A dictionary for anarchists

A reminder that institutions are founded by geniuses, and not the other way around

Dear H,

AJP Taylor writes, in The Oxford History of England, that before August of 1914 no Englishman ever had an ID. He also didn't need a passport to travel, and he could pretty much go anywhere he wanted.

He didn’t need a permit to change his house. He could trade with any foreign country on pretty much the same terms he traded in his own. Unlike the other European countries, he didn’t have to do mandatory service in the military; and the annual amount of taxes Englishmen paid to the government was somewhere around only eight percent. Things were so loose that these rules also went for foreigners. They didn’t have to register with the state either, and they could come and go pretty much as they pleased*.

This is all interesting to me because 1914 was the height of the British Empire and the government was practically invisible — except for the post office, the school (which only lasted for many until they turned 13), the policeman, and some safety rules and regulations. To modern Americans this looks like a state of borderline anarchy. And the British were on top of the world, despite the British government not really being on top of Britain.

The reason I bring this up is because, maybe a hundred and fifty years before this, the English language was in a state of almost absolute freedom too. You could almost call it chaos. And yet this period, of the mid-to-late 1700s, was a time of profound leaps in the art of communication. Not only were the British reading and writing more as the years went on, but they were learning more, thinking more, and growing more than ever before. They were delivering speeches for hours in Parliament that could easily pass as theatrical performances.

They couldn’t agree on what to capitalize at first, or how to spell, or even which way to frame a sentence best. But somehow that's when the clearest sentences were used, and the deepest thoughts were framed, and the most perfect words were picked. Reading Samuel Johnson's Rambler, from somewhere in the 1750s, or Madison's and Hamilton's Federalist, or Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, or almost any speech or letter by Edmund Burke, it's clear that great thinkers and masters of communication are never hemmed in: they're let loose. And, Samuel Johnson being a rare exception, they almost never teach. What they do is inspire.

Samuel Johnson's command of the English language was so powerful and meticulous that when he made the first English dictionary, people just said, why the hell not? He didn't get help from any schools or patrons, and finally, at the end of the lonely and financially difficult project of eight years, he found this puff-piece in the London Chronicle, written by Lord Chesterfield.

‘It must be owned, that our language is, at present, in a state of anarchy, and hitherto, perhaps, it may not have been the worse for it. During our free and open trade, many words and expressions have been imported, adopted, and naturalized from other languages, which have greatly enriched our own. Let it still preserve what real strength and beauty it may have borrowed from others; but let it not, like the Tarpeian maid, be overwhelmed and crushed by unnecessary ornaments. The time for discrimination seems to be now come.

‘Toleration, adoption, and naturalization have run their lengths. Good order and authority are now necessary. But where shall we find them, and, at the same time, the obedience due to them? We must have recourse to the old Roman expedient in times of confusion, and chuse a dictator. Upon this principle, I give my vote for Mr. Johnson to fill that great and arduous post. And I hereby declare, that I make a total surrender of all my rights and privileges in the English language, as a free-born British subject, to the said Mr. Johnson, during the term of his dictatorship. Nay more, I will not only obey him, like an old Roman, as my dictator, but, like a modern Roman, I will implicitly believe in him as my Pope, and hold him to be infallible while in the chair, but no longer. More than this he cannot well require; for, I presume, that obedience can never be expected, when there is neither terrour to enforce, nor interest to invite it.’

Chesterfield, by publishing this letter, was hoping to have it included as the preface to the dictionary. But what Chesterfield neglected to mention is that the dictator he so venerated had only yesterday been a mendicant. Johnson had been knocking at Chesty's door for years, actually, asking for financial assistance, and had been turned away so many times that he gave up. So when Johnson saw the letter in the papers, he wasn't flattered, or even mollified. He was pissed off.

He wrote Lord Chesterfield personally,

‘When, upon some slight encouragement, I first visited your Lordship, I was overpowered, like the rest of mankind, by the enchantment of your address; and could not forbear to wish that I might boast myself Le vainqueur du vainqueur de la terre; — that I might obtain that regard for which I saw the world contending; but I found my attendance so little encouraged, that neither pride nor modesty would suffer me to continue it. When I had once addressed your Lordship in publick, I had exhausted all the art of pleasing which a retired and uncourtly scholar can possess. I had done all that I could; and no man is well pleased to have his all neglected, be it ever so little.

‘Seven years, my Lord, have now past, since I waited in your outward rooms, or was repulsed from your door; during which time I have been pushing on my work through difficulties, of which it is useless to complain, and have brought it, at last, to the verge of publication, without one act of assistance, one word of encouragement, or one smile of favour. Such treatment I did not expect, for I never had a Patron before. […]

‘Is a Patron, my Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help? The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labours, had it been early, had been kind; but it has been delayed till I am indifferent, and cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary, and cannot impart it; till I am known, and do not want it. I hope it is no very cynical asperity not to confess obligations where no benefit has been received, or to be unwilling that the Publick should consider me as owing that to a Patron, which Providence has enabled me to do for myself.

— a vitriol which took hold and never quit.

Later, when speaking of Chesterfield, he said, This man I thought had been a Lord among wits; but, I find, he is only a wit among Lords. And when Chesty's letters to his son were published, Johnson remarked, they teach the morals of a whore, and the manners of a dancing master. For reasons like this you'll find Johnson referred to, in Chesterfield's letters to his son, as “a respectable Hottentot.”

What I'm getting at is simple: when it comes to who should be teaching English, I pick anybody who writes and speaks this well. English teachers are good at keeping you from obvious mistakes, but don’t ever trust your language to a professor of English. Just find out who moves you and soak in them until great English leaks out your ears.

Yours,

-J

December 16th, 2025

P.S. Obviously, Samuel Johnson isn’t the only writer I admire. A few of my favorites are Hunter S Thompson, Nora Ephron, Chuck Palahniuk, and Cormac McCarthy. P.J. O’Rourke and the Frame translation of Montaigne. I love Voltaire and Shakespeare and Thomas Paine and Edward Gibbon. John Steinbeck and George Orwell, Edmund Burke and Eric Hoffer. I’m a big fan of Ayn Rand’s ranting. and anything historical by Thomas Babington Macaulay. G.K. Chesterton and H.L. Mencken and E.B. White are perennial go-to’s; and I love the Saunders translation of Schopenhauer, and the C.S. Lewis translation of C.S. Lewis.

In there you’ll find the scoundrel and the scholar, the floral and the Spartan, the business and the bluster, the prophet and the playboy; and what should be clear from such a motley crew of literary giants is that there’s no one “right way” to do English. There's definitely a wrong way, and it's to bore and confuse the reader. But there isn’t an ideal way to shape a sentence; and, aside from the people you want to write for, there’s no tribunal to appeal to. You either make sense or you don't. You're either beautiful or you're not.

Love at first sight is always a surprise. You can make up a checklist if you want, but — I guarantee you — it's a total waste of time. Your dream girl will tear it to shreds the second she walks into the room.

*I’m sure you can think of some downsides of living in almost-absolute liberty, but the amazing thing is how dynamic and powerful both Britain and the USA were at this state — when neither of them had much of a state.

Barbara Tuchmann chronicles one downside in The Proud Tower: that nearly every lunatic in Russia and the West sought refuge in England, and in the period before The Great War, it became a hot-bed for foreign communists and anarchists and socialists and false prophets. And from there, the freaks put out their pamphlets and rallied all the malcontents. And they sent them all over the world to wreak havoc.

And this is how it always goes. Liberty is ephemeral. And its successes invite and breed those who tear it to shreds.

**Regarding the need for a dictionary, Stuart Chase writes in The Tyranny of Words,

Years ago I read a little book by Allen Upward called The New Word. It was an attempt to get at the meaning of “idealism” as used in the terms of the Nobel Prize award — an award for “the most distinguished work of an idealist tendency.”

Upward began his quest — which was ultimately to lead him over the living world and back to the dawn of written history — by asking a number of his friends to give their personal interpretation of the term “idealism.” He received the following replies: fanatical, poetical, what cannot be proved, altruistic, intangible, opposite of materialism, not practical, sentimental, something to do with imaginative powers, exact, [and] true.

With this kind of confusion it’s a miracle English (or any language) works at all — especially with the more abstract and difficult concepts. And it’s no wonder people mangle the meaning of Philippians 4:13.

Mr Upward wasn't the first to badger his friends and get discouraged. Mr Chase says that H.G. Wells wrote something for the Fabian Society, and said, of words, The forceps of the mind were clumsy, and crushed the truth a little when grasping it. A meaning which Mr Wells wrote, believed people would understand, and a hundred-plus years later seems crystal clear. At least to me.

But even Mr Wells is outclassed by the pessimistic words of Lao Tse: Those who know do not tell; Those who tell do not know.

— a statement I would take more seriously if only Lao Tse hadn’t said it.