I mentioned the brothers Thomas and Charles Blount in the podictionary episode on the word ditto. This was appropriate because ditto means “the same” and Charles Blount was there accused of being a plagiarist.

I gave you all the lurid details.

Ditto the case of Thomas Blount today. Doubly ditto because I’ll give you the lurid details but it’s also true that while Charles Blount did the copying it was the other way around for Thomas.

Thomas Blount put his hand to many things including studies of legal customs and the study of antiquities of England. This was back in the decades immediately following William Shakespeare’s death; say the 1630s to the 1670s. Importantly to us he put his hand to the production of a few dictionaries too.

One was on legal terms but the other is now regarded as one of the foundations of English dictionaries. I mentioned it yesterday. It has a rather lengthy title but we’ll just call it Thomas Blount’s Glossographia.

One of Thomas’s firsts was to include some etymology and that had never been tried before in an English dictionary.

But as important as his work was he found the whole exercise a really frustrating experience. Glossographia came out in 1656 and then in 1658 a guy named Edward Phillips comes out with something called The New World of Words. Edward Phillips was the nephew of John Milton of Paradise Lost fame and so had a little more pull in the publishing world.

Glossographia was one of those dictionaries that restricted itself to words that would add to the average Englishman’s vocabulary. It didn’t include a whole pile of words that most people would know anyway.

Phillips took all of Thomas Blount’s work and puffed it up with these common and already understood words and proceeded to outsell Glossographia like there was no tomorrow.

To us today Phillips was taking a bold new step in the content of dictionaries; something that we still use. Would you think very highly of a dictionary if it didn’t contain the word cow or house just because you already knew them? Who knows if Phillips thought he was being innovative of just repurposing someone else’s material for his own gain.

Certainly that’s what Thomas Blount thought though. In his rage he wrote:

“Must this then be suffered? A Gentleman for his divertissement writes a Book, and this Book happens to be acceptable to the World, and sell; a Bookseller, not interested in the Copy [meaning who isn't profiting from it] instantly employs some Mercenary to jumble up another like Book out of this, with some Alterations and Additions, and give it a new Title; and the first Author’s out-done, and his Publisher half undone.”

He even published a rebuttal dictionary to The New World of Words called A World of Errors Discovered in The New World of Words. As you might imagine all this frustration was enough to make him sick, which is what brings us back to lurid today’s podictionary word.

This word lurid came into the English record with Glossographia and at the time it was used to describe the skin color of someone who was sick. In Latin luridus meant a ghastly pale yellow. In English it seemed to grow to include bruises and other shocking visual signs of ill health.

From there by analogy lurid grew to our current understanding: something causing shock or horror; something marked by sensationalism.

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