JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2096

In the history of words and the history of writing them, the history of writing down what words mean came relatively late in the word game.  The first dictionary for the English language is difficult to establish–it wasn’t Dr. Johnson’s 1746 effort, as fabulous as it was.  There were more than a hundred earlier efforts, the earliest of which may be Robert Cowdry’s A Table Alphabeticall… as the first English dictionary, which was written in 1604. (Its more easy to determine the first American dictionary, Dr. Webster’s, 1828 .) It may be that dictionaries and assemblies of rogue/thieves language appeared well before Johnson, by perhaps as much as 175 years, providing the good readers and listeners in England with a ready tool for understanding “non-standard” (slang) words of the English language (with A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew, by “B.E.”, being the best known of these early works, published in 1698.)

 It is interesting to me that in addition to Johnson et al another  writer–or rather set of writers–were responsible for the first Johnsonian-first dictionary in German, the  Deutsches Wörterbuch by the Brothers Grimm.  These are good examples of modernity, though there are earlier examples for other languages–Petrus de Alingio’s manuscript of 1286 and the Catholicon as the first printed alphabetical listing of Latin words appeared very shortly after Gutenberg’s Bible did on the same press.  But then these were both many centuries into the use of the language.

{More detail in the “continue reading section”, below; also, the original is available for purchase from our blog bookstore.]
And this just to say how much I like the road to words–especially when they come from unexpected places. One fine example of this is the directive below, issued by the headquarters of th Allied Control Commission (“APO No 394″) in Rome in the summer of 1944.  (This would actually be the American arm of the ACC, which was commission set up by the Allied Powers to deal with the administration of defeated countries at the end of the war.  Three weeks after D-Day the end of the war was in sight (Bastogne and Co. not withstanding), though far more so in Italy than just about anywhere else, and so the implementation of governing and occupying plans needed to be established.  One of the primary features here was to ensure that the old Fascists not be included in the new Italian governments (along the lines of denazification in Germany, which had a more laissez-faire approach to defining Nazis, especially wealthy and useful ones), and the primary issue in finding and excluding Fascists was to define what was meant by “fascist”¹.  These are those working guidelines, at least on 25 June 1944.