There’s a title that will draw readers like the newsroom moochers to cold pizza.

This is how Samuel Johnson opened the preface to his great dictionary of the English language in 1755, with a profession of humility that later opens up to reveal a sturdy pride in his abilities and his accomplishments:

“It is the fate of those who toil at the lower employments of life, to be rather driven by the fear of evil, than attracted by the prospect of good; to be exposed to censure, without hope of praise; to be disgraced by miscarriage, or punished for neglect, where success would have been without applause, and diligence without reward.”

He was referring specifically to the lexicographer, a “humble drudge.” But surely those lower employments of life can include other humble drudges, among them the copy editor.

Another humble drudge is the teacher, whose challenges (again akin to those of the copy editor) are admirably summed up in Johnson’s Life of Milton:

“Every man who has ever undertaken to instruct others can tell what slow advances he has been able to make, and how much patience it requires to recall vagrant inattention, to stimulate sluggish indifference, and to rectify absurd misapprehension.”

Either passage would look fine tacked above a copy editor’s desk.

But not to neglect the writers. Here’s a remark Johnson made at dinner with the Literary Club in 1773, when the conversation turned to advice on writing:

“I would say … what an old tutor of a college said to one of his pupils: ‘Read over your compositions, and where ever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.’ ”