Madman shaped guide to language
Last month, I finally read a book I’ve had for years, The Professor and the Madman, by Simon Winchester. It’s about two people who were key to creating the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). I recommend it to anyone interested in words and language.
Members of the Philological Society of London decided in 1857 to create a dictionary. The publication was to be a definitive guide to the English language since Anglo-Saxon times.
I wondered how they chose the starting point. A.D. 1140 is considered to be the approximate time that English became English. A monk named Orm (not Mork from Ork) didn’t like that people were pronouncing words in numerous ways. He began a book of biblical text in which he spelled words just as they sounded. This explains, in part, why so many of the words we speak today have a crazy number of silent letters. (The pronunciations from that time have changed.)
I love that the Encyclopedia Britannica translated the title of this book Ormulum as “because Orm made it.”
Attempts at compiling dictionaries began in the 16th century. Some listed words alphabetically, others by subject. People wrote collections of hard words, unusual words, even “the choicest words.”
None had tried to include all the words in English. The Philological Society members decided to tackle the entire inventory.
The Philological Society members theorized that the dictionary would be four volumes, would hold 6,400 pages and would take a decade to complete.
They were off by a lot. It was such a huge undertaking that the process didn’t even begin for another couple of decades.
I’ll share a few facts about the first edition of the dictionary because that is the version detailed in this book.
Its 10 volumes include 15,490 pages.
It took 70 years to compile. It had 252,000 entries.
A key characteristic of the OED is the inclusion of a quotation from books for every sense of every word. About 5 million quotations were submitted to the editors. They managed to include a mere 1.9 million.
Many dictionaries today include a quotation or two with definitions. I remember reading Mark Twain as a kid and not knowing some of the words Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn and other characters would use. At least twice, the example sentence in the dictionary was the one I had
just read by Twain. I remember thinking that was scary.
The OED has its detractors. I’ll let you read the book to learn about those.
After I read it, I learned that it has been made into a 2019 movie with Mel Gibson and Sean Penn. When I found the book on Amazon, it had the familiar line, “Now a Major Motion Picture.” (Notice that it’s never a minor motion picture?)
Read more about the history of the language at arkansasonline.com/504english.
The “professor” in the book was James Murray, who would become the prime editor of the OED. The brilliant Scottish man spent his last 50 years of life working on the project. My favorite thing the book mentions about him is that as a teen “he made attempts to teach the local cows to respond to calls in Latin.”
The “madman” was William Minor, an American doctor who also was brilliant. But he was mentally ill and spent nearly half of his life in institutions after killing a man in London. He was an avid reader and submitted tens of thousands of quotations that were used in the OED.
I don’t want to talk too much about the book because I want you to read it. But I will share a few of the words I learned by reading this book.
A “polymath” is a person with expansive learning. I immediately recoiled from this word because of my fear of math. But the word comes from the roots of “poly,” meaning multiple, and “math” meaning learning.
“Reify.” This one is easier for me to understand than to explain. Also, it looked as if it had a prefix and a suffix, but nothing in the middle. When you reify, you use concrete examples to show abstract concepts. I found a form of the word in a Washington Post opinion piece:
All the memories and photographs and intangible accretions of friendship have been reified and neatly packaged where we can visit them on our iPhones from anywhere.
“Tocsin” is the ringing of a bell, or a warning. The meaning is literal at times, abstract at other times. It’s pronounced just like toxin, a poison. (That makes tocsin and toxin homophones.) Here’s an example of its use in a Washington Post review of three books about the Russian Revolution in 1917:
As three new books show, the revolution was local in its origins but global in its effects — a tocsin that heralded not just the birth of a new country, the Soviet Union, but also a new way of thinking about the relationships between politics, the state and ordinary people.
A “dab hand” is an expert. Merriam-Webster says it’s “chiefly British.” I’ll use that as my excuse for not knowing what the word means.
One’s “fettle” is the condition one is in. Nearly all the examples I found using this included “fine.” From a music review:
The orchestra sounded in fine fettle.
I think the best word I learned from the book is “inkhorn.” An inkhorn is a vessel for holding ink. Back when people wrote with quill pens, the ink was stored in a container often made from horn. Over time, the adjective inkhorn came to mean “affectedly or ostentatiously learned, pedantic.” I didn’t know this pet peeve of mine had its own adjective. As early as the 16th century, “inkhorn” described writers using obscure words, sometimes from Latin or Greek, to sound intellectual and highfalutin.
People who have read my columns might know that I prefer shorter, simpler words. But a longtime columnist from my first newspaper loved using words that would send people to their dictionaries. To each his own.