The Professor and the Madman

by Simon Winchester

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).