The Surgeon of Crowthorne

by Simon Winchester

The Lambeth Tragedy, the papers eventually settled upon calling it – as if the simple existence of Lambeth itself was not something of a tragedy.

The author really hates the hamlet of Lambeth. Or it is that bad.

He had caught venereal disease at least once, and a medical examination conducted at Horsemonger Lane Gaol showed that he had a case of gonorrhoea even now. He had caught it, he said, from a local prostitute, and had tried to cure it by injecting white Rhine wine into his urethra – an amusingly inventive attempt at a remedy, and one that, not surprisingly, failed.

Oh gee, I wonder why...

German scholars in particular are constantly deriving much pleasure from winning an informal lexicographic contest that aims at antedating OED quotations: at the last count the Germans alone had found 35,000 instances in which the OED quotation was not the first; others, less stridently, chalk up their own small triumphs of lexical sleuthing, all of which Oxford’s editors accept with disdainful equanimity, professing neither infallibility nor monopoly.)

Good for the Germans then. Too bad no (almost) nobody outside of that country is speaking it with any real enthusiasm.

‘Treat me as a solar myth, or an echo, or an irrational quantity, or ignore me altogether.’

‘Nihil est melius quam vita diligentissima.’

Nothing is better than a careful life. As someone who is afraid to cross the street in traffic, I tend to agree with this.

He engaged in furious digs at a multitude of archaeological sites all over the borderlands (which, being close to Hadrian’s Wall, was a treasure-trove of buried antiquities); he made attempts to teach the local cows to respond to calls in Latin; he would read out loud, by the light of a minute oil lamp, the works of a Frenchman with the grand name of Théodore Agrippa d’Aubigné, and translate for his family, who gathered about him, fascinated.

It somewhat beggars belief that the Museum turned down his job application. Murray was initially crushed but soon recovered.

Yes, it does in deed beggars belief. The museum ought to feel like a real ass. LOL.

God – who in this part of London society was held to be an Englishman – naturally approved the spread of the language as an essential imperial device;

had compiled it, he said, ‘for the benefit & help of Ladies, gentlewomen or any other unskilful persons. Whereby they may more easilie and better vnderstand many hard English wordes, which they shall heare or read in the Scriptures, Sermons or elsewhere, and also be made able to vse the same aptly themselues’.

Oh yes, all of those people are dreadfully unskilled. /s

tended to concentrate, as Cawdrey’s first offering had, on what were called ‘hard words’ – words that were not in common everyday use, or else words that had been invented specifically to impress others, the so-called inkhorn terms with which books of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries seem well larded.

‘No language as depending on arbitrary use and custom can ever be permanently the same, but will always be in a mutable and fluctuating state; and what is deem’d polite and elegant in one age, may be accounted uncouth and barbarous in another.’

‘Poor Dr Minor?’ asked Murray, as perplexed as any of those who were now keenly listening. ‘What can you possibly mean?’

This is the romantisized version, no doubt.

According to one version of the story, it is said that he vowed, with all the knowledge of his lexicography, to take a leaf from Francis Bacon, who in 1625 had written in English the axiom from the hadith, to the effect that ‘If the hill will not come to Mahomet, Mahomet will go to the hill.’

So Bacon was responsible for this odd phrase.

There was always sadness when the time came for the editor to leave: the keys would turn, the gates would clang, and Minor would be left alone again, trapped in a world of his own making, redeemed only when, after a day or so of quiet mourning, he could take down another volume from his shelves, select a needed word and its most elegant context, pick up his pen and dip it in the ink and write once more: To Dr Murray, Oxford. The Oxford Post Office knew the address well: it was all that was needed to communicate by letter with the greatest lexicographer in the land, and make sure the information got through to him at the Scriptorium.

So enormous have been Dr Minor’s contributions during the past 17 or 18 years, that we could easily illustrate the last 4 centuries from his quotations alone.

The surgical removal of the penis is at the best of times a dangerous practice, rarely performed even by doctors: an attack by the renowned bloodsucking Brazilian fishlet known as candiru, which likes to swim up a man’s urine stream and lodge in the urethra with a ring of retrorse spines preventing its removal, is one of the very rare circumstances in which doctors will perform the operation, known as a peotomy.

Dreadful to even read this passage.

By great good fortune the Home Secretary of the day was Winston Churchill – a man who, though less well known then than he would soon become, had a naturally sympathetic inclination towards Americans, since his mother was one.

Did not know that ol' Churchy was half yankee.

One must feel a sense of strange gratitude that his treatment was never good enough to divert him from his work. The agonies that he must have suffered in those terrible asylum nights have granted us all a benefit, for all time. He was mad, and for that we have reason to be glad. A truly savage irony, on which it is discomfiting to dwell.

The lonely drudgery of lexicography, the terrible undertow of words against which men like Murray and Minor had so ably struggled and stood, now had at last its great reward. Twelve mighty volumes; 414,825 words defined; 1,827,306 illustrative quotations used, to which Minor alone had contributed scores of thousands. The total length of type – all handset, for the books were done by letterpress, still discernible in the delicately impressed feel of the inked-on paper – is 178 miles, the distance between London and the outskirts of Manchester. Discounting every punctuation mark and every space – which any printer knows occupies just as much time to set as does a single letter – there are no fewer than 227,779,589 letters and numbers. Other dictionaries in other languages took longer to make; but none was greater, grander or had more authority than this. The greatest effort since the invention of printing. The longest sensational serial ever written.

Suffice to say, Dr Minor's contribution to the OED cannot be underestimated.