A Library of Essential Knowledge ...

Abelardo Morell for The New York Times

Last week, yours truly bought, for $40, a 1940 unabridged Webster's Columbia Encyclopedic Dictionary, complete with color illustrations and 4pt type defining every word in the English Language keyed to that year as this tome was 
A Library of Essential Knowledge, a priceless artifact of a lost age when print was king
prior to the advent of the computer. 

Have you ever obeyed the suggestions of a digital writing assistant to replace a word or restructure a sentence without knowing how, why or even if it made your writing better? Before the reign of digital tools, you’d probably have turned to a dictionary for the same assistance. Our parents and grandparents picked up a heavy book and looked up what words meant, how they’re used, maybe glanced at their etymology — and then made a linguistic choice, however shaky or idiosyncratic, to express their ideas.

In today’s universe of spell-check, autocorrect and artificial intelligence — each of which is capable of making those choices for us — why should we keep producing and owning actual, cinder-block-sized dictionaries?

Because dictionaries enable us to write not with fail-safe convenience but with originality and a point of view. While A.I. assistants manufacture phrases and statements so writers don’t have to think them up, dictionaries provide us with the knowledge to use language ourselves in expressive and potentially infinite ways. They place choice — and authority — literally in human hands, forcing us to discover how we want to explain ourselves and our ideas to the world.

Back in the day ...

Title page from the second edition of the Dictionary

One of my heroes for sure. 

A Dictionary of the English Language, sometimes published as Johnson's Dictionary, was published on 15 April 1755 and written by Samuel Johnson.[2][3] It is among the most influential dictionaries in the history of the English language.

There was dissatisfaction with the dictionaries of the period, so in June 1746 a group of London booksellers contracted Johnson to write a dictionary for the sum of 1,500 guineas (£1,575), equivalent to about £310,000 in 2023.[4] Johnson took seven years to complete the work, although he had claimed he could finish it in three. He did so single-handedly, with only clerical assistance to copy the illustrative quotations that he had marked in books. Johnson produced several revised editions during his life.

Until the completion of the Oxford English Dictionary 173 years later, Johnson's was viewed as the pre-eminent English dictionary. According to Walter Jackson Bate, the Dictionary "easily ranks as one of the greatest single achievements of scholarship, and probably the greatest ever performed by one individual who laboured under anything like the disadvantages in a comparable length of time".[5]

The Elements of Style, a notion of music in my head and the challenge of writing without AI applies though a spell check comes in handy without question. :)

The first expanded edition (1959)