Today we wish a happy birthday to the original heavyweight champion of the English language, the corpulent king of Fleet Street, the one and only Dr. Samuel Johnson.  Today, September 18th, is the day this lexical titan was spat into the world, and if you’re not raising a glass of something foul and flammable to his name, you’re doing it wrong.  Dr. Johnson was a roaring, opinionated, profoundly human engine of intellect who practically body-slammed the English language into submission and then bought it a drink.

Let’s get the big one out of the way: A Dictionary of the English Language.  Imagine the sheer balls-to-the-wall authenticity of it.  Long before computers, before funding, before anything but the flickering candlelight of your own goddamn ambition, deciding you – you – are going to chain the wild beast of the English vocabulary to a desk and define it.  All of it.  For nine years.  It’s a project of such monumental, caffeine-and-desperation-fueled hubris that you have to respect it.  He went beyond just defining words…he breathed life into them, injecting his own biases, wit, and occasional shade.  Look up “oats” and you’ll see what I mean.  The man was a troll before the  internet was even a dream.

But the Dictionary was just one part of the main event.  This was a man who practically invented the modern literary biography with Lives of the Poets, and whose essays in The Rambler and The Idler are still terrifyingly relevant today.  You think your existential dread is unique?  Your struggle against laziness and procrastination?  Brother, Johnson was writing the manual on that stuff 250 years ago, all while battling his own menagerie of inner demons, from debilitating depression to a laundry list of physical ailments that would make a lesser man curl up and cry.

And he was not some soft-spoken academic.  When I was in London, I went to the tavern where he used to hold court, surrounded by a cloud of his own smoke and intellectual firepower, ready to verbally disembowel anyone who dared cross him with a poorly formed argument.  He was a glutton, a slob, a whole collection of tics and convulsions, but had an absolutely lethal wit that cut through pretentious bullshit like a hot scimitar through haggis.

So here we are, centuries later, dear reader, picking through the rubble of the house that Johnson built – only to find the plumbing’s been rewired by some pervert, and the wallpaper is a vapid parade of euphemisms.  Because if Dr. Johnson could see what’s become of his beloved language over the last twenty years or so, he’d vomit on his own Dictionary.  He’d recoil at how the left has weaponized words, bludgeoning clarity and nuance in pursuit of ideological aims.  The intentional dulling, the childproofing of language, the bending of definitions to suit reality as they wish it, not as it is – Johnson would see this not as progress, but as felonious vandalism.  Take the most egregious example: the butchery of pronouns.  The syntactic slapstick, the ghastly and perverse contortions foisted on our mother tongue in the name of inclusivity, he’d call it a grotesque travesty (and he’d be right) and grab his quill to fight back, one thunderous, caustic pamphlet at a time.

So crack open a book.  Write something honest.  Argue with a stranger about the Oxford comma.  Do something.  Because Sam Johnson is watching, and you can bet he’s judging you – harder than ever.  Happy birthday, sir.  The first round is on us, but the last word was always yours.

N.P.: “God And The Devil” – Makua