speak about Preserve the purity of English
Answers
Explanation:
Many people know at least the outline of Johnson’s life: his birth on September 18, 1709, in Lichfield, Staffordshire; his studies at Oxford’s Pembroke College (which he left after about a year, without a degree); and his struggles to make a living as a writer in London.
These struggles were slightly eased when Robert Dodsley and a group of other publishers commissioned Johnson to compile an English dictionary.
As John Wain says in his biography of Johnson, “June 18, 1746, is the date that marks Johnson’s turning-point. From now on, he is no longer a hand-to-mouth hack-writer; he is subsidized by a group of responsible entrepreneurs”.
Johnson (often called Dr Johnson) optimistically thought that he could write the dictionary in three years but, even with help from about half-a-dozen assistants, the task took three times as long. This is par for the course in lexicography: most dictionaries take much longer than anticipated. When James Murray started work on the Oxford English Dictionary, it was intended to take ten years but it actually took 50.
Despite Johnson’s well-known jibes at Scotland, Boswell pointed out that most of his assistants were Scots. The assistants’ main task was to copy out the illustrative quotations that Johnson selected from books in which he underlined the chosen word in pencil and marked within brackets the quotations to illustrate those words.
Johnson's most famous jest about the Scottish was in his Dictionary’s definition of oats: “A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people”.
Boswell, himself a Scot, got his own back on Johnson when they visited Lichfield.
“Oat cakes . . . were served at breakfast. It was pleasant to me to find, that oats, the food of horses, were so much used as the food of the people in Dr Johnson’s own town”.
One of Johnson's greatest innovations was his use of illustrative quotations. They not only showed how words are actually used but helped to clarify for Johnson how to divide each word into separate senses. Being a staunch moralist, Johnson tended to choose quotations which contained an uplifting or educative message, or at least had literary merit.