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employed at London’s Bethlehem Hospital for the Insane—such a dreadful place that the name has given us the word bedlam—where his duties included watching the prisoner-patients through the night to make sure that they behaved themselves and did not try to cheat justice by committing suicide. He had been seconded to the Horsemonger Lane Jail in mid-February,
“You will be detained in safe custody, Dr. Minor,” said the judge, “until Her Majesty’s Pleasure be known.” It was a decision that was to have unimaginable and wholly unanticipated implications, effects that echo and ripple through the English literary world to this day.
It took more than seventy years to create the twelve tombstonesize volumes that made up the first edition of what was to become the great Oxford English Dictionary.
The OED’s guiding principle, the one that has set it apart from most other dictionaries, is its rigorous dependence on gathering quotations from published or otherwise recorded uses of English and using them to illustrate the use of the sense of every single word in the language.
Some call the language of the dictionary old-fashioned, high-flown, even arrogant. Note well, they say by way of example, how infuriatingly prissy the compilers remain when dealing with even so modest an oath as “bloody”: Though the modern editors place the original NED definition between quotation marks—it is a word “now constantly in the mouths of the lowest classes, but by respectable people considered ‘a horrid word’, on a par with obscene or profane language, and usually printed in the newspapers (in police reports, etc.) ‘b——y’”—even the modern definition is too lamely self-regarding for
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Tenderloin expeditions.
or of oats (“a grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people”),
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.
English, who had raised eccentricity and poor organization to a high art, and placed the scatterbrain on a pedestal, loathed such Middle European things as rules, conventions, and dictatorships. They
Unwittingly, Sir Joshua’s words were to provide the starting point for a relationship between Doctor Murray and Doctor Minor that would combine sublime scholarship, fierce tragedy, Victorian reserve, deep gratitude, mutual respect, and a slowly growing amity that could even, in the loosest sense, be termed friendship. Whatever it was called, it was a link that would last the two
And yet as came the madness, so came the words. Many of those that fascinated him were Anglo-Indian, reflecting his birthplace: There were bhang, brinjal, catamaran, cholera, chunnam, and cutcherry. He
but so sonorous were the names and so evidently awesome their achievements, the diners, well into their port and cognac by now, heard them out in a silence that was easy to confuse with rapture. As it happens, the most fulsome remarks
Dr. Fitzedward Hall,
In England he had no one and no work, no reason for existence. His life was merely a slow-moving tragedy, an act of steady dying conducted before everyone’s eyes.
Pray pardon the liberty I take, to enclose you a postal payable to your order—that I thought might add in a small way against unexpected demands upon your means. Even a millionaire may feel satisfaction to find he has a sovereign more than he thought for, though himself a republican, and we less gifted people have a right to a like satisfaction when the chance permits. Building a house and going on a journey are much the
same, in costing more than one expects; and in any case I am sure you can make this useful. Now I will say goodbye to you both, with best wishes for your welfare, and in its uncontracted form also, God be with you, W. C. Minor
All the casual inconveniences of old age were being piled onto his madness, each a Pelion upon Ossa, until William Minor was no more than a thin and elderly wretch, feared by no one, pitied by all.
One must feel a sense of strange gratitude, then, 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.
forgetting. His mind, though tortured, had always been peculiarly acute:
Thanking you for what you would wish to do. I am very truly yours W. C.
He had lived for eighty-five years and nine months. He might have been mad, but like Doctor Johnson’s dictionary elephant, he had been “extremely long lifed.”
The simple existence of the fence underlines a sad and ironic reality: Dr. William Minor, who was among the greatest of contributors to the finest dictionary in all the English language, died forgotten in obscurity, and is buried beside a slum.
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 William Minor alone had contributed scores of thousands.
The greatest effort since the invention of printing. The longest sensational serial ever written.
One word—and only one word—was ever actually lost: bondmaid, which appears in Johnson’s dictionary, was actually mislaid by Murray and was found, a stray without a home, long after the fascicle Battentlie-Bozzom had been published. It, and tens of thousands of words
It was the heroic creation of a legion of interested and enthusiastic men and women of wide general knowledge and interest; and it lives on today, just as lives the language of which it rightly claims to be a portrait.
This has been the story of an American soldier whose involvement in the making of the world’s greatest dictionary was singular, astonishing, memorable, and laudable—and yet at the same time wretchedly sad.
ceaseless enthusiasm, dogged initiative, and untiring zeal,
MOST OF US KNOW about twenty thousand words—a fine number, except that the Oxford English Dictionary lists more than half a million as making up the entirety of the language. A sobering realization: that of all possible words we know no more than a mere four percent.
