gargarise, to wash the mouth, and throate within, by stirring some liquor up and downe in the mouth
hipocrite, such a one as in his outward apparrell, countenaunce, & behaviour, pretendeth to be another man, then he is indeede, or a deceiver
buggerie, coniunction with one of the same kinde, or of men with beasts
theologie, divinitie, the science of living blessedly for ever
Among the most troublesome were technical terms from new sciences:
cypher, a circle in numbering, of no value of it selfe, but serveth to make up the number, and to make other figures of more value
horizon, a circle, deviding the halfe of the firmament, from the other halfe which we see not
zodiack, a circle in the heaven, wherein be placed the 12 signes, and in which the Sunne is mooved
Not just the words but the knowledge was in flux. The language was examining itself. Even when Cawdrey is copying from Coote or Thomas, he is fundamentally alone, with no authority