Read the excerpt from samuel johnson’s a dictionary of the english language. mádness. n. s. [from mad.] distraction; loss of understanding; perturbation of the faculties. why, woman, your husband is in his old tunes again: he so rails against all married mankind, so curses all eve's daughters, and so buffets himself on the forehead, that any madness i ever yet beheld seemed but tameness and civility to this distemper. shakesp. merry wives of windsor. there are degrees of madness as of folly, the disorderly jumbling ideas together, in some more, some less. locke. how does this dictionary entry differ from those of earlier dictionaries?