The Information by James Gleick Page A

relationship between an object and its shadow.
    The relevant concepts had not reached maturity:
    figurate , to shadowe, or represent, or to counterfaite
     
    type , figure, example, shadowe of any thing
     
    represent , expresse, beare shew of a thing
     
     
    An earlier contemporary of Cawdrey’s, Ralph Lever, made up his own word: “ saywhat , corruptly called a definition: but it is a saying which telleth what a thing is, it may more aptly be called a saywhat.” ♦ This did not catch on. It took almost another century—and the examples of Cawdrey and his successors—for the modern sense to come into focus: “Definition,” John Locke finally writes in 1690, “being nothing but making another understand by Words, what Idea the Term defin’d stands for.” ♦ And Locke still takes an operational view. Definition is communication: making another understand; sending a message.
    Cawdrey borrows definitions from his sources, combines them, and adapts them. In many case he simply maps one word onto another:
    orifice , mouth
     
    baud , whore
     
    helmet , head peece
     
     
    For a small class of words he uses a special designation, the letter
k:
“standeth for a kind of.” He does not consider it his job to say
what
kind. Thus:
    crocodile ,
k
beast
     
    alablaster ,
k
stone
     
    citron ,
k
fruit
     
     
    But linking pairs of words, either as synonyms or as members of a class, can carry a lexicographer only so far. The relationships among the words of a language are far too complex for so linear an approach (“ chaos , a confused heap of mingle-mangle”). Sometimes Cawdrey tries to cope by adding one or more extra synonyms, definition by triangulation:
    specke , spot, or marke
     
    cynicall , doggish, froward
     
    vapor , moisture, ayre, hote breath, or reaking
     
     
    For other words, representing concepts and abstractions, further removed from the concrete realm of the senses, Cawdrey needs to find another style altogether. He makes it up as he goes along. He must speak to his reader, in prose but not quite in sentences, and we can hear him struggle, both to understand certain words and to express his understanding.
    gargarise , to wash the mouth, and throate within, by stirring some liquor up and downe in the mouth
     
    hipocrite , such a one as in his outward apparrell, countenaunce, & behaviour, pretendeth to be another man, then he is indeede, or a deceiver
     
    buggerie , coniunction with one of the same kinde, or of men with beasts
     
    theologie , divinitie, the science of living blessedly for ever
     
     
    Among the most troublesome were technical terms from new sciences:
    cypher , a circle in numbering, of no value of it selfe, but serveth to make up the number, and to make other figures of more value
     
    horizon , a circle, deviding the halfe of the firmament, from the other halfe which we see not
     
    zodiack , a circle in the heaven, wherein be placed the 12 signes, and in which the Sunne is mooved
     
     
    Not just the words but the knowledge was in flux. The language was examining itself. Even when Cawdrey is copying from Coote or Thomas, he is fundamentally alone, with no authority to consult.
    One of Cawdrey’s hard usual words was
science
(“knowledge, or skill”). Science did not yet exist as an institution responsible for learning about the material universe and its laws. Natural philosophers were beginning to have a special interest in the nature of words and their meaning. They needed better than they had. When Galileo pointed his first telescope skyward and discovered sunspots in 1611, he immediately anticipated controversy—traditionally the sun was an epitome of purity—and he sensed that science could not proceed without first solving a problem of language:
    So long as men were in fact obliged to call the sun “most pure and most lucid,” no shadows or impurities whatever had been perceived in it; but now that it shows itself to us as partly impure and spotty; why should we not call