We totally know words too.

69. The Professor and the Madman – Simon Winchester

This is the story of the Oxford English Dictionary…the dictionary’s dictionary, the big one which has so many giant volumes. I’ve interacted with these mainly in the reference shelves of libraries because it’s so humungous and it doesn’t surprise me that it wasn’t finished before some of the major players involved died. However, this story teaches us that the United States played an interesting role in the creation of the OED, which I don’t think is super publicized.

Oxford screams England and not much else; I mean “Oxford English” certainly doesn’t imply that an American veteran who had some mental health concerns, as we’d say now, and totally killed a guy had a major influence on it from his asylum cell, which to be fair had a ton of cool antique books in it because rich people, no matter what they do, tend to end up better off even in an asylum in England. I also think he probably had syphilis, just based on his lust for the ladies being kind of endless before he was in the asylum, where it was just mental lust. See, these things are all things that seem disqualifying for an “Oxford man,” don’t they? Or someone who would end up being a most trusted source of dictionary quotes for the most important dictionary of all time? But they’re not because he also loved words and old books and had a knack for finding endless accounts that could be the first uses of words in them. He also painted.

And said that the Irish were coming for him because in his military time, he was a doctor and had to brand deserters from the Civil War in the US, some of them Irish and this apparently had quite an effect on him and gave him the idea that the Irish were coming for him…for the rest of his life. He had a lot of paranoid delusions and frankly, talents. Why there is no movie I have seen about him I do not know, maybe it’s the penis cutting off thing, maybe not. There are a lot of reasons to read about this bizarre American man, perhaps a peak example of American exceptionalism, Dr. W. C. Minor, and they’re thankfully cataloged in this book. There’s other stuff in there too, including that there’s another American who contributed a very large amount to the dictionary, which was another weird surprise.

 

I wouldn’t be surprised if Belvedere also contributed to the OED, really, he was so very clever.