The Professor and the Madman

by Simon Winchester

Then, as still today, the use of a firearm in the commission of a crime was thought of as somehow a very un-British act—and as something to be written about and recorded as a rarity. “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.”

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.

Just as English is a very large and complex language, so the OED is a very large and complex book. It defines well over half a million words. It contains scores of millions of characters, and, at least in its early versions, many miles of hand-set type. Its enormous—and enormously heavy—volumes are bound in dark blue cloth: Printers and designers and bookbinders worldwide see it as an apotheosis of their art, a handsome and elegant creation that looks and feels more than amply suited to its lexical thoroughness and accuracy.

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.

This, from a lexicographical point of view, seems to be the English word’s mother lode, a fair clue that the word may well have been introduced into the written language in that year, and possibly not before. (But the OED offers no guarantee. German scholars in particular are constantly deriving much pleasure from winning an informal lexicographic contest that aims at finding quotations that antedate those in the OED: At last count the Germans alone had found thirty-five thousand 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.)

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. Any use suggesting the contrary would be grammatically utterly wrong. And not just wrong, Fowler declares, but absurd. It would be nonsense to suggest that there could ever be two characters in a play, both of whom could be described as the most important. One either is the most important person, or one is not.

Perhaps Fowler’s great linguistic authority was technically correct but, the dictionary explains in an expanded version of its 1928 definition, perhaps only in the specific terms of classical Greek theater for which the word was first devised. In the commonsense world of modern English—the world that, after all, the great dictionary was designed to reify and define—to fix, in dictionary-speak—it is surely quite reasonable to have two or more leading players in any story. Many dramas have room for more than one hero, and both or all may be equally heroic. If the ancient Greeks were one-hero dramatists, then so be it. In the rest of the world, there could be as many as the dramatists cared to write parts for.

He engaged in furious digs at a multitude of archaeological sites all over the Borders (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;

Two of the sons that resulted from this marriage died, the first aged one, the second five. One of William’s stepsisters died when she was eight. His own sister, Lucy, died of consumption when she was twenty-one. (A third half-brother, Thomas T. Minor, died in peculiar circumstances many years later. He moved to the American West, first as doctor to the Winnebago tribe in Nebraska, then to the newly acquired Alaskan Territory to collect specimens of Arctic habitations, and finally on to Port Townsend and Seattle, where he was elected mayor.

There the full horror of this cruel and fearsomely bloody struggle came home to him, suddenly, without warning. Here was an inescapable irony of the Civil War, not known in any conflict between men before or since: the fact that this was a war fought with new and highly effective weapons, machines for the mowing down of men—and yet at a time when an era of poor and primitive medicine was just coming to an end. It was fought with the mortar and the musket and the minié ball, but not yet quite with anesthesia or with sulphonamides and penicillin. The common soldier was thus in a poorer position than at any time before: He could be monstrously ill treated by all the new weaponry, and yet only moderately well treated with all the old medicine.

One of the more interesting observations in this book.

But compared with those who had fought one or two years before, there was a subtle difference in the mood of the Irishmen who fought with the Federal troops in 1864. At the beginning of the war, before Emancipation had been proclaimed, the Irish were staunch in their support of the North, and equally antipathetic to a South that seemed, at least in those early days, to be backed by the England they so loathed. Their motives in fighting were complex—but once again it is a complexity that is important to this story. They were new immigrants from a famine-racked Ireland, and they were fighting in America not just out of gratitude to a country that had given them succor but in order to be trained to fight back home one day, and to rid their island of the hated English once and for all.

God—who in that part of London society was of course firmly held to be an Englishman—naturally approved the spread of the language as an essential imperial device; but he also encouraged its undisputed corollary, which was the worldwide growth of Christianity. The equation was really very simple, a formula for undoubted global good: The more English there was in the world, the more God-fearing its peoples would be. (And for a Protestant cleric there was a useful subtext: If English did manage eventually to outstrip the linguistic influences of the Roman Church, then its reach might even help bring the two churches back into some kind of ecumenical—if Anglican-dominated—harmony.)

The “English dictionary,” in the sense that we commonly use the phrase today—as an alphabetically arranged list of English words, together with an explanation of their meanings—is a relatively new invention. Four hundred years ago there was no such convenience available on any English bookshelf. There was none available, for instance, when William Shakespeare was writing his plays. Whenever he came to use an unusual word, or to set a word in what seemed an unusual context—and his plays are extraordinarily rich with examples—he had almost no way of checking the propriety of what he was about to do. He was not able to reach into his bookshelves and select any one volume to help: He would not be able to find any book that might tell him if the word he had chosen was properly spelled, whether he had selected it correctly, or had used it in the right way in the proper place.

Shakespeare was not even able to perform a function that we consider today as perfectly normal and ordinary a function as reading itself. He could not, as the saying goes, “look something up.” Indeed the very phrase—when it is used in the sense of “searching for something in a dictionary or encyclopedia or other book of reference”—simply did not exist. It does not appear in the English language, in fact, until as late as 1692, when an Oxford historian named Anthony Wood used it.

Swift was the fiercest advocate of all. He once wrote to the earl of Oxford to express his outrage that words like bamboozle, uppish, and—of all things—couldn’t were appearing in print. He wanted the establishment of strict rules banning such words as offensive to good sense. In future he wanted all spellings fixed—a firm orthography, the correctness of writing. He wanted the pronunciations laid down—an equally firm orthoepy, the correctness of speech. Rules, rules, rules: They were essential, declared Gulliver’s creator.

Samuel Johnson could not have disagreed more. At least he wanted to have no truck with ordering the language to remain pure. He might have liked it to, but he knew it couldn’t be done. As to whether he thought it possible or desirable to fix it, theses have tumbled by the score from academic presses in recent years, arguing variously that Johnson did want to or that he did not. The consensus now is that he originally planned to make a fix on the tongue, but when he was halfway through his six-year task, he came to realize that it was both impossible and undesirable.

“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.”

He had decided, as Murray was to decide a century later, that the best way—indeed the only way—to compile a full dictionary was to read: to go through all literature and list the words that appeared on hundreds of thousands of pages. It is an axiom that you have three overlapping choices in making a word list. You may record words that are heard. You may copy the words from other existing dictionaries. Or you may read, after which, in the most painstaking way, you record all the words you have read, sort them, and make them into a list.

It was swiftly realized that it would be impossible to look through everything, and so Johnson imposed limits. The language, he decided, had probably reached its peak with the writings of Shakespeare, Bacon, and Edmund Spenser, and so there was probably precious little need to go look further back than their lifetimes. He ruled, therefore, that the works of Sir Philip Sidney, who was only thirty-two when he died in 1586, would usefully mark the starting point for his search; and the last books published by newly dead authors would mark the end.

He did not publish the completed work until 1755, however: He wanted to persuade Oxford University to grant him a degree, believing that if he was able to add it to his name on the title page, it would do Oxford, the book’s sales, and himself—and not necessarily in that order—a lot of good. Oxford agreed; and on April 15, 1755, there appeared: A Dictionary of the English Language, in which the Words are deduced from their Originals and Illustrated in their Different Significations by Examples from the best Writers to which are prefixed a History of the Language and an English Grammar, by Samuel Johnson, A.M., in Two Volumes.

There were some critics. The fact that Johnson allowed his own personality to invade the pages may today seem pleasant whimsy, but to some who wanted the book to be supremely authoritative, it was irritatingly unprofessional. Many writers sniped at the limited authority of some of those whom Johnson quoted—a criticism that Johnson himself anticipated in his preface. Some found the definitions patchy—some trite, some unnecessarily complicated (as with network: “any thing reticulated, or decussated, at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections”). A century after publication the redoubtable Thomas Babington Macauley was to damn Johnson as “a wretched etymologist.

But, Macauley aside, many of the critics were probably just jealous, envious that Johnson had done what none of them could ever do. “Any schoolmaster might have done what Johnson did,” wrote one. “His Dictionary is merely a glossary to his own barbarous works.” But the writer was anonymous and quite probably a disappointed rival. or else a rabid Whig: Johnson was a noted Tory and wrote with what some thought a distinctive Tory bias.

One woman even disparaged Johnson for failing to include obscenities. “No, Madam, I hope I have not daubed my fingers,” he replied, archly. “I find, however, that you have been looking for them.”

Who now really remembers their dictionaries, and who today makes use of all that they achieved? The question begs an inescapably poignant truth, of the kind that dims so many other pioneering achievements in fields that extend beyond and are quite unrelated to this one. The reality, as seen from today’s perspective, is simply: However distinguished the lexicographical works of Thomas Elyot, Robert Cawdrey, Henry Cockeram, and Nathaniel Bailey, and however masterly and pivotal the creation of the Great Cham, Samuel Johnson himself, their achievements seem nowadays to have been only stepping-stones, and their magnificent volumes of work very little more than curios, to be traded, hoarded, and forgotten. And the reason for this is principally that in 1857, just over a century after the publication of the first edition of Johnson’s Dictionary, there came a formal proposal for the making of a brand-new work of truly stellar ambition, a lexicographical project that would be of far, far greater breadth and complexity than anything attempted before.

While Johnson had presented a selection of the language—and an enormous selection at that, brilliantly fashioned—this new project would present all of it: every word, every nuance, every shading of meaning and spelling and pronunciation, every twist of etymology, every possible illustrative citation from every English author.

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 was an essential credo for any future dictionary maker, he said, to realize that a dictionary was simply “an inventory of the language” and decidedly not a guide to proper usage. Its assembler had no business selecting words for inclusion on the basis of whether they were good or bad. Yet all of the craft’s earlier practitioners, Samuel Johnson included, had been guilty of doing just that. The lexicographer, Trench pointed out, was “an historian…not a critic”. It was not within the remit of one dictator—“or Forty” he added, with a cheeky nod at Paris—to determine which words should be used and which should not. A dictionary should be a record of all words that enjoy any recognized life span in the standard language.

Descriptive approach?

The undertaking of the scheme, he said, was beyond the ability of any one man. To peruse all of English literature—and to comb the London and New York newspapers and the most literate of the magazines and journals—must be instead “the combined action of many.” It would be necessary to recruit a team—moreover, a huge one—probably comprising hundreds and hundreds of unpaid amateurs, all of them working as volunteers.

The volunteers’ duties were simple enough, if onerous. They would write to the society offering their services in reading certain books; they would be asked to read, and make wordlists of all that they read, and would then be asked to look, super-specifically, for certain words that currently interested the dictionary team. Each volunteer would take a slip of paper, write at its top left-hand side the target word, and below, also on the left, the date of the details that followed: These were, in order, the title of the book or paper, its volume and page number, and then, below that, the full sentence that illustrated the use of the target word. It was a technique that has been undertaken by lexicographers to the present day.

He estimated that the first volume of the dictionary would be available to the world within two years. “And were it not for the dilatoriness of many contributors,” he wrote, clearly in a tetchy mood, “I should not hesitate to name an earlier period.” Everything about these forecasts was magnificently wrong. In the end more than six million slips of paper came in from the volunteers; and Coleridge’s dreamy estimate that it might take two years to have the first salable section of the dictionary off the presses—for it was to be sold in parts, to help keep revenues coming in—was wrong by a factor of ten. It was this kind of woefully naive underestimate—of work, of time, of money—that at first so hindered the dictionary’s advance. No one had a clue what they were up against: They were marching blindfolded through molasses.

And Herbert Coleridge’s early death slowed matters down even more. He died after only two years at work, at the age of thirty-one, not even halfway through looking at the quotations of words beginning with A. He had been caught in the rain on the way to a Philological Society lecture, and he had sat through it in the unheated upstairs room on St. James’s Square, caught a chill, and died. His last recorded words were: “I must begin Sanskrit tomorrow.”

One newcomer, asked why he had killed his wife and children, told the superintendent: “I don’t know why I am telling you all of this. It’s none of your business As a matter of fact it was none of the judge’s business either. It was a purely family affair [emphasis added].”

The letter seems to have worked a small miracle: Not only did Mrs. Merrett agree to accept financial help from Minor—she also asked if it might be possible to visit him. It was an unprecedented request, that an incarcerated murderer be allowed to spend time with a relative of his victim; but the Home Office, after discussing the matter with Doctor Orange, agreed to one experimental supervised visit. Accordingly, sometime during late 1879, Mrs. Eliza Merrett traveled up from Lambeth to Broadmoor and first met the man who had ended her husband’s life seven years before, and who had so drastically changed her own life and the lives of her seven children.

The list was quite awesome: Most of the volumes were rare, and likely to be in the hands of only a very few collectors. Some books, on the other hand, were already available at Murray’s newly established dictionary library at Mill Hill: They could be sent to readers who promised to do work on them. (And vouched to return them: When Henry Furnivall had been editor he found that a number of disgruntled readers used the lending scheme as a means of swelling their own library collections, and neither sent in the requested quotation slips nor ever returned the books.)

Murray’s early rules were clear and unambiguous: Every word was a possible catchword. Volunteers should try to find a quotation for each and every word in a book. They should perhaps concentrate their efforts on words that struck them as rare, obsolete, old-fashioned, new, peculiar, or used in a peculiar way; but they should also look assiduously for ordinary words as well, providing that the sentence that included it said something about the use or meaning of the word. Special attention also needed to be paid to words that seemed to be new or tentative, obsolete or archaic, so that the date could be used to help fix the moment of their introduction into the language. All that, Murray hoped, was surely plain enough. But then again, asked would-be readers—how many quotations should be supplied for each word? “As many as convenient,” Murray wrote back, especially where different contexts tended either to explain differences in the meaning or helped to illustrate the subtle variations in a particular word’s usage. The more quotation slips that came in to the iron shed he had built in Mill Hill, the better: He assured readers that he had an ample supply of assistants to sort them, and that his floors had been especially strengthened to hold them.

More than two tons of slips of papers had already come in from Coleridge and Furnivall’s first efforts, Murray added. But he didn’t allow as to how many of them had been nibbled at by mice or ruined by damp, nor did he reveal that one batch was found in a baby’s bassinet, or that a load of slips beginning with the letter I had been left in a broken-bottomed hamper in an empty vicarage, or that the entire letter F had been accidentally sent off to Florence, or that thousands of slips were so poorly handwritten that, Murray reported to a friend, it would have made for easier reading if they had been written in Chinese.)

Many early readers turned out to be dreadfully confused; they simply did not understand the scope of their allotted task. For example, asked a couple of them, Did every single use of the word the within any one book require an illustrative quote? There would be tens of thousands from any volume, before any of the substantive words were even begun. And further, wailed one of the women readers, what if one had plowed through all 750 pages of a volume, as she just had, and found not a single rare word to extract?

Murray’s notes offer a tolerant and genial-enough response to this kind of complaint, though a faint sense of his Calvinist asperity glimmers between the lines. No, he spoke through moderately gritted teeth, there was really no need to offer scores of illustrations for definite articles and prepositions, unless the circumstances turned out to be very strange. 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

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.

Reporting bias?

The unique manner of his procedure was soon to become a hallmark of Minor’s astonishing accuracy and eye for detail. His work would win the admiration and awe of all who were later to see it; even today the quires preserved in the dictionary archives are such as to make people gasp. Let us choose as an example the moment when he came across the word buffoon. He was first struck by the significance of its appearance, in a suitably illustrative sentence, on du Boscq’s page 34. He promptly wrote it down in his tiny, perfectly neat, perfectly legible handwriting, on the first page of his blank booklet. He wrote it in the first column, and decided to place the word and its page number in the column about a third of the way down. The placement was precise, and it was carefully chosen. The reason for this was Minor’s certainty that sooner or later he would find another interesting word beginning with the same letter, b; that there was a very good chance it would have to be put before buffoon and only a very much slimmer chance that it would need to be put after (because with buffoon’s second letter being u, there were only three possibilities—finding a further word or words whose second letter was again u, or one with the only other legitimate second letters, w—with only one word, bwana—or y).

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.

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.

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.”

There were no fewer than fourteen speeches—James Murray on the entire history of dictionary making, the head of the Oxford University Press on his belief that the project was a great duty to the nation, and the egregious Henry Furnivall, as lively and amusing as ever, taking time from recruiting buxom Amazons from the local ABC teahouse to come a-rowing with him, to speak on what he saw as Oxford’s heartless attitude toward the admission of women.

And then, quite precipitously, his life fell terribly apart. No one is sure why, except that he had a furious dispute with a fellow Sanskrit scholar from Austria named Theodor Goldstücker. It was a dispute of such gravity—linguists and philologists were known to be mercurial and hold eternal grudges—that it caused Hall to quit the India Office, have himself summarily suspended from the Philological Society, and leave London for a small village in Suffolk.

Murray advanced toward the great man, who rose. Murray bowed stiffly and extended his hand. “I, Sir, am Dr. James Murray of the London Philological Society,” he said in his finely modulated Scottish voice, “and editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. “And you sir, must be Dr. William Minor. At long last. I am most deeply honoured to meet you.” There was a pause. Then the other man replied: “I regret not, sir. I cannot lay claim to that distinction. I am the Superintendent of the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. Dr. Minor is an American, and he is one of our longest-staying inmates. He committed a murder. He is quite insane.” Doctor Murray, as the story then continues, was in turn astonished, amazed, and yet filled with sympathetic interest. “He begged to be taken to Doctor Minor, and the meeting between the two men of learning who had corresponded for so long and who now met in such strange circumstances was an extremely impressive one.”

The great librarian—for Justin Winsor remains one of the grandest figures in all of nineteenth-century American librarianship, and a formidable historian to boot—then told the story, which Murray then retold to his friend in Boston. Some of the facts are wrong, as facts tend to be when related over a period of years—Murray says that Minor went to Harvard (while in fact he went to Yale), and repeats the probably apocryphal story that he was driven mad by having to witness the execution of two men after a court-martial. He goes on to say that the shooting happened in the Strand—then, unlike now, one of London’s more fashionable streets—rather than in the grim purlieus of the Lambeth waterside. But essentially the story is relayed correctly, after which Murray resumes his own narrative.

True, Doctor Minor’s had a more ragged and unkempt look about it, doubtless because the arrangements for cutting and washing inside Broadmoor were rather less sophisticated than in the outside world. Murray’s beard, on the other hand, was fine and well-combed and shampooed, and looked as though no particle of food had ever been allowed to rest there. Minor’s was the more homely, while Murray’s was more of a fashion statement. But both were magnificently fecund arrangements. When the beards were added to the other collections of the pair’s individual attributes, each must have imagined, for a second, that he was stepping toward himself in a looking-glass, rather than meeting a stranger.

He was replaced by Doctor Brayn, a man selected (for more than his name alone, one trusts) by a Home Office that felt a stricter regime needed to be employed at the asylum.

He is the manager of an insane asylum.

Masturbate (), v. [f. L. masturbt-, ppl. stem of masturbr, of obscure origin: according to Brugmann for *mastiturbr f. *mazdo- (cf. Gr. pl.) virile member + turba disturbance. An old conjecture regarded the word as f. manu-s hand + stuprre to defile; hence the etymologizing forms MANUSTUPRATION, MASTUPRATE, -ATION, used by some Eng. writers.] intr. and refl. To practise self-abuse.