The Surgeon of Crowthorne

by Simon Winchester

philology

Knowledge

It would accomplish two desirable deeds: the fixing of the language, and the maintenance of its purity.

Note

defined. ‘I am not yet so lost in lexicography,’ he said in his famous preface, ‘as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven.’ His life had been devoted to the gathering in of those daughters; but it was heaven that had ordained their creation.

Note

And while Samuel Johnson and his team had taken six years to create their triumph, those involved in making what was to be, and still is, the ultimate English dictionary, took seventy years, almost to the day.

It would be necessary to recruit a team – moreover, a huge team, one probably comprising hundreds and hundreds of unpaid amateurs, all of them working as volunteers.

His cells still exist – not much at Broadmoor

Check

QMG.

Royal Family – a rule made because so many deranged

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,

There is some occasional carping that the work reflects an elitist, male, British and Victorian tone. Yet even in the admission that, like so many achievements of the era, it did reflect a series of attitudes that are not wholly harmonic with those at the end of the twentieth century, none seems to suggest that any other dictionary has ever come close, or will ever come close, to the achievement that it offers. It was the heroic creation of a host of interested and enthusiastic men and women of wide general knowledge and interest; and it lives on today, as does the language of which it rightly claims to be a portrait. Chapter Twelve

But nothing else remains to suggest that the man he killed was ever worthy of any memory at all. George Merrett has become an absolutely unsung man.