US Edition Dr Samuel Johnson – “Writer, Dictionary Compiler, Wit, Wracked by th’infernal GOUT” of 17 Gough Square, London – began posting regular observations on life in no more than 140 characters.
His tweets took the form of definitions: “Alton Towers (n) Purgatory in Staffordshire”. Or sly moral judgments: “The Dutch are a meticulous Race: they convene a COURT to divine whether Miss Naomi CAMPBELL consorts with distasteful Men.” He now has 18,534 followers.
Johnson’s presumptuous imitator is Tom Morton who, following his hero’s advice that “no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money”, has now produced Dr Johnson’s Dictionary of Modern Life (Square Peg, £9.99) which collects his best tweets along with original material.
My favourite definitions have a vivid way with language. Guitar Hero is a “pantomime perform’d with a plastic lute”; a podcast is a “sermon preach’d into an electronick Bucket”.
I also liked this definition of the Man Booker Prize: a “Cabal of Necromancers & Shamen meeting once yearly to endow but one Book with mythick Popularity”.
Morton’s Johnson could be accused of being too obsessed with the trivial. Yet we would do well to remember Johnson’s own words to Boswell that “there is nothing too little for so little a creature as man”.
Whether Johnson would be tweeting today, I’m not sure. What I can imagine is Boswell, instead of noting his subject’s words on napkins and tablecloths, hiding his iPhone under the table and excitedly updating his followers on the great man’s latest declarations.