James Boswell is best known as Samuel Johnson's biographer, but he also wrote a dictionary himself, which has been lost for more than two hundred years. Lexicographer Dr Susan Rennie came across it in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, where it had been wrongly included among the papers of the 19th-century Scottish lexicographer John Jamieson.
The dictionary (which Boswell never completed) contains about eight hundred Scots words and phrases. They include: bubbly-jock (turkey cock), dabberlock (type of seaweed) and jardelou (a spelling of gardyloo, the Edinburgh cry warning passers-by that slops were due to be thrown out of a window).
James Boswell was born in Edinburgh in 1740 and studied law. He met Samuel Johnson (who was older than him -- Johnson was born in 1709) in 1763 and they became firm friends.
For more on the discovery of his Scots dictionary see here. For even more, see Susan Rennie's site.
Comments