Planet Word

by J. P. Davidson

  When the Dictionary was published in 1755, two volumes’ worth and a total of 2,300 pages, it was generally well received. Johnson was certainly criticized for various omissions and errors, like there being no entry for a simple word like irritable, and leeward and windward being given the same definition. The etymology was sometimes wayward – the historian Thomas Macaulay called Johnson ‘a wretched etymologist’ – and one philologist declared that the grammatical and historical parts of the Dictionary were ‘most truly contemptible performances’. And, of course, what makes the Dictionary fascinating and delightful and creative – the fact that it’s the vision and execution of one man – is exactly what makes it flawed.

  But the magnitude and breadth and flair of the Dictionary are undeniable. It is an astonishing work of individual scholarship and genius, the influence of which has stretched across the world and even further across the centuries. Noah Webster, the editor of the American Webster’s Dictionary, disliked many aspects of Johnson’s Dictionary, but he, too, liberally helped himself to verbatim chunks of it for his new work.

  Perhaps the most curious footprint left by Johnson’s Dictionary is to be found, of all places, in the US Constitution. The Dictionary’s biographer, Henry Hitchings, tells us that American lawyers still refer to Johnson in questions of interpretation because, when the Constitution was originally drawn up, in the late 1780s, it was his Dictionary which was the prevailing authority on the English language. He cites an example from 2000, when American lawyers were debating whether US airstrikes against Yugoslavia violated the Constitutional principle that Congress alone can declare war. One of the central issues was: what was the authentic eighteenth-century meaning of declare: if you declared war, did it mean actual military engagement, or was it simply an acknowledgement of the necessary prior conditions for conflict? They turned to Johnson for guidance as to what the words of the Constitution meant. That would no doubt have given Dr Johnson a good deal of satisfaction.

  Not Just a Dictionary but a National Institution

  The story goes that the first editor of the Oxford English Dictionary kept a copy of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary open on his desk as he worked, marking all his definitions he included in the new tome with a ‘J’.

  The OED, as it’s more commonly known, is considered to be the authority on the English language. Quite simply, it’s one of the wonders of the world of words. Its second edition, printed in 1989, is the definitive guide to the meaning, history and pronunciation of over half a million words, past and present. These words make up 21,730 pages, bound in twenty dark Oxford-blue volumes, and take up four feet of shelf space. And the shelves themselves need to be pretty robust, given that the OED weighs almost 140 pounds.

  The OED’s policy is to record a word’s most-known usages and variants in all varieties of English. It’s a constantly evolving process, as new words enter our language all the time – and for this, the online version is ideal.

  The OED’s chief editor, John Simpson, was in charge of bringing the entire second edition of the dictionary into the internet age in 2000. John is now managing the first complete revision of the twenty-volume dictionary since it was originally published in 1933. His team started work at the letter M and they release updated sections of words every three months; in March 2011 they’d reached Ryvita. Computers and the internet may make revision physically easier and quicker, but up-to-the-minute access to rapidly expanding historical databases – from eighteenth-century farming manuals to twenty-first-century rap lyrics – means this is still a massive archaeological dig into the English language.

  John Simpson first started working on the OED in 1976, in the pre-computer age; back then, the process of compiling the dictionary with the aid of millions of index cards hadn’t really changed since the nineteenth century, when it all began. Below his office is the archive room where some of the index cards from the first dictionary have been preserved: 700 boxes filled with neatly tied packets of dictionary quotation slips and a topslip with the definition – many of them in the tiny handwriting of the OED’s extraordinary first editor, James Murray.

  James Murray, the Oxford English Dictionary’s first editor, surrounded by boxes of definitions

  This white-bearded lexicographer gazes from photographs on the wall, a dead ringer for Professor Dumbledore. Murray was the Scottish schoolteacher and self-taught philologist (he claimed a working knowledge of twenty-five languages including Russian and Tongan) who was invited by the Philological Society of London in the late 1870s to realize their vision of a new dictionary to replace the existing outdated and incomplete dictionaries of Samuel Johnson and others.

  The Oxford University Press was to publish it in instalments, and whereas Johnson’s dictionary had drawn heavily on a main group of literary sources – Shakespeare, Dryden, Milton, Addison, Bacon, Pope and the Bible – the new collection of words and meanings would be supported by evidence drawn from a myriad of works and sources. Murray thought that the task could be completed in ten years and at first planned to keep on his job as a teacher at Mill Hill School whilst editing the dictionary at home. Little did he realize the gargantuan task he faced, both in collecting the quotations and then filing and editing them.

  In April 1879, a month after his appointment, an appeal went out ‘to the English speaking and English reading public’ for a thousand people to ‘read books and make extracts for The Philological Society’s New English Dictionary’. A list of books, starting with Caxton’s printed works, was included. All offers to help were to be addressed to ‘Dr Murray, Mill Hill, Middlesex, N.W.’

  In preparation for the flood of responses, and to store the sacks of quotation slips already amassed, Murray built a corrugated iron shed in his front garden, jokingly called the scriptorium. After six years, when the dictionary had only reached A for Ant, Murray gave up his teaching job and moved his family to a bigger house in Oxford, building a larger version of the scriptorium in his back garden.

  It’s here that the photographs of Murray, the white-bearded sorcerer of words, were taken. Perched on his head is the black cap in the style of his hero, the Protestant reformer John Knox, which he insisted on wearing to work every day. Surrounding him are shelves and pigeonholes bulging with millions of quotation slips illustrating the use of words to be defined in the dictionary. At one point these slips were arriving from volunteer readers at a rate of 1,000 a day; Murray even roped his eleven children into the work of sifting and alphabetizing them alongside his small team of assistants.

  James Murray and his team of assistants in his specially built shed

  One of Murray’s most prolific early contributors was an American surgeon by the name of Dr William Chester Minor. Over the years he and Murray corresponded regularly. Minor gave his address as Broadmoor, Crowthorne, Berkshire, so Murray must have known that he was connected to the Broadmoor Hospital for the Criminally Insane. But it wasn’t until 1891, when Murray visited Dr Minor, that he learned the full story. Minor, a surgeon in the Union army during the American Civil War, had been committed to Broadmoor in 1872 after shooting dead a stranger, George Merrett, in London.

  Minor lived a fairly comfortable life at Broadmoor. He had two rooms – a bedroom and a dayroom – and a private income which allowed him to buy books and good food. He sent money to the widow of the murdered Merrett, and it’s said that the two got on so well that she visited him monthly, bringing him new supplies of books. In 1879, Minor heard about the appeal for readers for the new English dictionary and he set about the task which dominated most of the remainder of his life. Over the next twenty years, Minor supplied tens of thousands of quotations. James Murray described his contributions to the writing of the dictionary as ‘enormous’, acknowledging that, in a two-year period, Minor had sent in at least 12,000 quotations.

  A typical submission from Minor to James Murray is his contribution to the verb to set: ‘a1548 Hall Chron., Hen. IV. (1550) 32b, Duryng whiche sickenes as Auctors write he caused his cr
owne to be set on the pillowe at his beddes heade’.

  The two men became friends over the years, with Murray making frequent visits to the surgeon at Broadmoor. When Minor’s mental health deteriorated, Murray campaigned for his release, and in 1910, thirty-eight years after entering Broadmoor, Minor was allowed to return to America. He died in a hospital for the elderly insane in Connecticut ten years later.

  Minor outlived his friend Professor Murray, who was still only at the letter T when he died in 1915, working on the word take. The ten-volume dictionary was finally completed in 1928, almost thirty years after Murray began it. The final letter to be completed was W, as the team working on XYZ had already finished. In the W team, by the way, working on waggle to warlock, was one J. R. R. Tolkien.

  Today, with a fully computerized, online OED, editor John Simpson and his team of lexicographers are coming face to face with the English language’s boundlessness. ‘It’s constantly moving,’ says John. ‘It’s fascinating.’ New words are coined one minute and spread like wildfire the next. As a result, the rate of change in language itself has switched into hyperdrive. A printed version – with a due date estimated some time in 2037 – will be so vast, so heavy and so expensive that it’s little wonder that the Oxford University Press may consider never printing the OED again.

  The online dictionary’s advanced author quotations search is tempting for any prolific writer interested in discovering how often they have been cited as a source. Type in ‘S Fry’ and, as well as telling you it’s short for stir fry, the search engine throws up twenty-three words listed against the name, among them paramnesia, to pinken (taken from P. G. Wodehouse), ack-emma and pip-emma for a.m. and p.m. (Woodhouse again) and otherwhere (not a neologism – its first reference is in 1400!).

  For a lover of words, John must have quite simply the best job in the world. Working with a living, moving stream of words, the whole of the English language his bailiwick. John is somewhat more restrained. ‘It’s rather nice,’ he murmurs.

  Libraries

  As Stephen Fry exults, ‘There’s an excitement about the cries and whispers and the solaces and the seductions that are contained within the bound form of a single book. And when you have thousands together it’s as if all of human history, all of human hope is captured and is murmuring to you like sirens, pulling you in.’

  Libraries are more than just buildings, just as books are more than just print and ink. As the poet and political theorist John Milton said, ‘Books are not absolutely dead things, they do contain a potency of life in them. He who destroys a book, kills reason itself.’ Perhaps that’s why tyrants everywhere have always attacked libraries before almost anything else. In the third century BC, the Chinese Emperor Shi Huangdi ordered that all literature, philosophy and poetry written before his dynasty should be destroyed. Books from the Persian library of Ctesiphon were thrown into the Euphrates in AD 651 on the order of Caliph Umar. And Mongol invaders in 1258 attacked Baghdad’s House of Wisdom, the single largest library in the world at the time, destroying some of the oldest books ever written. It was said that for six months the waters of the Tigris ran black with ink from the enormous quantities of books flung into the river.

  And it’s not just in ancient times that such wanton acts of destruction were carried out. The twentieth century saw more book burning than any other time in human history – in Nazi Germany, in Bosnia, in Afghanistan

  The story of libraries is as old as the story of writing itself, for wherever and whenever we have committed knowledge to clay tablet or papyrus, bamboo or palm leaf, parchment or paper, ways of keeping that information safe and accessible have had to be found. The first libraries were mostly archive collections of commercial transactions or inventories – like the Sumerian temple rooms full of clay tablets in cuneiform or the papyrus records of the governments of ancient Egyptian cities. An archaeological dig in the ruins of a palace in Ebla in Syria uncovered shelves of clay tablets dating back to 2500 BC. The tablets – as many as 1,800 in complete form and thousands more in fragments – were inscribed with lists of the city’s imports and exports, royal edicts, religious rituals and hymns and proverbs. They had been stored upright on shelves, positioned so that the first words of each tablet could be seen easily, and separated from each other by pieces of baked clay. Civilization’s first library stack, perhaps.

  The flourishing of literacy and intellectual life in ancient Greece saw the extension of libraries into public life. An author would write his book on nature or astronomy on a parchment or papyrus scroll, take it to be copied (by hand of course) at a copy shop and then arrange for those copies to be sold via book dealers. Some copies were of a higher standard than others so a decree in Athens called for a repository of ‘trustworthy’ copies. By the time of the Romans, collections of scrolls were available in the dry sections of the public baths for bathers to peruse.

  The most prevalent collection of writings, however, were private ones. In the fourth century BC, the Greek philosopher Aristotle amassed a huge personal library. According to the historian and geographer Strabo, writing 300 years later, he ‘was the first to have put together a collection of books and to have taught the kings in Egypt how to arrange a library’.

  That library was the wondrous Library of Alexandria, built around 300 BC by Egypt’s Ptolemy I. It was apparently the brainchild of one of Aristotle’s disciples, Demetrius, who inspired Ptolemy with the vision of a public library open to scholars and holding copies of every book in the world. There are a number of colourful stories about how Ptolemys I, II and III went about amassing the ancient world’s greatest collection of books. Ptolemy I sent letters to kings and governors, begging them to send back to his library all the works they could get their hands on. Ptolemy III is reputed to have ordered every visitor to the city to hand over all the books and scrolls in their possession. These were then quickly copied by library scribes and handed back to the traveller; the originals were kept for the library. Legend has it that Mark Antony gave Cleopatra over 200,000 scrolls for the library as a wedding gift, ‘borrowed’ from the rival ancient Greek Library of Pergamon.

  At its peak the Library of Alexandria stored three-quarters of a million scrolls

  At its peak the library held perhaps three-quarters of a million scrolls, many of them different versions of the same text. The papyrus and leather scrolls, with wooden identity tags attached, were kept in a honeycomb of pigeonholes inside ten great Halls dedicated to different areas of learning – mathematics, astronomy, physics, natural sciences and so on.

  During the second century BC, people in the Mediterranean region began using parchment, a much more expensive alternative to papyrus. One theory is that the Library of Alexandria was using so much papyrus that Egypt had very little left to export. Another suggestion is that rivalry between the two Libraries of Alexandria and Pergamon was so intense that Ptolomy V tried to cut off the supply of books to the Greek rival by banning the export of papyrus.

  Whatever the reason, the shortage of papyrus meant that the library at Pergamon was forced to rely on parchment instead. Indeed parchment – pergamenum in Latin – derives its name from the city. It took several centuries for it to develop into a viable alternative to papyrus and become the standard writing material for medieval manuscripts. Alexandria’s library lasted for around five centuries, until fires and civil war reduced and destroyed the vast collection.

  The spread of Christianity and monasticism was a vital ingredient in the growth of libraries. The monasteries became the great centres of copying and preserving of codex manuscripts which had now replaced the scroll. The first Benedictine monastery, set up in Montecassino around AD 529, had a rule for monks which mandated: ‘During Lent … let them receive a book apiece from the library and read it straight through.’ Copying by hand was a labour-intensive, expensive business, and the manuscripts were prized possessions. Books were often chained to lecterns or shelves to prevent theft. Despite this, monasteries began lending volumes t
o each other – the first inter-library loaning system. It was these manuscripts – copied, sold or filched – which formed the core of the libraries of the Middle Ages.

  The Renaissance saw a new golden age of libraries as the aristocrats of Europe vied with each other as patrons of learning and the arts by amassing large private collections of early manuscripts. The library of the Medici family of Florence was so enormous that they commissioned Michelangelo in 1523 to build the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana (The Laurentian Library) to house it. This period also saw the founding and growth of universities – and with it the university library. Another patron of the arts, Humphrey Duke of Gloucester, youngest brother of Henry V, donated his collection of 280 manuscripts to Oxford University in the early 1400s. ‘Duke Humphrey’s Library’ became the foundation of Oxford’s Bodleian Library.

  The Bodleian Library at Oxford University is a network of thirty libraries, linked by underground tunnels

  The Bodleian is one of the oldest libraries in the world, home to over 11 million books, maps and documents, a glorious institution, described by Yeats as the most beautiful building in the world (although he died before the building of the New Bodleian, which travel writer Jan Morris described as looking like a municipal swimming bath). For over 400 years scholars have had to swear a solemn oath on joining the library: ‘I hereby undertake not to remove from the Library, or to mark, deface, or injure in any way, any volume, document, or other object belonging to it or in its custody; nor to bring into the Library or kindle therein any fire or flame, and not to smoke in the Library; and I promise to obey all rules of the Library.’ Until the nineteenth century the oath would have been in Latin, but today one can choose from over 200 languages, from Maori and Manx to Celtic and Yiddish.

  The line in the oath promising not to ‘kindle therein any fire or flame’ is a heartfelt one. Over the whole history of librarianship hangs the spectre of the burning of the Library of Alexandria, the greatest library of the ancient world. The ban on fire meant that the Bodleian was entirely unheated until 1845 and lacked artificial light until 1929. This kept opening hours rather short – as little as five hours a day during the darkness of winter.