Richard Chenevix Trench’s “…idea of a dictionary is straightforward and simple: a dictionary is ‘an inventory of the language.’ ‘It is no task of the maker of…[a dictionary] to select the good [his italics] words of a language…He is an historian of…[the language] not a critic.’ The public ‘conceive of a Dictionary as though it had this function, to be a standard of the language.’ But that is a misconception, which he blames the French Academy for fostering. Echoing [Samuel] Johnson, Trench demands to know how anyone with a spark of ‘vigour and vitality’ could allow ‘one self-made dictator, or forty, [to] determine for him what words he should use, and what he should forbear from using.’ This suggests not just a linguistic objection to prescription but a philosophical and political objection: it is repugnant to the English tradition of individual freedom.”
—Sidney I. Landau, Dictionaries: The Art and Craft of Lexicography, (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1984), pp. 67-8.
“In Paris, [Cardinal] Richelieu had established the Académie Française in 1634. The Forty Immortals—rendered in perhaps more sinister fashion as simply ‘the Forty’—have presided over the integrity of the tongue with magnificent inscrutability until this day.”
—Simon Winchester, The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, (HarperCollins, 1998), p. 87.
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