The Professor and the Madman

by Simon Winchester

“Happily,” proclaimed a smug editorial in Lambeth’s weekly newspaper, “we in this country have no experience of the crime of ‘shooting down,’ so common in the United States.”

To say that a story has two protagonists, or three, or ten, is a perfectly acceptable, unremarkable modern form of speech. It happens, however, that a furious lexicographical controversy once raged over the use of the word—a dispute that helps illustrate the singular and peculiar way in which the Oxford English Dictionary has been constructed and how, when it flexes its muscles, it has a witheringly intimidating authority.

now another shade of meaning had been found for it—that of “a leading player in some game or sport.” A sentence supporting this, from a 1908 issue of The Complete Lawn Tennis Player, is produced in evidence. But then comes the controversy. The other great book on the English language, Henry Fowler’s hugely popular Modern English Usage, which was first published in 1926, insisted—contrary to what Dryden had been quoted as saying in the OED—that protagonist is a word that can only ever be used in the singular.

And even if someone outside did know the word asylum, the sole definition that was available at the time was quite innocent in its explanation. The meaning was to be found in Johnson’s dictionary, naturally: “A place out of which he that has fled to it, may not be taken.” An asylum was to Doctor Johnson no more than a sanctuary, a refuge. William Chester Minor was quite content to be seen to write from inside such a place—just so long as no one looked too closely for the deeper and more sinister meaning that the word was then gathering to itself in the hard times of Victorian England.

And no, no, no! books were not to be scoured for rare words alone—he had to remind volunteers of this fact time and again. Readers must find and note all and any words that seemed interesting, or that were quoted in interesting and signifying ways or in ways that were good, apt, or pithy. As an example of the dangers of the process so far, he said, he had received no fewer than fifty quotes for the word abusion (which means “perversion of the truth”), but had had only five for the much more common word abuse. “My editors have to search for precious hours for quotations for examples of ordinary words, which readers disregarded, thinking them not worthy of including,” he wrote. Think simple, Murray kept insisting: Think simple.

With the arrival of Minor’s first letter, saying what he had done and how ready he was for further inquiry, Murray’s hard-pressed staff discovered that life had become in theory very much simpler. From this moment forward they were not obliged only to ferret through their shelves and pigeonholes, and to trawl through thousands of existing slips for quotations that might or might not exist for a word they wanted to include. They could simply decide on a word that was giving them problems, write to Crowthorne, and ask for it. With good fortune—and with a high statistical likelihood—they would in due course receive a letter and a package from Doctor Minor, giving the precise chapter and verse for whatever was wanted, enclosing the quotation slips at the very instant they were needed to be pasted onto a page for the compositors, the typesetters and the printers.

He organized the workings of the Scriptorium as might an officer on a battlefield. The slips were the peculiar province of the quartermaster corps, of which Murray was quartermaster general. The packages would come in each morning, a thousand or so slips a day. One reader would check quickly to see if the quotation was full and all words were spelled properly; then a second—often one of Murray’s children, each of whom was employed almost as soon as he or she was literate, paid sixpence a week for half an hour a day and rendered precociously crossword capable—would sort the contents of each bundle into the catchwords’ alphabetical order. A third worker would then divide the catchwords into their various recognized parts of speech—bell as noun, bell as adjective, bell as verb, for instance—and then a fourth employee would see that the quotations assembled for each were arranged chronologically. Then a subeditor, one of the more exalted members of the team, would subdivide the meanings of each word into the various shades it had enjoyed over its lifetime; also at this point (if he had not done so earlier) he would make a first stab at writing that most crucial feature of most dictionaries—the definition.

Defining words properly is a fine and peculiar craft. There are rules—a word (to take a noun as an example) must first be defined according to the class of things to which it belongs (mammal, quadruped), and then differentiated from other members of that class (bovine, female). There must be no words in the definition that are more complicated or less likely to be known than the word being defined. The definition must say what something is, and not what it is not. If there is a range of meanings of any one word—cow having a broad range of meanings, cower having essentially only one—then they must be stated. And all the words in the definition must be found elsewhere in the dictionary—a reader must never happen upon a word in the dictionary that he or she cannot discover elsewhere in it. If the definer contrives to follow all these rules, stirs into the mix an ever-pressing need for concision and elegance—and if he or she is true to the task, a proper definition will probably result.

He would write and insert the word’s etymology (which Oxford, despite the existence of its own etymological dictionary, did in the end see fit to allow Murray to include) and its pronunciation—a tricky decision, and one likely to provoke, as it has, ceaseless controversy—and then make a final selection of the very best quotations. Ideally there should be at least one sentence from the literature for each century in which the word was used—unless it was a very fast-changing word that needed more quotations to suggest the speed of its new shadings.

Murray was no whiner, but his letters tell a great deal about the difficulty of the task he had set himself—and that the publishers, who wanted to see a return on their investment, in turn had set him. The expressed hope was that two parts—six hundred pages of finished dictionary—might be published each year. Murray himself tried gallantly to complete work on thirty-three words every day—and yet “often a single word, like Approve…takes 3/4 of a day itself.”

recently, for example, the word art utterly baffled me for several days: something had to be done with it: something was done and put in type; but the renewed consideration of it in print, with the greater facility of reading and comparison which this afforded, led to the entire pulling to pieces and reconstruction of the edifice, extending to several columns of type.

Although the men talked principally about words—most often about a specific word, but sometimes about more general lexical problems of dialect and the nuances of pronunciation—they did, it is certain, discuss in a general sense the nature of the doctor’s illness. Murray could not help noticing, for instance, that Minor’s cell floor had been covered with a sheet of zinc—“to prevent men coming in through the timbers at night”—and that he kept a bowl of water beside the door of whichever room he was in—“because the evil spirits will not dare to cross water to get to me.”

Murray was aware, too, of the doctor’s fears that he would be transported from his room at night and made to perform “deeds of the wildest excess” in “dens of infamy” before being returned to his cell by dawn. Once airplanes were invented—and Minor, being American, kept keenly up to date with all that happened in the years after the Wright Brothers first flew at Kitty Hawk—he incorporated them into his delusions. Men would then break into his rooms, place him in a flying machine, and take him to brothels in Constantinople, where he would be forced to perform acts of terrible lewdness with cheap women and small girls. Murray winced as he heard these tales, but held his tongue. It was not his place to regard the old man with anything other than sad affection; and besides, his work for the dictionary continued apace.

Murray himself, given his steadily advancing years, suspected that with Furnivall’s passing, his own end could not be too far off. And with offering take to Furnivall it was evident he had only just begun the monumental work on the entirety of the letter T. That single letter was to take him five long years—from 1908 until 1913—to complete. When he finished he was so relieved as to voice an incautiously optimistic forecast: “I have got to the stage where I can estimate the end. In all human probability the Oxford English Dictionary will be finished on my eightieth birthday, four years from now.” But it was not to be.

In a sense doing all those dictionary slips was his medication; in a way they became his therapy. The routine of his quiet and cellbound intellectual stimulus, month upon month, year upon year, appears to have provided him with at least a measure of release from his paranoia.