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They were eager to get away from the sound of explosions and the excitement of celebration, and repair to the calm of scholarly discourse.
The English language was spoken and written—but at the time of Shakespeare it was not defined, not fixed.
Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language was, and has remained ever since, a portrait of the language of the day in all its majesty, beauty, and marvelous confusion.
“No language as depending on arbitrary use and custom can ever be permanently the same, but will always be in a mutable and fluctuating state; and what is deem’d polite and elegant in one age, may be accounted uncouth and barbarous in another.”
It was an essential credo for any future dictionary maker, he said, to realize that a dictionary was simply “an inventory of the language” and decidedly not a guide to proper usage.
They were marching blindfolded through molasses.
From the little evidence that survives in his medical records, he appears to have started recovering his confidence and even his contentment, both with every moment that he spent reading Murray’s acceptance letter, and then when he prepared to embark on his self-set task.
For the next twenty years he would do almost nothing at Broadmoor except enfold himself and his tortured brain in the world of his books, their writings, and their words.
Can it ever be said that a major psychological illness like schizophrenia, with its severe disruption of the brain’s chemistry, appearance, and function, truly has a cause? In the case of William Minor, could the terrible scenes at the Battle of the Wilderness actually have triggered his florid behavior?
