You Could Look It Up: The Reference Shelf From Ancient Babylon to Wikipedia

by Jack Lynch

  There may be no more exemplary pair of reference books than the Dictionnaire and the Dictionary: they represent opposite poles on the dictionary continuum. On the one side is the authority imposed by academic prestige and government sanction, promoting clear notions of right and wrong—the French say normatif, the English prescriptive. On the other, Johnson’s approach to language was almost laissez-faire, believing that the job of the lexicographer was merely to note what actual people said, and recognizing that trying to regulate a human institution as messy and as complicated as a language was impossible. The only hope was to let the language evolve on its own. These two notions of the language have been at war ever since. Lexicographers and grammarians have to declare an allegiance to one side or the other, and in doing so they are certain to disappoint much of their potential audience.

  CHAPTER 10 ½

  OF GHOSTS AND MOUNTWEAZELS

  Look up the word foupe in Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary, and you’ll discover that it means “To drive with a sudden impetuosity. A word out of use.” But it was more “out of use” than even Johnson realized—in fact it is not a word at all. Johnson misread the long s of the rare word soupe ‘to swoop’ and inadvertently coined a new word. He also summoned the word adventine into existence, even though his source, Francis Bacon, had written adventive and a printer had accidentally set it as adventine. Another misprint in an early edition of Bacon led James Murray to enter the word dentize in the OED, meaning “to cut new teeth.” But the word was dentire, misprinted in the 1626 edition of Bacon’s Sylvia.

  Instances like this abound in dictionaries, and W. W. Skeat, the great Victorian philologist, coined the term ghost word for these not-quite-existent words: “Like ghosts, we may seem to see them, or may fancy that they exist; but they have no real entity. We cannot grasp them; when we would do so, they disappear.”1 A typo in the Edinburgh Review—kime instead of knife—led to the appearance of kime in several dictionaries; since the original sentence referred to Hindus stabbing their hands with kimes, people assumed a kime must be some ghastly torture device.2 And a printer’s inability to read the verb nurse in Sir Walter Scott’s novel The Monastery created a verb to morse appearing in collections of Scottish lowland dialect.

  The most famous ghost of the twentieth century appeared in Webster’s Second New International, published in 1934. Webster’s included many abbreviations in its wordlist, and the compilers planned to include the abbreviation for density, usually D, though sometimes a lowercase d is used. In July 1931, one lexicographer—Austin M. Patterson, special editor for chemistry—typed a 3 × 5 card explaining the abbreviation: he headed it “D or d” and provided the explanation “density.” But when it came time to transcribe the card, someone misread it and ran the letters together without spaces, producing “Dord, density.” And then, because Webster’s had a policy of beginning all words with a lowercase letter, the entry made it into the dictionary as “dord, density.” It took five years for a Merriam editor to notice the strange entry, supported by neither etymology nor pronunciation. After investigating—no one could find any evidence for a word dord—he realized it was a mistake. He made an annotation: “plate change / imperative / urgent,” and the printer removed dord from the next reprint, filling the otherwise empty line by adding a few letters to the entry for doré furnace.3

  Some incorrect entries, though, are intentional, part of a long tradition of clever frauds in reference books. The German Brockhaus Enzykopädie has a tradition of including one prank entry in every edition—when a new edition is published, the old joke is removed and a new one inserted.4 One of the best such larks is the last entry in Robert Hughes’s Music Lovers’ Encyclopedia of 1903, zzxjoanw, supposedly a Maori word, miraculously polysemous, that means “drum,” “fife,” and “conclusion.” (Never mind that the Maori language does not have the letters z, x, or j.) The first edition of the Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary (1987) sports an entry for hink: “If you hink, you think hopefully and unrealistically about something.” And the Neue Pauly Enzyklpädie includes a learned entry on apopudobalia, an ancient game similar to football, which prompted a retort in a learned journal, pointing out six serious mistakes in the entry. The reviewer missed the fact that the entry was just a jeu d’esprit, with no basis in fact.5 Other fakes are less jovial: in 1986 a laid-off editor from Britannica retaliated by vandalizing the encyclopedia’s database, changing every occurrence of “Jesus” to “Allah.” (His own boss became “Rambo.”)6

  An even more elaborate fake appeared in 1975, when the New Columbia Encyclopedia included a long entry on the distinguished American fountain designer Lillian Virginia Mountweazel, who had achieved some fame with Flags Up!, a collection of photographs of rural American mailboxes. Ms. Mountweazel, alas, met a premature end, dying in an explosion while she was researching an article for Combustibles magazine. Although Mountweazel was nothing more than an inside joke among the encyclopedia’s authors, she is said to have appeared in other encyclopedias and biographical dictionaries—proof that other editors have pilfered from the New Columbia. The term mountweazel is now used to refer to these mischievous entries inserted in reference books.

  Mountweazels also seem to feature in some struggles over intellectual property. In 2001 the New Oxford American Dictionary included a made-up word, esquivalience (“the willful avoidance of one’s official responsibilities”), designed to catch rivals who simply copied the New Oxford American in their electronic editions. When the word materialized in Dictionary.com, they knew something untoward had happened.7 Cartographers are said to do the same thing—the trap street is a nonexistent road that appears on a map.

  There are problems, though, with using fake entries to catch copyright violations. The first is that the number of unintentional errors will always be far greater than the number of intentional errors, whatever the reference work. All dictionaries, encyclopedias, chronologies, and atlases, even the best, have many errors. There is no legal benefit, moreover, to loading a dictionary, encyclopedia, or atlas with errors—copyright law gives no incentive. While reproducing someone else’s entries verbatim is a violation of copyright law, it is a violation of copyright whether those entries are true or false. Lifting facts from another reference work, though, is not illegal, even if it may be shifty or lazy. A dictionary that contains esquivalience may deserve scorn for being a shoddy dictionary, content to let filching take the place of serious research. Unless it reproduces the wording of the New Oxford American Dictionary, though, it’s not illegal. A legal ruling in the United States in 1992 confirmed this view: a federal court declared, “To treat ‘false’ facts interspersed among actual facts and represented as actual facts as fiction would mean that no one could ever reproduce or copy actual facts without risk of reproducing a false fact and thereby violating a copyright… . If such were the law, information could never be reproduced or widely disseminated.”8

  CHAPTER 11

  THE WAY OF FAITH

  Guidelines for Believers

  Antoine Augustin Calmet

  Dictionnaire historique, critique,

  chronologique, géographique et

  littéral de la Bible

  1720–21

  Alexander Cruden

  A Complete Concordance to the

  Holy Scriptures of the Old and

  New Testament

  1738

  Religions are rarely improvised. They represent a collective body of knowledge transmitted from one generation to another. And because most religions presume to address a tremendously wide range of subjects—the origin of the universe, the history of humanity, the underpinnings of morality, the nature of the afterlife—they tend to produce overwhelming amounts of text.

  Every literate religious community accumulates a collection of scripture, narratives, laws, genealogies, wisdom literature, prophecies, and interpretations; before long, the sheer volume of text threatens to overwhelm even the most devoted believer. Reference works have therefore step
ped in to distill the wisdom of the ages, to illuminate the path, and to justify righteous beliefs and behaviors. But these books do more than simply reflect already-existing beliefs. In compiling far-flung facts, the authors of reference books actively shape the religious practices and doctrine of the communities they chronicle. Though Marcus Terentius Varro’s Antiquitates rerum humanarum et divinarum, completed in 47 B.C.E., survives only in fragments today, its summary of previous religious practices influenced the religious practice of his contemporaries, helping to constitute religion as a coherent field of inquiry. In a sense, Rome had no religion until it had an encyclopedia of religion.

  Judaism is prominent among the religions of the book; it has a tradition of scholarly commentary going back as far as our records allow us to look. Already by 500 B.C.E., exegetes had extracted from the Hebrew Bible a set of 613 mitzvot, ethical principles that should direct the virtuous life. Later commentators added glosses, observations, and interpretations to these summaries of biblical wisdom, known collectively as the Mishnah and the Talmud. The result is the Halakhah, which means something like “the way.” The collection has served Orthodox communities as a collection of essential principles for twenty-five centuries. The Halakhah is not so much a book as a library, and a growing one at that: every year there are dozens, if not hundreds, of new books interpreting the interpretations. It has even spun off mighty reference books in its own right, such as Jacob Neusner’s Halakhah: An Encyclopaedia of the Law of Judaism, published in five volumes in 2000.

  Antoine Augustin Calmet of Lorraine, France, was educated by Benedictines at their abbey in Breuil. At the age of sixteen he joined the abbey of Saint-Mansuy in Toul, northeastern France, and he was ordained in 1696. His first post after his ordination was teaching philosophy and theology at Moyenmoutier Abbey in Lorraine. With his brother monks he began collecting material for an interpretation of the Bible. Earlier commentaries focused on the “allegorical” (mystical) and “tropological” (moral) meanings of the Bible, but Calmet wanted to emphasize the literal meanings: readers should master the basic facts of biblical history before moving on to the symbolic significance. He published the first part of his Commentaire littéral sur tous les livres de l’Ancien et du Nouveau Testament in 1707, a work that reached twenty-three quarto volumes in 1716. Even before the first edition was finished he was at work on a second, which appeared in twenty-six volumes between 1714 and 1720, and then a third, further enlarged edition from 1724 to 1726. A series of Latin translations of his commentaries appeared across Europe over the next seven decades.

  Calmet’s next major work continued this interest in the literal meaning of the scriptures. In fact it is also a kind of commentary, but instead of being structured by the biblical text, it arranges all the factual information alphabetically. The Dictionnaire historique, critique, chronologique, géographique, et littéral de la Bible appeared in four folio volumes in 1720–21, with an expanded edition appearing between 1722 and 1728. The dictionary opens with more than a hundred pages of front matter: a dedication to the prince royal, a preface explaining his purpose, a royal privilege, and a very long and detailed annotated bibliography of suitable works for learning about the Bible (including not only Latin and French, but also Syriac, Arabic, Persian, Armenian, Coptic, and Greek Bibles). The erudition is formidable, even daunting. Then comes a map of the ancient world, and a pair of “Carte[s] du Paradis Terrestre” (“Maps of the Earthly Paradise”), one following a map by Daniel-Pierre Huet, with Eden placed where modern Basrah in Iraq stands, the other Calmet’s own, with Eden near Mount Ararat in Turkey. Another map shows the wandering of the Israelites in the desert, and yet another where the Apostles traveled. All of this front matter is complemented by lengthy back matter: a chronology of biblical events, guides to the weights and measures used in the Bible, a survey of ancient money, and so on.

  TITLE: Dictionnaire historique, critique, chronologique, géographique et littéral de la Bible, enrichi d’un grand nombre de figures en taille-douce, qui représentent les antiquitez Judaïques

  COMPILER: Antoine Augustin Calmet (1672–1757)

  ORGANIZATION: Alphabetical, Aaron to Zuzim

  PUBLISHED: Paris: Emery, 1720–21

  VOLUMES: 4

  PAGES: 1,073

  ENTRIES: 5,450

  TOTAL WORDS: 1.3 million

  SIZE: 15¾″ × 11″ (40 × 28 cm)

  WEIGHT: 14 lb. 3 oz. (6.5 kg)

  AREA: 1,290 ft2 (120 m2)

  The information presented in the dictionary proper is heterogeneous. Some entries are very short, hardly more than cross-references: the whole of the entry for Lahem reads “Ce mot est mis pour Bethléem”—“This word is used for Bethlehem.” Others are long: the entry for grace fills columns. There are also entries on classical mythology: Hercules, for instance, is explicitly mentioned nowhere in the Bible, but Calmet noticed the ways the scriptures invoke the Greek hero in their treatment of Joshua, Samson, and Moses. Marginal notes provide the biblical citations and the Hebrew words.

  Virtually all the personal names in the Bible were given an entry, ranging from a few words for Sobab (“fils de David & de Beth-sabée”—son of David and Bathsheba) to many pages for Adam (“le premier homme créé de Dieu,” the first man created by God), Moses, David, Mary, Jesus (“fils de Dieu, vrai Messie, Sauveur du Monde,” son of God, true Messiah, savior of the world), John the Baptist (“précurseur de nôtre Seigneur JESUS-CHRIST,” forerunner of our Lord Jesus), and the Apostles. Locations, too, were covered in detail, with learned entries on Sodom, Judea, and Bethlehem. Entries like déluge (flood) and sabbathum go on for pages, often with elaborate calendrical calculations trying to pin down when events occurred. The entry for croix (cross) covered the ancient practice of crucifixion, with illustrations of various ways of crucifying criminals and learned citations to John Chrysostom, Aelius Lampridius, Cyprian, Gregory Nazianzus, Titus Livy, and a dozen others. But not merely the central symbols of Christianity were covered—anything in the lives of biblical figures was fair game. There are entries on elephants and scorpions, synagogues and troglodytes, athletes and fountains. Essays usefully illuminate practices like simonie (simony) and viticulture, and even worthwhile articles on sandals and trumpets are included. Calmet was careful, though, to avoid controversy. He was a devout Catholic, and his dictionary was therefore rigorously orthodox. The entry for heresie is loaded with contempt for those who stray from Church teaching: it contains nothing but impeccable Catholic doctrine, supported by dozens of marginal citations to provide the scriptural authority for every assertion.

  Like his commentary, the Bible dictionary went through a series of expanded editions and translations, and it remained a standard work of biblical investigation well into the nineteenth century. Calmet went on to write a history of his native Lorraine, the Histoire ecclésiastique et civile de la Lorraine (1728), and his learning and piety were rewarded with a series of ecclesiastical postings. Pope Benedict XIII even wanted to make him a bishop, but he rejected the offer. He died in Paris in 1757.

  Calmet’s dictionary was outward looking: it moved from the religious text to the world at large. Whether he was discussing Old Testament juniper bushes or tracing the history of the Caliphate, he started with the original Scripture and then looked to the real world beyond it.

  Other religious reference books, though, are focused not on the real world but strictly on the text itself. Dictionaries of the sacred languages, such as Santes Pagninus’s hoc est, Thesaurus linguæ sanctæ, siue lexicon Hebraicum (Thesaurus of the Holy Language, or Hebrew Lexicon, 1575) and William Dugard’s Lexicon Græci Testamenti alphabeticum (Alphabetical Lexicon of the Greek Testament, 1660), are linguistic rather than historical. And one of the great reference books, Alexander Cruden’s Complete Concordance to the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament (1738), points not from words to world, but squarely at the words themselves.

  Cruden’s title page includes a motto from the Book of John, “Search the Scr
iptures, for in them ye think ye have eternal life, and they are they which testify of me,” and his book really is about a new way of searching the Scriptures. The work is titled a Concordance, and it opens with a definition of this newfangled reference genre that he suspected some of his readers might not understand: “A Concordance,” Cruden explained, “is a Dictionary, or an Index to the Bible, wherein all the words, used thro’ the Inspired Writings, are ranged alphabetically, and the various places where they occur, are referred to, to assist us in finding out passages, and comparing the several significations of the same word.” Such a book was certain to be useful, he wrote, because it “tends so much to render the study of the holy Scriptures more easy to all Christians.”1

  A concordance is an index—a comprehensive, or nearly comprehensive index—of words. A short passage from the Bible, Ecclesiastes 1:4–7, shows how a concordance works:

  4. One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever. 5. The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose. 6. The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits. 7. All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full: unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.

  TITLE: A Complete Concordance to the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament: In Two Parts: Containing, I. The Appellative or Common Words in So Full and Large a Manner, That Any Verse May Be Readily Found by Looking for Any Material Word in It … II. The Proper Names in the Scriptures … The Whole Digested in an Easy and Regular Method, Which, Together with the Various Significations and Other Improvements Now Added, Renders It More Useful than Any Book of this Kind Hitherto Published