Oxford Dictionary editor enjoys the last word
“THE MORE WE WORK WITH THE DICTIONARY ON THE COMPUTER, THE MORE WE SEE THAT WORDS ARE JUST PART OF THE MOSAIC OF LANGUAGE.”
JOHN SIMPSON
The third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary is some 18 years behind schedule. But then, one doesn’t like to rush these things, says the departing chief editor.
John Simpson is a fairly normal human being who shaves in the morning, doesn’t wear a black velvet four-cornered cap and can use snappy sentences to get his point across.
He doesn’t expect people to genuflect in his presence. It’s as well to establish this because Simpson himself — departing chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary — has failed to douse the expectation that he is some kind of austere patriarch with a long white beard, like his Victorian predecessor, Sir James Murray.
Yet the awe his position inspires is not really so very weird. The OED is the most exacting and authoritative living document of the English language ever devised. It runs to 20 monumental volumes, defines more than half a million words and is in a state of perpetual revision.
During his 37-year tenure, Simpson has not only initiated the biggest overhaul of the dictionary for 100 years (the third edition, or OED3), but taken the whole mindblowing endeavour onto to the web.
Today, the OED is not just a hefty collection of reference books but a dynamic online resource that tells the story of human history through the words we use. Simpson has masterminded that revolution. “Maybe it’s time to see what happens outside the windows,” he muses of his impending retirement.
When he joined, there were 25 editors. Today, there are 70, sitting in silent concentration outside his office. The deep quiet of lexicographical brains at work is enveloping. Outside this room, there are hundreds of unseen scholars, research engineers, specialist consultants and readers. The dictionary has always appealed to the public for help in tracking down and compiling new words and usages, but the Internet has turned that steady trickle into a torrent.
“Contributors can send grumpy letters,” Simpson says. “They like to tell you what clots we are. But if you write back and show you have taken note, you find a poacher-turned-gamekeeper attitude. All the time, we are fighting against stereotypes — the long white beard, the Oxford elite. It’s not like that at all. I want to show that the work is fun.”
The most infamous contributor was Dr. William Minor, who, after years of correspondence with Murray on the first edition (18841928), was revealed to be a lunatic, confined to Broadmoor asylum for murder and who later cut off his own penis. (His story is told in Simon Winchester’s bestseller The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary.)
“I don’t think we have anyone quietly detained by the authorities,” Simpson says dryly. “Lots of people we correspond with who are interested in words are quite obsessive, but that doesn’t make them mad. It just makes them useful.”
Simpson can’t bear sloppiness. In common with most lexicographers, he has an innate distrust of people who claim to “love words.”
“There is so much waffle and woolly-mindedness,” he says. “Our job is to analyze data, not to love words. If somebody writes in with a new fact, I start off by disbelieving it.”
He doesn’t really think about words as “lovely little things,” but about the circumstances in which they arose, the history, the culture.
“The more we work with the dictionary on the computer, the more we see that words are just part of the mosaic of language.”
New words don’t excite him as they once did. “I used to keep a notebook in my pocket in case I came across new words,” he says. “That worked until I put my trousers in the washing machine.”
Besides, they are usually about 20 or 30 years older than people think, he points out. The new adjectival entry “buzzworthy,” for instance, is assumed to be late 1990s, but is recorded almost two decades earlier.
Words and phrases the OED has recently embraced include “phone hacking”; “gurrier”, an Irish-English colloquialism for a street urchin, circa 1936; and “heart attack on a plate”, for which evidence dates back to 1984. The new entry for “great balls of fire!” — indelibly associated with the Jerry Lee Lewis song of 1957 — actually goes back to 1893.
It takes about 10 years for a new word to pass through the fine-mesh editorial process to publication. But that is far from final. Every three months, the entire OED database is republished online, new words added, old words revised. Any of the dictionary’s readers may spot more information to improve an entry and that will be reflected. Revisions can go on indefinitely as more ante-datings are found and more information floods in.
Simpson would like people to be able to go home and press a button to review what appetizing stuff the OED has truffled each day. He fantasizes about having new dictionary entries shown continuously on screens in Trafalgar Square “so people can see what we’re doing.”