The Word Detective

FIRST things first: it’s not that John Simpson. It’s another one, the former chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). If this one has ever talked to camera in a safari suit while bombs rained down around him, it’s because a holiday has gone wrong, not because it was his job.

This Simpson started at the OED in 1976, straight out of university, as the most junior editor and retired in 2013 as head honcho.

The OED, in the 1970s was run, as I imagine it would have been run, in the 1870s. Editors worked on new words by writing on cards, and then filing those cards in a huge filing system, so heavy it had to stay in the basement.

Every day they would meet for a “dictionary tea”, where they would discuss all things dictionary. Simpson remembers one conversation about whether the plural of “referendum” should be “referendums” or “referenda” that almost ended in bloodshed. (They finally plumped for “referendums”.)

Occasionally the great panjandrum of the organisation, Robert Burchfield, would come and reminisce about his first day, back in 1957. Apparently he sat in his office and, “after much deliberation and doubtless many lonely cups of tea, he decided the best way to establish how the language was moving was to read the copy of The Times that he had brought to work”.

It all had to change, of course. Simpson was at the vanguard of the dictionary’s computerisation.

At one point the dictionary moved to new offices in St Giles’, one of the main streets in central Oxford, and the chief editor was determined to find out whether the street name should end with an apostrophe or not. Local records were perused, newspapers consulted, etymologists dug up for opinions, and the actual evidence of the living language was quiet- ly analysed.

“After weeks of debate and drama, the gavel came down on the side of the apostrophe.” Who would not want to work there?

Simpson intersperses his narrative with parentheses (in a different font) about definitions of particular words. “Inkling”, for example, derives from the good old English verb “to inkle”, which means to hint. He becomes interested in words that wouldn’t have entered the OED’s purview before, such as the Caribbean term “skanking”.

He then meets the performance poet Benjamin Zephaniah and asks him what it means. Zephaniah says that the next time he is in Oxford he will drop into the office and perform a “skank”.

This he does. Look in the dictionary now, and you’ll see this definition: “A style of West Indian dancing to reggae music, in which the body bends forward at the waist, and the knees are raised and the hands claw the air in time to the beat.”

Autobiography is a difficult genre to get right, but this elegantly crafted volume

After weeks of debate and drama, the gavel came down on the side of the apostrophe. Who would not want to work there?

will provide greater entertainment than a few more famous memoirists.

Did you know the Duke of Wellington was the first person to use the word “ganga” for cannabis? He wrote it in a report about Indian bazaars in 1800.– Daily Mail