The arbitrary power of language: Locke, romantic writers, and the standardizers of English

Writers from the Romantic period embraced Locke’s principle of linguistic arbitrariness as they reacted to the threat to their literary authority posed by the standardizers of English such as Samuel Johnson. Their texts articulate a desire to maximize the potential for authorial freedom that Locke’s theory of language offers. By exploiting arbitrary properties of language, writers hoped to transcend the linguistic limits imposed by the standardizers and thus to confirm their status as creative practitioners of the English language. Priestley, one of such writers, capitalizes on the arbitrariness of signs as described by Locke when he envisions a perfect language that shall be universally used in the future millennial kingdom. Predicated upon the arbitrary connection between words and “things of considerable consequence,” Priestley’s universal language scheme allows the writer to ponder meanings outside the semantic range of standard lexicography. In Pigott’s Political Dictionary (1795), Locke’s semantic theory becomes the means to radicalize Locke’s political ideas, especially the idea of the right of revolution. The arbitrariness (or voluntariness) of signification encourages Pigott to revise Johnson’s standard definitions in a way that articulates French Revolutionary principles. Wordsworth sides with Francis Grose—the author of A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785)—in placing a high value on vulgar English. But unlike Grose, he contends that rural language is “more permanent,” i.e. durable, than a refined language. Wordsworth’s description of how rustics’ language achieves durability reveals that he is deeply conscious of all linguistic signs being arbitrary. Furthermore, the naturalism that Wordsworth attributes to his poetic diction results from his appropriation