Antoine Furetière (1619–1688)

France is something of a pariah state among linguists. If international relations were based on linguistics rather than politics, then France would be – well, if not quite North Korea then at least somewhere fairly repressive and unpleasant like Saudi Arabia. For one thing, there has been a rigid intolerence towards France's regional languages, which used to be very numerous – when a survey was taken after the Revolution, just 11 percent of French citizens were native French-speakers, whereas now many French people consider languages like Picard or Franco-Provençal to be simply illiterate dialects of French. And when it comes to usage, the apparatchiks of the Académie Française are there to lay down the law on what is and is not correct.

Things didn't have to be this way, and they nearly weren't. In 1662, Antoine Furetière was admitted to the Académie after having written a couple of widely-admired satires. When he joined, he discovered that they were planning to compile and release a definitive dictionary of the French language. Furetière was delighted: he'd been planning something similar himself, and he eagerly showed the other members some of his research. His plan was all-encompassing: to showcase the full wealth of French usage, including sexual slang, jargon from various professions, regionalisms, courtly language, insults from the market-place, trendy new foreign borrowings – the lot.

The other Academicians stared at him in horror. This was not their idea of a dictionary at all. What they wanted was to purify French, to strip it down to its respectable Latin and Greek inheritance. They wanted to show common people what they were doing wrong.

What followed was an astonishingly acrimonious ‘Battle of the Dictionaries’ which left Furetière sick and frightened for his life, and which culminated in 1685 when he was kicked out of the Académie and accused of plagiarism. This charge was a bit of a joke, since the problem was not that their dictionaries were too similar, but rather that they were too different.

In the end the Académie won and Furetière lost. There is a direct line running from this bust-up to the situation of today, where the Académie's dictionary continues to try and tell native French speakers how to speak their own language. But that's not how it works, and the result is that French dictionaries are decades behind the actual spoken language. Compare this to English, where there is no language authority, and the Oxford English Dictionary is happy to record the words people actually use (hence we have OED entries for such things as K/S ‘A subgenre of science fiction […] in which the Star Trek characters Kirk and Spock are portrayed as having a homosexual relationship’, or LOL, assiduously dated back to 1989; as well as definitions for the so-called ‘wrong’ meanings of words like decimate or disinterested).

Furetière's Dictionnaire universel was finally published in 1690. The original is hard to get hold of now, which is why Les Mots obsolètes, a selection of the entries, is particularly welcome. As the title suggests, most of the words have since gone out of usage, though some are still around and are retained here for their historical interest. It's as good a selection criterion as any, I guess. Here's a representative sample (my on-the-fly translation):

Garçailler. To frequent sluts in nasty places.

Gaz. Term from chemistry, employed by Van Helmont to explain the diverse seeds, or fermentations, or first principles of things; but he spoke of it so obscurely that one can scarcely tell what it means.

Jean. Proper noun which the people have brought into linguistic usage […]. Said particularly of those who have unfaithful wives and who put up with their misbehaviour. ‘His wife has made him a jean.’ One whose wife has created a great scandal is called a double jean.

Mézeréon. Term from pharmacy. Medicinal plant from which apothecaries make pills, which are so violent and dangerous in purgations that the Arabs call it lion of the earth or the herb that makes women widows.

Pisser des os. It is said that a girl has pissed bones when she has given birth in secret.

For anyone interested in lexicography this is a tantalizing glimpse of what could have been. As a comparison, I turn to one of the Académie's recent blog entries. ‘You say: mettre un disque. You do not say: jouer un disque.’ Forty-nine thousand Google results beg to differ….

Poor old Furetière died in exile in Rotterdam in 1688. He never lived to see the publication of his dictionary, and indeed he wasn't really rehabilitated into French cultural history until the nineteenth century. Nowadays we should know better. This is a great work of scholarship, and France's linguistic authorities would do well to try and learn from it even today.… (mere)