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

by Jack Lynch

  PAGES: xlviii + 870

  ENTRIES: 2,000

  TOTAL WORDS: 750,000

  SIZE: 9″ × 6¼″ (23 × 16 cm)

  AREA: 361 ft2 (33.8 m2)

  PRICE: 36s.

  The two worked together for a decade, Yule usually in England, Burnell in Madras. Burnell, victim of a constitution that did not respond well to the Indian climate, died of cholera and pneumonia in 1882, at the age of just forty-two, but Yule kept at it for another six years. A year before Hobson-Jobson appeared in 1886, a rival work, George Clifford Whitworth’s Anglo-Indian Dictionary, came out. But Hobson-Jobson was more than twice the length of Whitworth’s dictionary, and the range and depth of Yule’s and Burnell’s learning, combined with the quirkiness of their interests, left the competition far behind.

  The strange title was Yule’s idea. A friend who had published a book with the drab title Three Essays was disappointed with sales, and Yule wanted to avoid that fate. He thought of the Arabic phrase “Ya Hasan! Ya Hosain!,” a mourning cry used in Shia Islam, which was variously anglicized as “Hosseen Gosseen,” “Hossy Gossy,” “Hossein Jossen,” and “Jaksom Baksom.” The version that caught on borrowed a pair of stock names, “Hobson” and “Jobson,” used in the nineteenth century to stand in for unknown or concealed names, a paired version of “John Doe.”7 The process by which foreign loanwords get twisted into new forms to suit the sound system of the receiving language has since come to be called “the law of Hobson-Jobson.”

  Many words in the dictionary have to do with colonial administration—only natural, given the nature of the Raj—including both words originally Indian (peshwa, “chief minister of the Mahratta power”; dewaun, “the head financial minister”) and words originally English (settlement, “an estate or district is said to be settled when … the Government has agreed … for a fixed sum to be paid”; civilian, “covenanted European servants of the E[ast] I[ndia] Company”). Other words reveal social relations: sahib is “The title by which, all over India, European gentlemen, and it may be said Europeans generally, are addressed, and spoken of, when no disrespect is intended,” and a cooly is “A hired labourer, or burden-carrier; especially, a labourer induced to emigrate from India, or from China, to labour in the plantations … sometimes under circumstances … which have brought the cooly’s condition very near to slavery.”

  The list of words from Indian languages that made their way into standard English is long, and Hobson-Jobson reveals the pathway they took. Words for distinctively South Asian phenomena, such as chutney, curry, guru, nirvana, pashmina, sari, and yoga, are still associated in many minds with India. On the other hand, most English speakers have forgotten the Indian origins of words like avatar, bungalow, cashmere, chintz, juggernaut, jungle, khaki, pariah, polo, pundit, typhoon, and veranda. And to learn that words like bangle, cummerbund, dinghy, dungarees, loot, shampoo, shawl, thug, and toddy are all of Indian origin probably surprises everyone but etymologists. Conversely, English words have acquired new meanings in India. Cheese, for instance, came to mean “anything good, first-rate in quality, genuine, pleasant, or advantageous”; English compass developed into kompáss with a meaning expanded to take in all sorts of surveying instruments; and ducks was used as a “distinctive name for gentlemen belonging to the Bombay service.”

  The longer entries in Hobson-Jobson are often the most enlightening. The article on boy includes extensive comments on the situations in which the term was considered appropriate; snake-stone (“a substance, the application of which to the part where a snake-bite has taken effect, is supposed to draw out the poison”) drew on mythology, history, and medicine; and the entry for India filled pages—“A book,” the lexicographers say, “might be written on this name”—and should be included in any account of European attitudes toward South Asia. The entry for home is telling: “In Anglo-Indian and colonial speech this means England.” The first quotation from 1837 makes it clear: “Home always means England; nobody calls India home—not even those who have been here thirty years or more, and are never likely to return to Europe.” The article on suttee—“The rite of widow-burning; i.e. the burning of the living widow along with the corpse of her husband”—is one of the longest in the book; it combines a history of the practice with comparative anthropology, noting similar traditions in other faiths, and the quotations give a good account of how Europeans have understood it over the centuries.

  An early review exulted that “ ‘Hobson-Jobson’ provides a practically inexhaustible supply of quaint and rare information, and the reader who grumbles at the heaviness of Oriental literature should find reason to moderate his complaint from a cursory inspection of its pages.”8 Hobson-Jobson is an impressively scholarly work; it is also, in the words of the poet Daljit Nagra, “a madly unruly and idiosyncratic work.”9 The etymologies are notoriously digressive, rambling into anthropological anecdotes and speculation. The book ends up being a social history despite itself.

  The occasional condescending entries do make one wince—the definition of naukar-chaukar, “the servants,” comes with this note: “one of those jingling double-barrelled phrases in which Orientals delight even more than Englishmen”—and sometimes the book engages in outright racism, using terms such as “barbarous display” and “ignorant natives” when discussing the Indians. But the more we examine the book, the more balanced, even enlightened, it becomes. Yule and Burnell took the trouble to get to know the languages and the cultures, and they believed they had much to learn about them. Every subsequent lexicographer of nonstandard English has been indebted to Yule and Burnell. James Murray (see chapter 18) read the book while it was still in proof, and the Oxford English Dictionary quotes Hobson-Jobson in nearly 150 entries, including citations for words such as beri-beri, chit, nabob, and pundit, and there are probably hundreds more for which the OED editors borrowed without citation. A second edition, edited, expanded, and indexed by William Crooke, was published in 1903 and had greater influence than the first.

  Plenty of writers have valued Hobson-Jobson. Rudyard Kipling admiringly called it “neither glossary, vocabulary, dictionary or anything else that may be described in one word, but simply—Hobson-Jobson.” For Anthony Burgess, it evoked the lost days of British India, and India Ink by Tom Stoppard—who spent part of his childhood in India—is riddled with allusions to the glossary. Amitav Ghosh praises Hobson-Jobson for revealing something about the way English was actually spoken in the nineteenth century: “I love dictionaries and have many, not just of English, but dictionaries of laskari and nautical language. If you read these dictionaries, it becomes perfectly clear that English people when they were living in India were certainly not speaking like Jane Austen or George Eliot. In fact, it is often said when these nabobs went back home to England, people couldn’t understand them.”10 Salman Rushdie is also attentive to the influence of Indian speech patterns on the English when he calls Hobson-Jobson a “legendary dictionary” and views it as “eloquent testimony to the unparalleled intermingling that took place between English and the languages of India,”11 though he complains that some offensive terms have been omitted from the modern abridgment.

  Despite their priority and their importance, bilingual dictionaries get much less attention than the familiar monolingual ones. To many people, “dictionary” means works such as Johnson’s, Webster’s, and the Grimms’. Bilingual (and other multilingual) dictionaries, however, open up views on history that are hard to find elsewhere and that allow us to see something about interactions between peoples that is hard to see elsewhere. Whether it is the only point of contact between two cultures, as with the Dutch in Japan, or merely a “lexical snapshot of a truly strange and fascinating moment in world history,”12 the bilingual dictionary is an indispensable reference genre.

  CHAPTER 14 ½

  A SMALL ARMY

  Collaborative Endeavors

  “The tone of American encyclopedias,” the famous cultural commentator Charles Van Doren complained in 1962, �
�is often fiercely inhuman. It appears to be the wish of some contributors to write about living institutions as if they were pickled frogs, outstretched upon a dissecting board.”1 For many modern books, this is precisely the point: “humanity” in an encyclopedia or a dictionary is a quirk, and a quirk is a failing. Most works strive to exclude personality. Even Wikipedia famously aspires to “objectivity”—a “neutral point of view” is the one inflexible rule governing that vast collaborative endeavor.

  Individuality, though, has not always been a fault. Once upon a time, reference books had not compilers but authors. Samuel Johnson’s uniquely powerful mind, for instance, is visible on every page of his Dictionary, and you can almost smell the revolutionary air blowing through the pages of the Encyclopédie. Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique could only have been written by that skeptical genius. Most early reference books, at least in Europe and America, were the work of a single person working more or less alone, with little more than clerical assistance. All the major English dictionaries through the middle of the nineteenth century, for instance, are known by the name of their author: Cawdrey, Bullokar, Phillips, Kersey, Johnson, Webster, Richardson … In books like these we get a hint of what the lexicologist John Considine calls “the lexicographer as hero.”

  These personal books gave us some amusing eccentricities. Johnson’s swipes at some of his enemies—tax collectors (excise, “A hateful tax levied upon commodities, and adjudged not by the common judges of property, but wretches hired by those to whom excise is paid”), Lord Chesterfield (patron, “Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery”), and the Scottish (oats, “A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people”)—are so familiar that some people assume the whole Dictionary is nothing but put-downs. (The actual number of such disparaging entries is tiny.) The personal qualities make eponymous books not merely works of reference but also works of literature, worth reading long after all their research has been rendered obsolete.

  But already in the seventeenth century, European dictionaries were identified not with individuals but with organizations: the Accademia della Crusca, the Académie Française. This was the age of the first big collaborative projects. By the end of the eighteenth century, the name of the lone genius was being traded for that of an impersonal committee. The Encyclopædia Britannica, almost entirely the work of William Smellie (except when he was plagiarizing others’ work), omitted his name from the title page; it was by “A Society of Gentlemen,” and there are mentions throughout to the “Editors and Compilers” as if there were more than one.2 The Deutsches Wörterbuch by the Brothers Grimm, begun in 1838, and Peter Mark Roget’s Thesaurus, published in 1852, may be the last great reference works to go by the names of authors rather than teams.

  We now live in an age when dictionaries, encyclopedias, atlases, and so on are almost always the work of impersonal committees. The six-page masthead of the fifth edition of the American Heritage Dictionary, to consider one very fine modern example, advertises the contributions of a publisher, an executive editor, a supervising editor, a managing editor, a senior lexicographer, two senior editors, an editor, two associate editors, nine consulting editors, four proofreaders, two production supervisors, an editorial and production coordinator, three designers, three administrative coordinators, five editorial and production assistants, a prepress developer, thirty-four special contributors, forty-five previous consultants, and a usage panel made up of 178 experts still drawing breath and another 21 who did not live to see the work’s publication. The total is well into the three digits, all working on one single-volume dictionary.

  The Oxford English Dictionary is an even grander project, with a chief editor, a deputy chief editor, an editorial project director, an editorial director, a team of eighteen in charge of general revision, thirteen science editors, nine new-word editors, eleven etymologists, seventeen bibliographers, twenty-three library researchers, and so on. In addition to the current staff, the OED website lists everyone who has worked on the project since 1989, when OED2 was completed: the list of current and former employees runs to 560 people, and that does not include the thousands upon thousands who have served as volunteer readers or answered the editors’ queries. The New International Encyclopedia makes the case that collaboration is now the only choice: “No good general encyclopædia, at least, is now possible which does not include in its editorial staff a small army of men of science, historians, theologians, lawyers, and so on.”3

  The encyclopedic army has included some impressive recruits. The Encyclopædia Britannica has since the early days made a policy of recruiting experts—historians, scientists, politicians, philosophers—to write its entries. The entries have not always been signed, and many publishing house records have been destroyed, so we will never know who all the contributors were. But we can say for certain that editions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries included articles by the likes of Isaac Asimov, J. B. Bury, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Marie Curie, Thomas De Quincey, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Edmund Gosse, the skateboarder Tony Hawk, William Hazlitt, Harry Houdini, Thomas Henry Huxley, Lee Iacocca, Pyotr Alekseevich Kropotkin, H. L. Mencken, Bertrand Russell, Ernest Rutherford, George Bernard Shaw, Algernon Charles Swinburne, John Addington Symonds, Leon Trotsky, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and James Watt.

  CHAPTER 15

  KILLING TIME

  Games and Sports

  Edmond Hoyle

  A Short Treatise on the Game of Whist

  1742

  John Wisden

  Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack

  1864

  Not every reference book is strictly utilitarian—not every reference, in other words, tells us things we need to know. Many tell us what we simply want to know, and how we might amuse ourselves.

  Games and sports go back at least as far as the archaeological record will take us—Senet was played in predynastic Egypt around 3000 B.C.E., Ur in first-millennium-B.C.E. Babylon, and Go in fourth-century-B.C.E. China—and the more complicated the game, the more necessary are written rules. Isidore described board games, dice games, and ball games in his Etymologies, but some games required more extensive treatment. Simple games like catch and tag require little strategy, but chess—sixty-four squares, thirty-two pieces falling into six classes, each with different rules for moving—cries out for codification. One estimate says there are about 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000 possible positions in a chess game. An early aid to those zillions of games appeared in 1512, when the Portuguese pharmacist Pedro Damião of Odemira wrote Questo libro e da imparare giocare a scachi et de li partiti in Italian. The book was translated from Italian to French, and then from French to English in 1562, when it was called The Pleasaunt and Wittie Playe of the Cheasts Renewed, and the long subtitle to the English edition promises Instructions Both to Learne It Easely, and to Play It Well.

  No age took gaming more seriously than the eighteenth century. It was the great age of gaming, with card games, board games, and parlor games at the height of their popularity. Not coincidentally, the English idiom to kill time dates from exactly this period. And the king of the gaming table was Edmond Hoyle, who has held his position as the authoritative lawgiver for games since he wrote the first in a series of books on card games. He took it on himself to issue the rules, and nearly three centuries later, his name is a byword for authority.

  Frustratingly little is known about him. He was probably born in 1671 or 1672, and he died in 1769. The best biographical source notes only that he “is said to have been a barrister by profession.” In the early 1740s he lived in Queen Square, London—an upscale address—and he gave lessons on one of the most fashionable card games of the day, whist, similar to bridge. He “thought it would be doing no inconsiderable Service to many of my Countrymen,” he wrote, “if I contributed a little to put them upon their Guard and preserve their Purses, while they are indulg
ing themselves in what is elegantly called Killing Time.”1

  Hoyle began circulating handwritten copies of a short book on how to excel at the game, and eventually the private manual went public: he published his Short Treatise on the Game of Whist in 1742. Some sources say he received the astronomical sum of £1,000 for a published version. That is hard to believe—at the time, a working-class family could live on £30 a year—but he did sell copies for the outrageous price of a guinea, or twenty-one shillings, at a time when day laborers earned a shilling a day. Hoyle obviously had high-stakes players in mind when he priced his eighty-six-page pamphlet so extravagantly.

  Most of what appeared in this first book was not really rules but suggestions or strategies. But one two-page section, “The Laws of the Game at WHIST,” made fourteen rules explicit. A typical one: “1. If any Person plays out of his Turn, it is in the Option of the adverse Parties, either to call the Card then played at any Time in that Deal (in case he does not make him revoke) or the Person who is to lead, may demand his Partner to name the Suit, which he would have him play from.” After spelling out the “laws,” he offered “Some general Rules to be observed by Beginners,” not actually the fundamental rules but tips for those who already knew the basics: “I. If you have Ace, King, and four small Trumps, with a good Suit,” for instance, “you must play three Rounds of Trumps, or otherwise you may have your strong Suit Trumped.” From there he worked his way up to discussions of strategy: chapter 5 spelled out “Particular Games to endeavour to deceive and distress your Adversaries, and to demonstrate your Game to your Partner.”2

  TITLE: A Short Treatise on the Game of Whist: Containing the Laws of the Game: And Also Some Rules, Whereby a Beginner May, with Due Attention to Them, Attain to the Playing It Well