Читать книгу F**k: An Irreverent History of the F-Word - Rufus Lodge - Страница 11

Doctor Samuel Johnson is still revered today as the doyen of dictionary makers, despite – or perhaps because of – his refusal to countenance the inclusion of any language that he could not repeat in genteel society. Yet the doctor was not deaf to the existence of such terms. In a true meeting of eighteenth-century giants, Johnson was once asked by actor David Garrick to name the greatest pleasure in life. His reply, Garrick related, was ‘fucking; and second was drinking. And therefore he wondered why there were no more drunkards, for all could drink, though all could not fuck.’

One of those who could undoubtedly do both was Johnson’s Boswell – the original Boswell of the cliché, in fact, who in his journals reported that a prostitute named Louise had congratulated him on the remarkable feat of achieving intercourse five times within a single night. This was, of course, James Boswell, who dogged the doctor’s footsteps for several decades, committing all the great man’s aperçus et bons mots to paper. He duly chronicled the ‘fucking and drinking’ quip, but (to the disappointment of students for centuries thereafter) elected not to include it in his epic Life of Samuel Johnson, reserving his multiple volumes for all the discussions in which the doctor triumphed over his interlocutors without resorting to the F-word.