The Word Detective

by John Simpson

  When I mentioned Tolkien, I noticed a flicker of additional interest on the brow of the chief editor. Little was I to know, given the only modest amount of preparation I had done, that the chief editor and J. R. R. Tolkien had been well acquainted with each other in Oxford, and indeed that the chief editor had been Tolkien’s student and then colleague in the English faculty for many years.

  Coincidence piled on top of coincidence. Although Tolkien had died three years earlier, he was clearly much in the mind of the chief editor at the time of my interview, and he started speaking about his old friend. As chance would have it, it appeared, at this very moment the entry for “hobbit” was about to make its appearance in the soon-to-be released second volume of the Supplement to the OED (containing words starting with the letters H to N)—the imminent publication of which I had been, until recently, so blissfully unaware. A hobbit, as any reader of Tolkien’s fantasy writings will know, is “one of an imaginary people, a small variety of the human race, that gave themselves this name (meaning ‘hole-dweller’) but were called by others halflings, since they were half the height of normal men” (OED). The chief editor was well aware that this was one of the most publicity-worthy items in the forthcoming supplementary volume. It was also a popular favourite, as it lacked the out-and-out naughtiness of the four-letter taboo words that had been crammed unceremoniously into the early letters of the alphabet, and had been published, to academics’ delight and purists’ despair, in the first volume of the Supplement (A–G).

  The OED, the chief editor told me, had asked Tolkien to advise on the draft definition and etymology of hobbit. The editor reached into his cabinet and took out a dusty file entitled “Men of Letters.” This was the thin cache, he explained, into which he placed a copy of any letter to the OED from anyone with a claim to literary merit. He pulled out a piece of paper, clearly one of his most prized. It was Tolkien’s response to a polite enquiry from him several years earlier. On closer inspection it transpired that Tolkien did not have much to add to the OED’s effort to define the word hobbit, but that he said so beautifully over several pages, in true Oxford style.

  With this passing flicker of interest we arrived at a critical moment in the interview, marked by a slight and quite clearly prearranged knock at the door. In strode John Sykes, the tall, thin embodiment of scientific—as opposed to historical—lexicography, the editor of the Concise Oxford Dictionary. He was the polar opposite to the gentleman with whom I had been happily conversing for the previous half hour: sparing of words to the point of disappearance, but with sharp, narrow eyes which focused you in their penetrating and relentless stare. I felt unravelled by his attention. At this point I realised that it was this man, the editor of the Concise, who would have the final say on every applicant for the post on his tributary dictionary, the Pocket Oxford.

  The downward trajectory to the interview that followed his appearance was all my fault. I’d never had much time for people who didn’t show any interest in me, and the editor of the Concise was just such a man. A colossus in his field, able to complete The Times crossword (as I later discovered) in less time than it took me to open the newspaper, he nevertheless regarded medieval poetry in general as a whimsical and illogical flight of fancy. He was a scientist through and through, and I had been in the wrong queue on the day they handed out scientific brains. He enthused (in very few words) on areas of the language that seemed to me dry, insipid, flat, and irrelevant (how many pages his new edition could have; ideas about making definitions even more compact and crossword-like cryptic); and I’m sure that the same feelings about me flitted through his brain. I was interested in the history of English (or so I thought), and he was interested in concise definition as an art form in itself.

  Somehow I had survived those first ten seconds with the amiable chief editor, but his deputy saw through me immediately—or, as I like to remember, he formed the wrong and worst opinion of me from the moment he walked through the door. Furthermore, I suspect that he didn’t like playing second fiddle to the chief editor in an interview for a post reporting to him.

  My protector, the chief editor, sat on one side as I was subjected to a barrage of silence interspersed by short, piercing, staccato enquiries. How would I characterise the Pocket Oxford Dictionary in comparison with the Concise? Smaller, I ventured? Silence. What audience did I think the Pocket was designed to reach? Younger, I guessed? Silence, followed by more silence. How would I differentiate between continuous and continual? A very fair question this time, but not one I had ever contemplated before. Silence and embarrassed shuffling on all sides. Had I been aware that the Fowler brothers (founder editors of the Concise) had published their dictionary well before its supposed source, the full OED, was finished? Yes, that one I definitely knew the answer to. Was I in the least interested in working with him? Of course he didn’t actually ask that.

  As the minutes passed I slowly realised that the Pocket had to be even more concise than the Concise. But where was the fun in that? Words have meanings, and even then I had a suspicion that the meanings interlocked or overlapped or at least impinged on each other; that their etymologies took you down curious paths, through societies you could only mistily imagine, back to cultures that had ceased to exist many years before you were even thought of. The Pocket Oxford wasn’t, I realised, a project on which I wanted to work: it didn’t involve the same luxuriant historical spread as the big, multi-volumed OED. The editor of the Concise and I held diametrically opposed views on what made language interesting. The editor of the Concise and I were on the reverse of a collision course, and we were likely to leave the observable atmosphere through opposite doors.

  That didn’t matter to him. He was the man in post. I was the junior upstart with no hope of pulling this conversation back on track. After a while it was clear that my forty-five minutes were up. In fact, they had been up about an hour and a quarter earlier. My interview had extended to around two hours, owing to the tendency of good-cop Chief Editor No. 1 to talk at length about language and life, from which I profited immeasurably, mainly by not having to speak and therefore say anything that would have precluded me from success in my application. My nemesis, bad-cop Editor No. 2, had continued to say little, but he let his withering eyes settle on me for, say, half an hour. There came a tide in the affairs of the interview when I knew the game was up, and I was ushered back out of the office, leaving both editors to discuss my prospective candidacy.

  As I left the dictionary offices after my interview I was aware that I had encountered a piece of “old Oxford,” the Oxford of Tolkien, Lewis Carroll, Benjamin Jowett, and C. S. Lewis. This was the Oxford of careful scholarship—often creative, but hard for an outsider to penetrate and understand. It was an environment to which you had to earn entry, and one which showed no signs to me of wanting to relax its powers. The OED had been moulded inside this old Oxford environment, and yet it reached outside it, out to the real language and the real world that everyone knew. It would be far too early in my involvement with the dictionary for me to have formulated any plans, but what if the dictionary, instead of sliding into the past, could instead redirect itself towards the future? Could there be a “new Oxford” in which this might happen, or would the old Oxford just engulf you if you tried?

  I left the dictionary house under no misapprehensions that I might have sneaked the job. I sauntered casually and somewhat sadly up the road to meet Hilary, who was exhausted by hours of window-shopping, and we took the train back to Reading and our quiet life. A few days later I heard from the Colonel that unfortunately I would not be offered the post.

  TWO

  Lexicography 101

  For a few weeks after receiving OUP’s letter of rejection, I carried on with my dissertation and left those around me to contemplate how I might best be employed in the years to come. I didn’t think badly of OUP and the dictionary for their decision. I was convinced that there were lots of potential candidates who were more egg-headed and therefore mo
re suitable than I was. So that was that—time to look around quietly to see if anyone else out there wanted my services. I buried myself deeper and deeper into my dissertation and applied optimistically for one or two research grants. I’m naturally optimistic: something would turn up. Hilary didn’t go into overdrive either; I think secretly she considered that she’d found me the perfect job, and that if I’d messed up, then that was my problem.

  I was shaken out of my contemplative complacency a month or so later, when a further letter from Oxford University Press arrived unannounced in my letterbox. This one was altogether sunnier than the last. It informed me in the usual scholarly code that another job had arisen out of the ashes of Job No. 1 (which they were by now almost devastated that I had not been offered), and would I be interested in accepting this alternative post? The position involved working on the full Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary instead of just the little Pocket. To me, this felt like a remarkable challenge: one that offered the chance to explore the language—how it had changed and how it might change in the future—rather than one which boiled this information down (as I loftily thought) into a reduced-size and derivative dictionary.

  The new job would become available later in the summer of 1976. I’d discover in due course that this opening had arisen because one of the spirited young editors on the dictionary had taken the unlikely step of leaving the learned ranks of the OED and setting sail for another dictionary job in America. When I met him several years later, he’d left the world of dictionaries and was teaching Middle English 101 to EngLit students.

  Some people wonder what numbers are doing in a dictionary. But don’t overthink. There it is in the OED—an entry for “101,” defined along the lines of “a postmodifying adjective designating an introductory course at American colleges and universities in the subject specified.” The number 101 is used with a specific meaning in regular English sentences, so there is no reason to exclude it from the dictionary. There are two questions that are important to ask about 101, but it’s the third that’s actually fascinating.

  Firstly, when were the first 101 courses set up? The answer, according to the OED, is in 1929, in Buffalo, New York. In that year, the New York educators devised a course called General Science 101, which, as far as we know, is the starting point for the modern expression. When they put their minds to dreaming up another scientific course, they rapidly decided that it was to be called General Science 102, but that didn’t take off.

  Secondly, why the number 101 rather than 1 or 001? We at Oxford don’t seem to know the answer to that, but maybe someone can tell us. (Perhaps it’s like American hotel rooms, which all start with a 1 for the ground floor, even though everyone knows this should be called level zero.)

  Thirdly, and most interestingly, why do we pronounce “101” the way we do? Why—when we pronounce numbers—do we pronounce the “nought” or “zero” as if it were the letter O? One-oh-one; one-zero-one. That’s a big question, but maybe a step too far for the historical lexicographer. My guess is that there are several factors. Firstly, “Oh” is easier to say at speed than “one” (which starts with a phonetically challenging “w” sound). Secondly, I would not be at all surprised to find that it was popularised by “double-oh seven,” James Bond, and then fed back into single occurrences of “oh.” But lexicographers don’t guess. The OED simply alerts any person who wishes to say “101” out loud that they must pronounce the zero as if it were “Oh.”

  Once this new letter had arrived from Oxford University Press, Hilary and I had to decide whether to pack up our things lock, stock, and barrel and relocate almost immediately to Oxford. We talked about it. Hilary was happy to shift her research to Oxford, with instant access to the gargantuan holdings of the Bodleian Library, so she needed little convincing. I still toyed with the possibility of further medieval research, but the idea of becoming involved in a major international language project based in Oxford was starting to sink its teeth into me. I’d always liked approaching things from odd angles: maybe dictionary work would be an intriguing outlet for my interest in language, literature, and historical research. Also, there were no other job offers available on our kitchen table that day. So, arguments in favour: more or less everything. Arguments against: we would have to move.

  Soon another letter was on its way back to OUP informing the powers that be that, even before I had my master’s degree in medieval studies tucked under my belt, I would be “delighted” to launch myself on the sea of historical lexicography.

  Once we’d made the decision, we needed a base in Oxford: preferably somewhere near the University Press but also within striking distance of the Bodleian Library, for Hilary’s thesis. As luck, or diligence, would have it, she was passing a newsagent’s near the University Press one day when she spotted a card in the window advertising accommodation in a shared house nearby. I didn’t have the necessary level of clearance at home to make this sort of decision myself, but within days we were moving into rooms in the smallest house in one of the smallest streets ready to begin our life in Oxford.

  Victor Street consisted of a series of terraced houses that started off reasonably large at each end of the street and became gradually smaller until they reached our house. Our front door opened on to a corridor on the left-hand side of the house. There is no simple way to describe how you found the stairs to the first floor. And then once you did get up the stairs, there wasn’t all that much to write home about. Mind you, this was not an uncommon set-up in small terraced houses. Our succession of house-sharers—who occupied (serially) the downstairs front room of the house—used the communal stairway for their occasional forays into the bathroom. I can’t remember speaking with any of them, except for a summer visitor from America who informed me that it was a well-known fact that coffee cooled faster if milk had not been added, a piece of advice by which I was momentarily tempted to live for the rest of my life.

  Almost before I knew it, it was time to venture into my first day at the OED. So in early August 1976, I arrived back at the dictionary offices in Walton Crescent to present myself for work. I climbed tentatively up the stone steps of No. 40 and then further up, to the first floor, to present myself to my new friend, the chief editor, in the heart of the dictionary’s sanctum.

  He was too busy to see me this time, and I could see his point. It was doubtless going to take several years to get me up to editorial operating speed, and why should he involve himself in that when there were plenty of other experienced editors to act as buffers to shield him from me? So instead I was met once again by the departmental secretary, both alphabetically and actually named Beta, and escorted to my handler.

  Needless to say, I had no idea what to expect from my first day on the job. This was, after all, my first job, and my application for a job with the Oxford dictionaries had been my first-ever job application. The dictionary offices felt like a university department, with a focus on research but without the responsibility for students. I was led into a long room at the rear of the first floor of Dictionary Terrace and introduced to Lesley Brown, who was—I soon discovered—as sharp as an icicle when it came to editing the dictionary. She was my handler, though they preferred the word “trainer.” As a senior editor she was ranked considerably higher than me, and I came to look up to her as a dog looks up to its master. She’d only been at the dictionary for a few years, but had risen into the lexicographical stratosphere. Give her a handful of sentences containing examples of a word, and she would craft you a fully-fledged dictionary entry in the time it takes to make a pot of tea.

  After the preliminaries, I was shown to my office. The nearest thing I had previously experienced to an office was a carrel in a university library. But within minutes of arriving, I was marched downstairs and taken into a real, live room where I could stack my pencils and arrange my family photographs, just like I’d seen on American cop shows.

  I could not help but notice that the office was already occupied by two editorial lad
ies scribbling furiously on pieces of card. (This was well before computer screens invaded the dictionary offices.) Good morning. Good morning. This is John. This is Edith. Here’s Deborah. Lovely old names. The dictionary maintained a roughly fifty-fifty male-to-female staff ratio (to his credit, the chief editor promoted all sorts equally), but based on my experience up to then, it seemed that most of the offices were occupied by women. In this case, they both had desks parked nonchalantly at angles to the wall; the sunlight played across them as the day advanced. I was shown a desk facing the wall. This was where I would start my long apprenticeship.

  Apprentice wasn’t one of the old Germanic words which formed the original bedrock of English, after the Angles and Saxons arrived in Britain in the sixth century or so AD. It came along years later, from French, after the Norman Conquest. In fact, apprentice is first recorded in English in the Middle Ages, in the fourteenth century (the OED offers William Langland’s Piers Plowman as the first reference). The word derives ultimately from Latin’s apprehendere, “to learn.”

  Words typically arise at a particular time for a particular reason, and apprentice is no exception. Back in the Middle Ages, when an apprentice signed up with a trade master, he or his minders signed a legal agreement—which was likely to have been drawn up in French—establishing the terms of the training. The French language (and particularly that version spoken in England, Anglo-French) was the language of law in fourteenth-century England, so inevitably a new word in this subject area would come from Anglo-French.