Food for Horses

The words

1. Samuel Johnson spent most of nine years on one book.
2. The Dictionary · 1755
3. His Dictionary of the English Language, 1755. Mostly careful, learned and dull.
4. But now and then he enjoyed himself.
5. Under OATS, A Dictionary of the English Language, 1755
6. Under OATS:
7. “A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.”
8. Scots still bristle at it.
9. The awkward part: it was true.
10. England fed most of its oats to horses. Scotland lived on oatmeal.
11. Our opinion
12. So what is wrong with a joke that is true?
13. Our opinion
14. It was never about oats. It was about the people who eat them.
15. Lichfield, Staffordshire · March 1776
16. In March 1776 Johnson took James Boswell, his future biographer, home to Lichfield, in Staffordshire.
17. Johnson’s own town
18. Boswell noticed the breakfast:
19. “Oats, the food of horses, were so much used as the food of the people in Dr. Johnson’s own town.”
20. Food for Horses
21. The insult was true. Breakfast beat it anyway.