The Oxford English Dictionary is a two-sided Kandinsky, a rare double image of grinding scholarship and popular acclaim. Unavoidably, perhaps, it is more widely esteemed than used. But somehow it has enough cachet that Mel Gibson is producing and starring in a movie about its first chief editor, James Murray, and one of its more eccentric early contributors, an American Civil War veteran named W. C. Minor, who mailed in citations from where he lived, an asylum for the criminally insane.
The movie is based on Simon Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman (1998). Even if the film is successful, by the way, I don’t think we’re in any danger of being inundated by dictionary-related movies. That’s because the OED is an only child among dictionaries and reference books. It receives all the love.
The OED is unique in other ways, not least for being a speaker of uncomfortable truths. Not long ago new evidence indicated a very benign origin for the controversial term redskin, requiring a forthright correction to the dictionary’s own earlier statements on whence this term came. This the dictionary made without hesitation, it seemed.
The OED is also a monument to several principles considered axiomatic by language scholars but frequently sniffed at by defenders of good English. One of these is that change over time—in meaning, pronunciation, spelling, and grammatical function—is perfectly ordinary for words and language. Another is that the job of a serious dictionary is to inventory the language, not to filter out the bad parts. As one of the OED’s founders, Richard Chenevix Trench, said about the lexicographer, “He is an historian of [the language], not a critic of it.”
Fortunately for the OED, these principles were as if written on its birth certificate, with a historical point of view and neutrality toward individual words at the heart of the project from the beginning. Yet not even the Swiss-like lexicographer can stay forever neutral when the language he or she holds dear is invaded by a barbaric new lexeme. The second editor of the OED, Henry Bradley, a member of the Society for Pure English, was aghast that swashbuckling was a part of the English language, according to Lynda Mugglestone’s Lost for Words (2005), a history of the OED. Bradley also hated it when people called the upper part of the face a fore-head. It seemed obvious to him that the h sound should be unvoiced, and the correct pronunciation was for-id.
The urge to correct and improve on what sounds fall from the mouths of humans is surely as universal as variation itself. Where a certain amount of deference is wanting in the usual way of putting things, we attempt to supply it. As common usage produces ugliness, we plot our linguistic journeys in the other direction. Our opinions about language shape how we use it and whether we genuflect before certain distinctions or walk on by.
Even John Simpson, who retired as chief editor of the OED in 2015, is made grumpy by certain words. Heft and hunkering, he complains, are always showing up in contemporary fiction. And he does not like content, which he calls “publisher’s jargon that reduces text to the level of filler. . . . For lexicographers, the opposite of content is discontent.” In The Word Detective, a memoir of his nearly four decades working on the OED, Simpson says he has no favorites among words. He is so open-minded that he even makes room for words he does not like, such as content. Many pages later, he mentions “the content and structure of the dictionary,” and while discussing a plan to update the OED, he writes, “With those changes, we could open up the content.”
Simpson is actually a very pleasant and smiling guide to the world of historical lexicography. Every word is a story, and he makes the most of it by breaking up his narrative with brief essays on the histories of various words, choosing superb examples. A dead line, says Simpson, is one that the fish are not biting on, or such is the first recorded use in the OED files. Where deadline comes to life is in the American Civil War:
The work of lexicography, safe to say, is more like fishing than shooting prisoners. Simpson, who seems to credit his being hired in 1976 to a lucky draw of conversational topics during his job interview, distinguished himself at the OED by his appetite for research. On the same page he recalls volunteering to investigate the lexicons of punk and Rastafarianism, he mentions buying a used set of 18th-century novels, which he brought on vacation and dutifully marked up. Such is his taste for busman’s holidays that, on another day off, he drives to an old diocesan archive to pursue a suspicion that an early citation for pal was being misinterpreted.
To make it into the OED, a word must achieve some kind of regular existence over a period of time. The one-use inspirations of poets and wits—the so-called hapax legomenon—do not qualify. And Simpson is deeply interested in where evidence of usage is found, preferring a broad range of sources that goes far beyond the literary canon.
James Murray was criticized for citing evidence of usage in the vulgar pages of newspapers, a lament that today seems especially Victorian. Simpson makes the opposite complaint: that the imperial literary tastes of early readers who contributed citations to the OED led to a misimpression that canonical authors enjoyed a greater influence over the language than was actually the case. James Joyce, for example, is listed as the first source for around 575 terms in the Second Edition, Simpson says, but in the current revision, earlier references have been found for over 40 percent of those.
Obviously, celebrated literature enjoys an extraordinary advantage over less-readily-available texts and unrecorded language when it comes time to be remembered in the pages of a dictionary. As the leader of the OED’s new words group, Simpson looked for ways to democratize and thus improve the sourcing of historical evidence. Even though the OED will not allow spoken language to be used as citations, he carried around a notebook to catch language on the fly.
Another great preoccupation of Simpson’s tenure was the digitization of the OED, which will surely go down as his great achievement. The OED’s unusual record of success as it transitioned into the digital age may not already be a Harvard Business School case study, but it could be. As early as the 1980s, the OED began experimenting with computerization, placing its files on computers, editing them, and, finally in 1992, selling the dictionary on a compact disc.
As important as the textual riches of the Internet, the simple search function is, obviously, a major hero of the digital revolution: The ability to search the OED’s own files on a disc helped Simpson and others understand that a dictionary is not only a book but a database. And in searching their database, OED editors made new discoveries. An earlier citation for militia was found in the OED’s own entry for folkmoot (an old term for a kind of town assembly).
Unlike a printed book, a database can also be updated whenever the need arises and instantly made available to online users. It can seem as if all the limitations imposed on dictionaries by printing and retail publishing are falling away in the digital age. A dictionary can now be not just “unabridged” but infinite, forever unhalted by the need to stop and print. The bitter joke that by the time your dictionary is published it’s already out of date is replaced by a new editorial model in which your dictionary is always updating and improving.
Today, the dictionary seems almost perfectible, but more than a few would-be lexicographers have been exiled from utopia. Simpson’s memoir could have done more to illuminate the churning of jobs brought on by cyclical hiring in the dictionary business and by the disruptions wrought by digitization and the lean cost structure of contemporary publishing. As an employee of Oxford University, perhaps Simpson is shielded from some of this collateral damage, but not all of it. His reticence about his colleagues may even be understandable, but it crops an important part of the story behind the OED.
Where Simpson’s humanity is on more touching display is in his own family. The arrival of a severely disabled child challenges him to love and care for a person sealed off from the world of language. His handling of this autobiographical material is admirable for its simple honesty, and it serves as an occasion for him to discuss delicate questions of linguistic appropriateness, which he does with an intellectual seriousness that should play a larger part in how we address shifting linguistic manners. These passages are, in a word, very English—a touch blunt and never lachrymose, the best of a good book.
David Skinner, writer and editor, is the author of The Story of Ain’t: America, Its Language, and the Most Controversial Dictionary Ever Published.
