Cawdrey's Argument Essay

Although the dictionary is seen as finite and dependable, it cannot be seen as ‘absolutely’ authoritative. In this essay, I will be discussing why I disagree with the proposition in the title. I will begin with a very brief history of the English dictionary, and then move onto prescriptivism, and neologisms.

The first single-language English dictionary, Robert Cawdrey’s ‘Table Alphabeticall’, was published in 1604, a time where language was ever changing and being influenced by such things as trade, travel, and transformations in the areas of art and science, increasingly unfamiliar words were being introduced into the English language. In an attempt to help the general public understand challenging words, Table Alphabeticall was published

In an attempt to further standardise spelling within the English language, Johnson took 9 years to publish his dictionary in 1755, which included 42,773 entries . Johnson, described as a ‘rather pompous… but quite humourous’ man , had very prescriptivist views when it came to language; therefore, his dictionary was heavily biased and contained inconsistencies. Some of his definitions were very prejudiced indeed, for example ‘Oats’ were defined as “A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people. ” and clearly shows Johnson’s personal views. This demonstrates, that by publishing the dictionary, Johnson was explicitly trying to achieve the goals of prescriptivism by injecting the biases he held. However, he was unsuccessful and language kept on developing, and in 1857, a new dictionary was being developed which

The most recent one was published in September 2015 and includes a variety of new words, sub-entries, senses, and phrases. Looking at the substantial list for this quarter, one word that catches my attention is ‘hoverboard ’. It surprises me that this word had not been added earlier, especially with the popularity of a certain 80’s film about time travel. OED figures suggest that “…after two years of relative silence on the subject…[of hoverboards], 2014 saw a sudden explosion of interest, and frequency of use is still on the rise .” This demonstrates that developing technology has a direct impact on language, just as it did in 1604. The regular OED updates reflect the transitional nature of language, and therefore demonstrate that it is difficult to follow a set of definitive rules and standards created by