Grammar Girl here. I'm Inion Fogarty, and today I am here with John Overholt,

curator of the Donald and Mary Hyde collection of Dr. Samuel Johnson and early books and manuscripts

at Harvard's Houghton Library. And I have to say, he is one of my favorite people to follow on

Mastodon. He's always sharing amazing photos of rare and interesting and odd items. John Overholt,

welcome to the Gram Root Girl podcast. Thank you. I was really pleased to be asked. Yeah, I know we've

followed each other for years and years. So it's just great to finally meet you.

So we have a lot of listeners who are all over the world and are different ages. And I think, you know, Samuel Johnson is an important figure, but maybe not as well known as Webster, for example. So to start, can you explain, you know, who Samuel Johnson is and why he's so important?

Sure. Johnson was one of the foremost writers of 18th century England.

The thing he is probably best known for is his 1755 dictionary of the English language,

but that's just one small part of what Johnson did.

He wrote in just about every genre you can think of,

literary criticism, biography, plays, poetry, a novel.

And he was also regarded as one of the most brilliant minds of his time period.

He had a whole circle of leading literary

lights of London in that time period and was renowned as a conversationalist and just a man of

really prolific talents. But of course, the thing he's most famous for today is his dictionary,

which is certainly not the first dictionary of English,

but it's a real landmark in terms of the evolution of lexicography, of how dictionaries should be

built. Johnson really believed in describing the whole language and not just obscure or hard words. And he believed in explaining

how language was used through the works of great writers. So as much as the dictionary is made up

of definitions, it's also full of quotations showing words in their context. Did he favor his

friends in the quotations?

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