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‘Words are like stories, don’t you think, Mr Sweatman? They change as they are passed from mouth to mouth; their meanings stretch or truncate to fit what needs to be said. The Dictionary can’t possibly capture every variation, especially since so many have never been written down
I used to think it was the other way around, that the misshapen words of the past were clumsy drafts of what they would become; that the words formed on our tongues, in our time, were true and complete. But I was realising that, in fact, everything that comes after that first utterance is a corruption.
‘Just bow to the young lady and try not to bang your heads,’ said Mr Sweatman from the other side of the sorting table. ‘You see what happens when you leave us, Esme? We must make do with music-hall comedians.’
Mr. Sweatman is the best. He deserves a better name.
mine, ‘everyone who contributes copy to the Dictionary will leave a trace of themselves, no matter how uniform Father, or Mr Dankworth, would like it to be.
Lizzie removed her apron. It was splattered with roasting juices, and she was changing it for a clean one just as Mrs Ballard used to do before she took a roast to table. As if evidence of their toil was offensive.
I’d searched the volumes and the pigeon-holes for just the right word to explain what I was feeling, experiencing. So often, the words chosen by the men of the Dictionary had been inadequate.
the words most often used to define us were words that described our function in relation to others. Even the most benign words – maiden, wife, mother – told the world whether we were virgins or not. What was the male equivalent of maiden? I could not think of it. What was the male equivalent of Mrs, of whore, of common scold?
You are not a coward, Esme. It pains me to think that any young woman would think such a thing because she is not being brutalised for her convictions.
it will be a long game. Play a position you are good at, and let others play theirs.
silence is a void filled with anxieties.
you should at least consider all sides. Not all sides have a newspaper to speak for them.’ ‘It’s a good thing, then, that some of them have you.’
she couldn’t stop saying that he was only turning seventeen next week. Over and over, like the fact of it would bring him back
‘But maybe it will help others to understand what she is feeling.’ Even as I said it, I wasn’t convinced. Of some experiences, the Dictionary would only ever provide an approximation. Sorrow, I already knew, was one of them.
‘Fred Sweatman was my lookout at the Scrippy,
Aw. Of course he was.
‘You make sure you come home now, Gareth. I can’t have her living in my room forever.’ ‘You have my word, Lizzie,’ he called back.
Cruel.
‘Don’t you think it’s about time you called me Fred?’
❤️
A poet might be able to push this word or that to mean something more than what has been ordained by our Dictionary men.
‘It wasn’t my place to judge what you said or how you said it. I just wanted to record, and maybe understand.’
This is what she did, you see: she noticed who was missing from the official records and gave them an opportunity to speak.
Meg pulled V to Z from its position at the end of the shelf and opened to the first page. She could smell its newness, feel the spine resist as she opened it. Published 1928.
Is that why you killed her off? So her life encompassed the making of the OED?
when I used to ask the adults in my life for help, they would say, ‘look it up in the dictionary’, but when you can’t spell, the dictionary can be an impenetrable thing.
But in all cases, they were outnumbered by their male counterparts, and history struggles to recall them at all.
the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary was a flawed and gendered text. But it was also extraordinary, and far less flawed and gendered than it might have been in the hands of someone other than James Murray.
every publication, since ‘A to Ant’ in 1884, has reflected some small move towards greater representation of all those who speak the English Language.
South Australian Parliament passes the Constitutional Amendment (Adult Suffrage) Act. This act grants all adult women (including Aboriginal women) the right to vote and the right to stand for Parliament. It is the first parliament in the world to do so. (While women in New Zealand won the right to vote in 1893, they were not eligible for election to the House of Representatives until 1919.)
Damn, I was so confused about the Aus/NZ discrepancy earlier on. If only I'd read this sooner.
