The Information - James Gleick [29]
One of Cawdrey’s hard usual words was science (“knowledge, or skill”). Science did not yet exist as an institution responsible for learning about the material universe and its laws. Natural philosophers were beginning to have a special interest in the nature of words and their meaning. They needed better than they had. When Galileo pointed his first telescope skyward and discovered sunspots in 1611, he immediately anticipated controversy—traditionally the sun was an epitome of purity—and he sensed that science could not proceed without first solving a problem of language:
So long as men were in fact obliged to call the sun “most pure and most lucid,” no shadows or impurities whatever had been perceived in it; but now that it shows itself to us as partly impure and spotty; why should we not call it “spotted and not pure”? For names and attributes must be accommodated to the essence of things, and not the essence to the names, since things come first and names afterwards.♦
When Isaac Newton embarked on his great program, he encountered a fundamental lack of definition where it was most needed. He began with a semantic sleight of hand: “I do not define time, space, place, and motion, as being well known to all,”♦ he wrote deceptively. Defining these words was his very purpose. There were no agreed standards for weights and measures. Weight and measure were themselves vague terms. Latin seemed more reliable than English, precisely because it was less worn by everyday use, but the Romans had not possessed the necessary words either. Newton’s raw notes reveal a struggle hidden in the finished product. He tried expressions like quantitas materiae. Too hard for Cawdrey: “materiall, of some matter, or importance.” Newton suggested (to himself) “that which arises from its density and bulk conjointly.” He considered more words: “This quantity I designate under the name of body or mass.” Without the right words he could not proceed. Velocity, force, gravity—none of these were yet suitable. They could not be defined in terms of one another; there was nothing in visible nature at which anyone could point a finger; and there was no book in which to look them up.
As for Robert Cawdrey, his mark on history ends with the publication of his Table Alphabeticall in 1604. No one knows when he died. No one knows how many copies the printer made. There are no records (“records, writings layde up for remembrance”). A single copy made its way to the Bodleian Library in Oxford, which has preserved it. All the others disappeared. A second edition appeared in 1609, slightly expanded (“much inlarged,” the title page claims falsely) by Cawdrey’s son, Thomas, and a third and fourth appeared in 1613 and 1617, and there the life of this book ended.
It was overshadowed by a new dictionary, twice as comprehensive, An English Expositour: Teaching the Interpretation of the hardest Words used in our Language, with sundry Explications, Descriptions, and Discourses. Its compiler, John Bullokar, otherwise left as faint a mark on the historical record as Cawdrey did.♦ He was doctor of physic; he lived for some time in Chichester; his dates of birth and death are uncertain; he is said to have visited London in 1611 and there to have seen a dead crocodile; and little else is known. His Expositour appeared in 1616 and went through several editions in the succeeding decades. Then in 1656 a London barrister, Thomas Blount, published his Glossographia: or a Dictionary, Interpreting all such Hard Words of Whatsoever Language, now used in our refined English Tongue. Blount’s dictionary listed more than eleven thousand words, many of which, he recognized, were new, reaching London in the hurly-burly of trade and commerce—
coffa or cauphe, a kind of drink among the Turks and Persians, (and of late introduced among us) which is black, thick and bitter, destrained from Berries of that nature, and name, thought good and very wholesom: they say it expels melancholy.
—or home-grown, such as “tom-boy, a girle or wench that leaps up and down like a boy.