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1.
In 1952 Maria Moliner seems to have grown bored. She and her husband had moved to Madrid some years before, from Valencia, to educate their children. But the children were mostly grown now, Maria's husband was often away, and her work as a librarian provided little stimulation. Moliner (born in 1900) had been one of the few Spanish women of her time to take a university degree, in history, and though it was an honors degree an academic position was unthinkable: even as a librarian she suffered from suspicion, prejudice, and a dearth of intellectual challenges. So she passed the time by returning to her deepest intellectual love, linguistics and lexicography. She decided that she would produce, all by herself, a dictionary: a complete dictionary of the Spanish language as it was actually used.
Dr. Johnson's Dictionary: |
A Dictionary |
To some degree this task constituted a protest—a protest against the work of the official guardians of the Spanish language, the Real Academia Español. These days the RAE's chief production is simply called the Diccionario de la lengua espanola, but at the founding of the august body, in 1713, its members worked on what they came to call the Diccionario de autoridades: the Authorities' Dictionary. The task of these Authorities was to preserve good Castilian Spanish, to purge it of impurities and unnecessary accretions, and to send it along to the next generation in a pristine state. But, Maria Moliner wondered, what about preserving a record of Spanish as it was actually used? It was not a Diccionario de Autoridades she wished to produce but rather a Diccionario del uso del español—so she titled her project.
She expected the work would take her two years. Instead it took fifteen, and it's a miracle that it didn't take far longer than that, especially when you consider that the Authorities of the first Academia labored over their project for fourteen. But in 1966 and 1967, the two volumes of Maria Moliner's Diccionario del uso del español appeared, weighing about seven pounds and comprising more than three thousand pages. The Colombian novelist Gabriel García Marquez, writing in 1982, gleefully noted that Moliner's dictionary was more than twice the size of the rae's, which he thought appropriate, since in his judgment it was "more than twice as good."
2.
Two hundred and six years before Maria Moliner thought to assuage her ennui by dictionary-making, Samuel Johnson, a rather obscure and not especially successful writer, was approached in his London rooms by a publisher named Robert Dodsley. Dodsley wanted Johnson to make a dictionary of the English language. Many years later Johnson would tell his friend James Boswell that he "had long thought" of such a task before Dodsley approached him. This is probably true. But then, Johnson thought of many tasks, and even took detailed notes about them in his journals; he never lacked for ideas. Summoning the resolve and discipline to carry them out was his problem. For decades he chastised himself for "Idleness" and prayed that God would grant him the power overcome it. Yet he also, famously, affirmed that "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money." (Maria Moliner would have been incomprehensible to him.) Fortunately for Johnson and the English language, Dodsley offered money.
Robert Dodsley, like many British intellectuals of his time, worried that English, that great and noble language, lacked—well, lacked something like an Authorities' Dictionary. In the matter of national lexicographical discipline, the English were running well behind their Continental neighbors. The Real Academia Español was itself a relative latecomer to the dictionary-making, language-fixing game, having been preceded by the Académie francais (founded by the great Cardinal Richelieu in 1635) and the oddly named Accademia della Crusca (originating in Florence way back in 1582). In Italian "crusca" means bran: these Florentine scholars called themselves la Crusconi—the bran flakes—in reference to their task of separating the linguistic wheat from the chaff, which is what all such acadamies seem to want to do.
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