WRB—June 25, 2025

“purple-and-crimson bloom”

Whatever happens, we have got
The WRB, and they have not.

Links:

• In Engelsberg Ideas, Malcolm Forbes on an exhibit in London dedicated to Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary:

  Many hands made lighter work and another section describes what kind of work that was. All of it was done by hand. Pencils, quill pens and ink were the main tools of trade. Breadcrumbs were used as erasers—not always successfully. One exhibit is a pot which would have contained “pounce,” a powder made from crushed cuttlefish bone, that was sprinkled on wet ink to prevent it from smudging.

  Johnson adopted a different approach to previous compilers. We learn that he was wary of words recorded in earlier dictionaries and so in 1746 embarked on an ambitious reading program, gathering first-hand evidence of English by means of a vast collection of quotations taken from literary and non-literary texts. Another departure he made in his Dictionary was allowing women’s voices to be heard by citing their publications. On show are quotations from the novelist Charlotte Lennox under “pique,” “simplicity” and “talent”; from Margaret Cavendish under “just”; and from Johnson’s friend Elizabeth Carter under “proportion.”

  An intriguing section is devoted to other definitions. Pages from the Dictionary show how there are 48 different ways to use the word “hand” and 66 for “put.” Some words are defined and then their meanings are reinforced by way of Shakespeare references. “Cockled” throws up this definition: “Shelled; or perhaps cochleate, turbinated.” There follows this line from Love’s Labour’s Lost: “Love’s feeling is more soft and sensible, / Than are the tender horns of cockled snails.”

  [The WRB goes through a lot of bread and cuttlefish.

  One of the many ways Paul Fussell’s book on Dr. Johnson (which I talked about in WRB—Feb. 26, 2025) is good is in its discussion of how much of Johnson’s personality can be seen in the choices he makes with his example sentences, specifically in his affection for Bible verses describing God.

  Personally, I mostly use the Dictionary as a way to find early and/or interesting uses of words that strike me. A couple months ago I had a conversation with a friend about using the word “taste” to mean (Dr. Johnson’s definition) “intellectual relish or discernment,” which led to me searching the internet until I uncovered the source of his example sentence from Richard Hooker. I guess a noticeable portion of the intellectual life in 2025 is searching stuff in various places on the internet until the right thing turns up. My congratulations to Dr. Johnson and his associates on putting together a dictionary without the internet; I couldn’t even manage this newsletter without it. —Steve]

Reviews:

• In our sister publication on the West Coast, Daniel Grubbs-Donovan reviews a translation of a new novel by Hanne Ørstavik (stay with me, translated from the Norwegian by Martin Aitken, April) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Apr. 12, 2025.]:

  Ørstavik’s insights and connections can, at times, feel overly tidy. In the final stretch of revelations that concludes the novel, Ørstavik’s narrator realizes that her lover gets upset about her drinking because his father drank, and that the narrator likes to work out because her mother was always thin. These causal pathways are neat, and they strain credibility in their dry sociological presentation of the workings of memory. This can make the narrator’s transformations feel clipped and unearned, an elaborate version of saying “suddenly, she realized . . . ” When the narrator finally plunges into the sadness that she felt on the day of her mother’s departure to nursing school, something “alters.” In time, “the urge to drink subsides.”  

  But Ørstavik’s unflinching presentation of a narrator so like herself can be breathtaking, and this makes up for some leaps in processing. It is interesting that, in a novel with these themes, very little mention is made of therapy. The writing itself is the excavation: “I write about the things I cannot find in myself, and to have access to them, I need fiction, because I do not know,” Ørstavik explained to Deleva. In this book, Ørstavik is actively looking “in herself.”

• Christopher Childers
  reviews two collections in the pastoral tradition (Bucolics, by Maurice Manning, 2007; and Pastorals, by Rachel Hadas, April):

  Again and again Manning shows us his shepherd questioning God about his likeness to himself and struggling to wrap his mind around their differences. The maneuver is psychologically astute and, it seems to me, an effective expansion of the “country simile” motif.

  I have more mixed feelings about the use of country diction. I don’t mind it in principle, but the more a word or phrase calls (potentially cringeworthy) attention to itself, the more I want it to defend its position with some further justification. “Boss” is the most prominent example. As you’ve already guessed, it appears a lot and I won’t say it never gets annoying. However, in my opinion it mostly works, because of a sort of double meaning: besides the primary sense of “superior,” “overseer,” “foreman,” “boss” is indeed a southern-inflected synonym for “buddy,” which carries an amused or dismissive air of ironic deference—at least, that’s how I’ve interpret it when I’ve rented a cabin in West Virginia for the weekend and the overall-wearing dude at the counter of the general store calls me “boss” when I go to buy a plastic lighter or something. Anyway, this sense of an ironic edge in “boss” tempers somewhat the shepherd’s solitary servility with a bit of rebellious human bluster.

  [Attempts at new titles for God, not having been legitimized by centuries of use, are always kind of goofy, but I suppose “Boss” participates in the tradition of “use the word from the most important hierarchical relationship in your society” also seen in “Lord” and Dominus. (I didn’t mind Sarah Ruden’s decision to translate Dominus as “Master” in her translation of the Confessions, but in the same way that “Lord” does not immediately call up ideas of feudalism “Master” does not immediately call up slavery in the ancient world. It’s not an unheard-of way to refer to God in English anyway; the standard version of that twentieth-century French prayer attributed to St. Francis translates the first Seigneur as “Lord” and the second, for no reason I can discern, as “Divine Master.”) “Boss” is also a literalization of “the man upstairs,” a phrase that only makes sense if God is, on some level, being imagined as an executive on the top floor. Why not throw it all together and see if you can refer to God as “Master of the Universe” with a straight face?

  Also, while get the sense I am not supposed to be putting Manning’s poems into a Christian frame some of the excerpts make it difficult—Childers quotes, among other things, these lines:

  . . . I wonder Boss if all

  at once I swallowed you O tell

  the truth how would that grab you Boss

  —Steve]

[The rest of today’s WRB has even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, as well as Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and going deeper on the state of criticism and other niche interests of mine in Critical notes. Today, from my desk:

• Trends in merchandising Jane Austen

• Judge Holden, Victorian explorer

• Poems featuring various Horatian complaints about Persian luxury, Frenchified fuss, and so on

If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe below.

And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much. I appreciate it. Why not share the WRB with your friends and acquaintances? The best way to support us is by subscribing, but the second-best is by telling your friends about us. —Steve]