{"id":357037,"date":"2018-04-16T17:31:58","date_gmt":"2018-04-16T16:31:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/17-hilarious-definitions-lewrockwell\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T17:31:58","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T16:31:58","slug":"17-hilarious-definitions-lewrockwell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/17-hilarious-definitions-lewrockwell\/","title":{"rendered":"17 Hilarious Definitions – LewRockwell"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

It took roughly eight years for Samuel Johnson and his staff of six helpers to complete the\u00a0Dictionary of the English Language<\/em><\/a>, which was published 263 years ago this month, on April 15, 1755. The work soon established itself as one of the most important dictionaries in the history of the English language, and remained a landmark reference source right through to the early 1900s.<\/p>\n

Johnson\u2014a celebrated humourist and anecdotist who also wrote countless works of journalism and criticism, biographies, essays, poems, and even a novel and a stage play\u2014brought a huge amount of that wit and linguistic creativity to his dictionary, which defined over 42,000 words, using 114,000 literary quotations to illustrate them. Famously, for instance, he defined\u00a0oats<\/em>\u00a0as \u201ca grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people\u201d\u2014but that famous definition is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the slights, barbs and quips Johnson included in his dictionary.<\/p>\n

1. BACKFRIEND<\/strong><\/p>\n


\n\"\"<\/a><\/span><\/span>
\nSamuel Johnsonu2019s D…<\/a><\/span><\/span>
\nSamuel Johnson<\/span>
\nBest Price: <\/span>$1.89<\/span><\/span>
\nBuy New <\/span>$14.96<\/span><\/span>
\n(as of 09:55 EDT – Details<\/span>)<\/span><\/span>
\n<\/a><\/span>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

The Oxford English Dictionary calls a\u00a0backfriend<\/em><\/a>\u00a0\u201ca pretended or false friend,\u201d but Johnson was more straightforward and\u00a0defined the word<\/a>\u00a0as \u201ca friend backwards\u201d\u2014or in other words, \u201can enemy in secret.\u201d<\/p>\n

2. EXCISE<\/strong><\/p>\n

No one likes paying tax\u2014and Johnson knew it.\u00a0Excise<\/em>\u00a0was\u00a0defined<\/a>\u00a0as \u201ca hateful tax levied upon commodities and adjudged not by the common judges of property but wretches hired by those to whom excise is paid.\u201d<\/p>\n

3. FINESSE<\/strong><\/p>\n

Johnson\u00a0didn\u2019t much care<\/a>\u00a0for French loanwords, and omitted a great deal of francophone words\u2014including such familiar examples as\u00a0champagne\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0bourgeois<\/em>\u2014from his…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It took roughly eight years for Samuel Johnson and his staff of six helpers to complete the\u00a0Dictionary of the English Language, which was published 263 years ago this month, on April 15, 1755. The work soon established itself as one of the most important dictionaries in the history of the English language, and remained a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-357037","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357037","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=357037"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357037\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=357037"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=357037"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=357037"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}