I warmly admire the late, great Dr Samuel Johnson, author of the famous 18th-century dictionary. In the Nineties, when I wrote an anonymous column on language for The Economist, I chose the byline “Johnson” for it. But any admiration has its limits. Mine were exceeded when I recently read in the London Times one Jane Shilling describing Johnson as “one of the towering figures of English literature, as great as Shakespeare, Chaucer or Dickens.”

With all due respect, Madam — and I’m not sure how much is due in this instance — nonsense. Johnson’s dictionary was great stuff. His conversation was forthright, well-turned and often witty. His literary judgment was sound. And he was clearly a lovable man, with many friends. But his own voluminous writing was often prolix, and over-Latinate (and that’s not just the 21st century speaking: I once came upon a pamphlet of his own time that mocked his Latinisms). And what literature did he leave behind? Shelves of it — which nobody reads. Is that mere chance?

Equal to Shakespeare, Chaucer or Dickens? No, frankly: nonsense, rot, rubbish, garbage, piffle, tosh, codswallop, bosh, bilge, bunk, balderdash, claptrap, hogwash, eyewash, baloney, poppycock, hooch and more, not to add sundry coarser epithets that I will not reprint here.

Johnson might not have liked that list. One avowed aim of his dictionary of English was “to preserve its purity”, and here we have a hotchpotch, mostly of bastard slang: piffle, tosh and codswallop, of unknown origin; bosh, from a Turkish word for empty; bilge short for bilge water, the muck in a ship’s bilges; bunk, short for bunkum or buncombe, an American county whose Congressman would say he was “talking for Buncombe”; balderdash, in the 17th century a concoction of incompatible drinks; claptrap, a piece of stage mechanism; hogwash, the swill fed to pigs; eyewash, an eye-lotion to make you not see straight; baloney, a Bologna sausage; poppycock, maybe from a Dutch dialect word meaning soft dung; hooch, American slang for dubious liquor, from Hoochinoo, an Alaskan tribe that brewed such stuff.

And I’ve left out phooey, more of an exclamation than a noun, maybe from phew or the German pfui ; and sarcasms such as oh yeah, which imply doubt without actually affirming it to be justified.

With its multiple origins and its disorderly vigour, English is an utterly mongrel language. Britain’s long line of foreign conquerors — Romans, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Vikings and Normans (and I almost added Americans) — are the main reason. When it later took to conquering foreigners, they too, notably south Asians, added to the language. All the while, English was borrowing from its European neighbours. Any attempt to purify the result, for instance by declaring the short word of Anglo-Saxon origin always (not merely often, as it indeed is) preferable to the Latin-born equivalent, is — well, take any word from that list above. And, whatever his aims or his writing habits, Johnson, unchallengeably a giant of language, must in his heart have known that.

As for the Times writer who thinks him a colossus of literature as well, OK, she’s a serious columnist, but on this issue, I fear, her judgment is one Shilling short of a pound. Or, in plainer English, she’s talking — what shall I call it? — twaddle.