The work of the American Friends of Dr Johnson's House to purchase an adjacent building to 17 Gough Square has received well-deserved cognition in a Dallas Morning News editorial by Rudolph Bush. The AFDJH, founded and lead by lexicographer and lawyer Bryan Garner, are seeking to raise $19 million for purposes of acquiring, retrofitting, and equipping a building connected to Dr. Johnson’s House. This would rectify our current accessibility challenges by providing a lift, as well as provide space in which we could expand our current educational and cultural programs manyfold.
In his editorial Bush discusses how contentious and political word choice can be in today's world and how often "sloganeering" replaces well-considered word choice. Reflecting how important the work of Dr Johnson and others who seek to clarify and unify the meaning of words, Bush points out that:
"A dictionary is more than a book of definitions. It is a statement of hope about the possibility of shared meaning. The more I thought about these things, the more I came around on Garner’s project. Maybe we need a symbol of shared meaning. In a little brick house on Gough Square, in the center of London, Samuel Johnson compiled the words of the English language and tried to define them in ways that would endure."
Read editorial here
