"Language is the dress of thought; and as the noblest mien or most graceful action would be degraded and obscured by a garb appropriated to the gross employments of rusticks or mechanicks, so the most heroick sentiments will lose their efficacy, and the most splendid ideas drop their magnificence, if they are conveyed by words used commonly upon low and trivial occasions, debased by vulgar mouths, and contaminated by inelegant applications."
— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Author
Place of Publication
London
Publisher
Bathurst, J. Buckland, W. Strahan, J. Rivington and Sons, T. Davies
Date
1779, 1781
Metaphor
"Language is the dress of thought; and as the noblest mien or most graceful action would be degraded and obscured by a garb appropriated to the gross employments of rusticks or mechanicks, so the most heroick sentiments will lose their efficacy, and the most splendid ideas drop their magnificence, if they are conveyed by words used commonly upon low and trivial occasions, debased by vulgar mouths, and contaminated by inelegant applications."
Metaphor in Context
His diction was in his own time censured as negligent. He seems not to have known, or not to have considered, that words being arbitrary must owe their power to association, and have the influence, and that only, which custom has given them. Language is the dress of thought; and as the noblest mien or most graceful action would be degraded and obscured by a garb appropriated to the gross employments of rusticks or mechanicks, so the most heroick sentiments will lose their efficacy, and the most splendid ideas drop their magnificence, if they are conveyed by words used commonly upon low and trivial occasions, debased by vulgar mouths, and contaminated by inelegant applications.
Categories
Provenance
Reading
Citation
At least 3 entries in ESTC (1779, 1781, 1790). [vols. 1 to 5 dated 1779, vols. 5 to 10, 1781)
Samuel Johnson, Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, to the Works of the English Poets, vol. 1 (London: Bathurst et al., 1779). <Link to ESTC><Link to ECCO>
Text from Jack Lynch's online edition, based on G. B. Hill's Lives of the English Poets, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905). <Link>
Samuel Johnson, Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, to the Works of the English Poets, vol. 1 (London: Bathurst et al., 1779). <Link to ESTC><Link to ECCO>
Text from Jack Lynch's online edition, based on G. B. Hill's Lives of the English Poets, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905). <Link>
Theme
Dress of Thought
Date of Entry
04/30/2011
