The Meaning of Everything

by Simon Winchester

  Let us say, for sake of argument, that the word was bungalow, and that it appeared in the self-evidently illustrative sentence: `Every day I stopped once or twice at a travellers' bungalow, or rest-house' (which is a quotation that Minor did indeed find in an 1875 copy of Lippincott's Magazine, and which the Dictionary later used). He would place the word in his booklet so that it was likely, eventually, to occupy its logical place in what he was in essence creating, an alphabetical index of the main book. Hence he would place bungalow on a very early page (since its first letter was b) somewhere towards the bottom (since its second letter was u) of the page.

  If the next word-and-quotation he found interesting was bread, he would position this word somewhere above bungalow, leaving enough space for words whose second letters lay within the range

  -re to -un, words like broken, bubble, and bully and which, if he happened upon them later, would slide in between those he had already found. If the next word that intrigued him was chortle, he would place this on a page or so a little further on; and if it was youngster, say, then it would go on the middle part of a page towards the end of the book. Against each word he would write the page number and line on which he had found it, so that he could find the sentence that included it in just a matter of moments.

  After some weeks of work—being a prisoner who was, essentially, serving out a life sentence, he had a limitless number of weeks ahead of him, so time was not a problem as it might have been for others—he would find he had completed a full word index for the book. He would head it with the title of the book; and then begin work on another, making another booklet for that, and then another and another, and so on.

  He would then wait for a communication—a letter or a postcard—from the editors. Rather than contribute quotations as he came across them—which is what almost all the other volunteers did, and often in vast numbers—he would bide his time until the editors asked him to solve a problem which immediately confronted them. A card would come in: the staff were just then working on the word bungalow—had Dr Minor by any chance any illustrative quotations for it? Had he by happenstance something in his index books that would satisfy what the editors were calling their desiderata—had he something (in this case a word, a quotation, or the solution to some lexicographical puzzle), which the labourers in the Scriptorium wanted, required, or desired?

  And the doctor—no one in Oxford in those early days knew he was in an asylum cell; it was supposed by those who knew what Broadmoor was that he worked on the asylum staff—he would go to the index folders, look up those entries for bungalow, find the relevant quotations noted in his index—often there would be scores of entries, perhaps dozens in one book alone—write each on a separate quotation slip, and put the bundle in the post for the Scriptorium. The editors would duly receive the bundle the next morning, and would ease them into the very page of the Dictionary on which they were then working. Working with Minor was just, one of them said, like turning on a tap. Whenever the Dictionary wanted specific material for words, an editor had merely to send a postcard to Broadmoor, and out the details flowed, in abundance and always with unerring accuracy.

  Murray and Minor did meet, and under unusual circumstances—no one at the Dictionary, least of all James Murray, had hitherto suspected that their most assiduous contributor was a madman, a murderer, and an American. But once the two did meet they became the firmest of friends; and when the elderly Minor, ill from his self-mutilation, was clearly no further threat to any member of the public, Murray saw to it that he was permitted to go home to spend his final years in the America of his birth. The Home Secretary at the time, the minister ultimately responsible for the asylum, was Winston Churchill, and he signed Minor's release papers in 1910. When the ailing old soldier sailed away home—with his elderly brother, who had been at the trial where he had first been sentenced 38 years before, to escort him back —he took with him as memento the first half-dozen completed volumes of the Dictionary to which he had made so immense— but in many senses unsung—a contribution. And in his later years, which he spent in yet more asylums and later in a hospital for the elderly insane, he told visitors that he could remember almost by heart what Murray had written of him, so warmly, some years before he left:

  The supreme position … is certainly held by Dr. W. C. Minor of Broadmoor, who during the past two years has sent in no less [sic] 55 than 12,000 quots. These have nearly all been for the words with which Mr. Bradley and I were actually occupied, for Dr. Minor likes to know each month just what words we are likely to be working on during the month and to devote his whole strength to supplying quotations for those words, and thus to feel he is in touch with the making ofthe Dictionary.

  So enormous have been Dr. Minor's contributions during the past 17 or 18 years, that we could easily illustrate the last 4 centuries from his quotations alone.

  The phrase `to feel he is in touch with the making of the Dictionary' has a kindly feel to it—an illustration, I like to think, of the little-seen compassionate side of Murray's normally rather stern nature. By then the editor had been well aware of Minor's sad condition; he thought, in a generous way (and, as it happens, with perfect correctness), that Minor would be a happier man if he could know that he was involved, however peripherally, in so grand and noble a project. Murray thought that it would give him a sense of purpose, a source of joy in his otherwise ruined life that he was doomed to spend behind the high walls and iron bars—and tortured fantasies—of his unending imprisonment.

  And there were many others besides, men and women who were in their own ways just as eccentric, their stories just as strange— though generally rather more cheerful than the sagas of Hall and Minor. In all the nooks and crannies of this project there lurked learned and remarkable people—those who were paid seem at this remove to have been every bit as unusual as those who did their work as reader volunteers. Consider, for example, the kind of mind that must have been possessed by one of the most tireless of Murray's editorial assistants, Frederick Sweatman.

  Sweatman was the son of a printer, and had little by way of a formal education. He joined the Bodleian Library in 1888, when he was just fifteen; and two years later, once Murray had come up from Mill Hill to the Banbury Road, joined him working in the Scriptorium. He remained as a word-slave for the following 43 years, saw the Dictionary through to its completion, and then worked on the Supplement that eventually came out in 1933. He died in 1936.

  That he must have been exceedingly bright is axiomatic: no one with a less than razor-sharp mind would have survived the intellectual rigours of working under Murray and Bradley (nor under their immediate successors, William Craigie and Charles Onions, for whom Sweatman was also an assistant). But a clue to his particularly unusual imagination came in the early 1900s, when he decided to write a playful definition of the word radium. 6

  Pierre and Marie Curie had discovered this new radioactive element in 1898; its first mention as a linguistic entity was made in both Nature and Chemistry News the following January. By what some might think a coincidence, and others a piece of lexicographic good fortune, the newly appointed William Craigie was working on the section R-Reactive in 1902, within just three years of the word radium coming into existence. One might suppose Craigie would have swooped on the word—some volunteer reader would have uncovered the quotation (`These different reasons lead us to believe that the new radio-active substance contains a new element, to which we propose to give the name of radium'—because it emitted rays) and inserted it into the section, then into the part R and then the completed Volume VIII, Q-S.

  But dictionaries do not respond so quickly. Craigie, like all his brother editors, was a cautious man. And James Murray, who by

  1903 was sunk in a brown study pondering both Kaiser-Kyx and P-Pennached, would have agreed with his caution. Would the new word last? Was it merely a scientific arcanum, jargon for a specialized priesthood? Or would it in due time enter the language proper, become a true part of the En
glish tongue? To determine that, said Craigie, with Murray's concurrence—wait a while. And just for now, leave it out.

  Charles Onions

  William Craigie

  So radium is not listed in the completed first edition of the Dictionary, and makes its first appearance only in the 1933 Supplement—an 867-page volume it was found necessary to publish in order to list all the new words (such as radium) and all the new meanings and senses of already listed words which had appeared or had been invented during the decades that the Dictionary itself had been in preparation. It was therefore up to Craigie and Onions to write definitions for these new words and meanings—and to tackle entirely new concepts, like radium. Frederick Sweatman (or Henry Bayliss), it is supposed, had the first try.

  First, he wrote a wondrously complex etymology, followed by the sparest of definitions:

  Radium. [mod.L. radium (B. Balius Add. Lex. : not in DuCange). The orig. source is Preh.—adamispadi, to dig;—Antediluv. randam (unconnected with PanArryan randan.) Cognate with OH Hash, mqdrq; Opj. rangtrum; MHGug. tsploshm; Mubr. dndrpq; Baby. daddums and N.Pol. rad are unconnected.] The unknown quantity. Math. Symbol x.

  Cf. Eureka.

  And then he had fun with an almost endless list of quotations and explanations, offered here in abbreviated form:

  Aristotle De. P.Q. LI. xx says it may be obtained from the excrement of a squint-eyed rat that has died of a broken heart buried 50ft below the highest depths of the western ocean in a well-stopped tobacco tin, but Sir T. Browne says this is a vulgar error; he also refutes the story that it was dug in the air above Mt. Olympus by the ancients.

  [Not in J., the Court Guide, or the Daily Mail Year Book before 1510.]

  1669 Pepys Diary, 31 June, And so to bed. Found radium an excellent pick-me-up in the morning. 1873 Hymns A & M 2517 Thy walls are built of radium.1600 Hakluyt's Voy. IV.21 The kyng was attired simply in a hat of silke and radium-umbrella.

  Probably many of the other assistants were similarly talented, though sadly few today are remembered. One, however, is quite unforgotten: John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, who worked under Bradley for one year, 1919, and is known today (though by the more formally British version of his name, J. R. R. Tolkien) by children of all ages, for writing The Hobbit and The Lord ofthe Rings. In dictionary circles he is known specifically for having laboured mightily over words beginning with W, among them warm, wasp, water, wick, wallop, 7 waggle, and winter. He also dealt at length with the three very tricky W words walnut, wampum, and walrus, and in lexicographical circles his struggles with walrus have become almost famous, since in the Bodleian library there is a ring-backed notebook in Tolkien's distinctively neat handwriting listing a bewildering variety of its possible definitions and puzzling etymologies.

  W was always in any case reckoned an interesting letter— there are essentially no Greek or Latin derivatives that begin with W, and its words are generally taken, as Bradley put it, `from the oldest strata of the language'. Walrus, a classic example of an extremely ancient W word, 8 is from Dutch and Low German, and when Tolkien finally got it right—he inserted a lengthy explanation of the etymology and of the curious word horse-whale, which is part of the convoluted story of walrus—and when he submitted his definition to the approving Bradley, what he wrote was quite masterfully precise:

  The sea-horse, or morse ( Trichechus rosmarus), a carnivorous pinniped marine mammal allied to the Phocidae (seals), and Otariidae (sea-lions), and chiefly distinguished by two tusks (exserted upper canine teeth). It inhabits the Arctic seas. A variety found in the N. Pacific has sometimes received the distinct specific name obesus. 9

  Tolkien said later of the time he spent with the Dictionary that he `learned more … than in any other equal period of my life'.

  Among the other largely unremembered notables are Sidney Herrtage, who, as already mentioned, turned out to be a kleptomaniac, and was fired for stealing; Herbert Ruthven, who was Murray's brother-in-law, a fair-to-middling lexicographer and, most importantly, the pigeon-hole-building Scriptorium carpenter; Alfred Erlebach, who was quite brilliantly supportive in the early days of the project, but vexed Murray mightily by leaving to teach at his brother's school; Charles Balk, who worked for Murray for 28 years and then wrote a lengthy meditation on life entitled Life is Growth; Arthur Maling, who worked from 1881 until 1927, was a wealthy Cambridge-educated mathematician and an eager Esperanto enthusiast, and who wore his distinctive green star badge in an effort to promote this most lost of causes; Wilfrid Lewis, the son of a college servant who managed to relieve the monotony of his 44-year stint with the slips by compiling what many still regard as the best and most comprehensive historical dictionary of the language of cricket; the magnificently named Hereward Thimbleby Price, 10 who was conscripted into the German army, captured by the Russians, and escaped overland to China—he wrote a book in 1919 called Boche and Bolshevik: Experiences ofan Englishman in the German Army and in Russian Prisons; the equally delightful-sounding LawrencesonFitzroy Powell, whose father had been a trumpeter in the Charge of the Light Brigade and who himself, though without any academic qualifications, became Librarian of Oxford's Taylorian Institution and an authority on Johnson and Boswell; and the redoubtable Catholic priest and missionary Father Henry Rope, who joined the team some time before 1905 and was still working, sending in quotations at the time of his death in 1978, when the four supplements were being prepared; the archive shelves groan under the weight of Father Rope's contributions, many of them scrawled on the backs of envelopes and labels and scraps of paper.

  And these were only the assistants. There were many other categories of helpers, each of which is seasoned by a number of memorable but largely unremembered characters. There were the sub-editors, for instance, those who were charged with working on specific letters; all of their names and the letters for which they were responsible, and the dates they worked—from `W. J. Anderson, portions of M and P, 1880-1900' through to `Mrs W. A. Craigie (Lady Craigie) revised arrangements of U, 1917-1918'—were faithfully listed in the completed Volume I once the project was fully finished. 11

  Those who stand out from the dozens listed include the Sanskrit scholar and Mayor of Guildford, Philip Whittington Jacob, who worked for a while on the immense word set, the most complex in the entire Dictionary; William Michael Rossetti, brother of the more famous Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and the author of a letter found in the OED archives today that sheds an interesting light on the pronunciation of the word Pre-Raphaelite: `My brother and I always pronounced the name Raphael with the sound Rahfyel … It certainly appears to me that the other Pre-Raphaelite Brothers adopted … the same pronunciation … It must no doubt be true that a great number of Englishmen pronounce the raph like man, bat, &c.'; the magnificent-sounding Gustavus Adolphus Schrumpf (whose sonorous name certainly rivals that of the Bolshevik prisoner Hereward Thimbleby Price 12), who taught, rather ordinarily, at a school near Wolverhampton, and sub-edited in A and H; an indefatigable spinster of the Cotswold village of Further Barton, near Cirencester, Janet Brown, who was an author of religio-didactic works such as The Heart ofthe Servant, which one newspaper thought should be required reading by all household staff, and to whom Murray was later to refer as `an honoured personal friend' (she left him £1,000 in her will); and Edward Charles Hulme, who was a librarian at the Patent Office and whose name was inexplicably omitted from Volume I 13 —Murray later wrote an embarrassed note in his Preface to a rather later part, apologizing and calling Hulme `one of the best workers for the Dictionary'.

  There were also plenty of linguistic advisers—towering figures of scholarship to whom Murray and Bradley would write on the finer points of their various specialities. James Platt was one such—a polymath and ghost story writer who knew scores of languages and once famously declared that the first twelve tongues were always the most difficult, but having mastered them, the following hundred should not pose too much of a problem. He helped Murray divine etymologies from obscurer languages of Afric
a and the Far East. Marie-Paul-Hyacinthe Meyer, who had worked on the documents relating to the Dreyfus affair, helped with medieval French and ProvencËal (which Murray spoke quite well anyway); the antiquarian Frederick Elworthy, a great friend of the Murray family who lived in Somerset, assisted with archaic West Country and Cornish dialect words; and Henry Yule, well known to any fan as one of the editors of the endlessly fascinating collection of Hindustani terms known as Hobson-Jobson, 14 assisted in matters Oriental. Professor H. R. Helwich of Vienna copied out, with barely believable assiduity, all of the Cursor Mundi (the most quoted work in the OED) and the Destruction ofTroy. And a Mr and Mrs A. Caland, who lived in Holland, fell out with one another over the work: Mr Caland said his interest in the book was the one thing that kept him alive. His wife would only speak through gritted teeth of what she called `that wretched dictionary'.

  There were many Americans, Fitzedward Hall and W. C. Minor aside. Dozens flocked to the side of Murray and his team, in part because of the energies of Francis March, whom Murray had appointed head of the American reading programme in 1879. In addition to the readers, most of whom have vanished into obscurity, there are grand figures like George Perkins Marsh, who was an environmentalist before it was fashionable to be so, the man who introduced the camel into the Wild West (to the rather limited degree that it has been introduced) and, confusingly, the first American readers' coordinator in the very early days of the project, and whose role was taken over by the so-similarlynamed Francis March; Albert Matthews and C. W. Ernst of Boston, who sent in thousands of examples of peculiarly American uses and phrases, while Ernst was a diligent scholar in medieval Latin; and William Dwight Whitney, the chief editor of the enormous Century Dictionary, against which Murray's dictionary was constantly being measured. Job Pierson, a librarian and Presbyterian minister from Ionia, Michigan, was one of the most energetic readers: he contributed some 46,000 quotations in 1888 alone—good enough to make this chapter's epigraph, but nowhere near as productive as the man who heads it, Thomas Austin Jr. of Hornsey and Oxford, a man who also managed to edit a volume entitled Two Fifteenth-Century Cookbooks, and who fell ill with a nervous disorder—Victorian middle-class shorthand for madness—while doing so.