The Word Detective

by John Simpson

  In many instances, [Coote’s] pronunciation is inelegant and vulgar; as when he gives sanction to dropping the sound of a in the last syllable of marriage, carriage, &c—thus, marrige, carrige.

  We didn’t like that back then. But time moves on, and we’ve forgotten that was ever an issue now.

  Over the course of my first year at the OED, I gradually moved along the alphabet from queen to quid to rap, and all the way up to Rastafarian and beyond. There is a freedom about the alphabet: it’s democratic—if you follow the words that arrive on your desk alphabetically, then you meet candidate words from all walks of life, not ones chosen with marketing strategies or any political intent in mind. I remember being puzzled by rannygazoo (“nonsense; foolishness; a prank”). We never did discover who invented the term. It appeared in the works of P. G. Wodehouse, surprisingly a bellwether for informal Americanisms of his day, and we tracked it back to the Washington Post of 1896. With the help of the OED’s researchers I found piano rags in the late 1890s, first played by African American bands in Kansas (according to the evidence, at least). We tracked the first occurrence of quisling (a wartime collaborator with the enemy), named in 1940 after the Norwegian officer Major Vidkun Quisling. Every discovery excited me and helped us to plot the stages through which the English language had progressed in recent decades around the world.

  As we made our way through the alphabet, there was, naturally, increasing pressure on us from the University Press to bring this nineteen-year project to an end. We had published two volumes of the Supplement, and we knew that there would be another two volumes to come. At, say, four years per volume, we would not be finished until the mid-1980s, or maybe even later. Oddly, none of us gave much thought to what we might do when the work ran out. Maybe Oxford University Press would contemplate a further supplement to the dictionary, updating yet again what we had just spent years trying to complete. In our lucid moments I think we doubted that. Maybe the academic world would be so impressed by what we had achieved that it would offer us jobs as professors in whatever English department we wanted when we hit Z. That was unlikely, but I didn’t mind—it was all too far ahead, and at the moment it was all too much fun. Although I had only been at the OED for a year, time seemed to move so slowly. I was absorbing all of the rules and secrets of the process and coming to terms with the magnificence of the language spreading back from our day to its very first appearance 1,500 years earlier.

  The OED has a reputation for taking a very long time to complete anything. This perspective is, needless to say, a travesty. But whenever we tried to tell people that we were working at top speed, they would eye us with indulgent disbelief. I was recently asked by a mid-European historical dictionary project to supply some data on how fast the original OED travelled on its journey towards the letter Z between 1884 and 1928 (44 years). It was, in fact, a very lean machine for its day. Its main counterpart in Europe was the Deutsches Wörterbuch, the so-called Grimm dictionary (launched by the fairy-tale brothers Grimm). That great dictionary started on its lengthy publication history in 1854 and was not completed—many instalments later—until 1961 (that’s 107 years later, for those of you without a degree in numbers). So the OED deserves a small pat on the head for knocking 63 years off the German world-record schedule. It’s a similar picture with the great Dutch dictionary, the multi-multi-volume Woordenboek der Nederlandse Taal (WNT). The first volume of the WNT was published in 1864, and the final one rolled off the printing presses in 1998 (I was there at the ceremony in the cathedral in Leiden). That’s 134 years. The former German record fades into insignificance. But length of time isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The hard-pressed editors in Germany and in the Netherlands were doing a thorough job. A very thorough job. The long gestation period does make their dictionaries hard to update, though, as the editorial style changes over generations of editors. The OED came in at a sprint by comparison and maintained a fairly regular style throughout, which (as we’ll see) made it feasible to consider revising and updating when the time came.

  But at the moment, the possibility of doing that didn’t even exist in our heads. We were driven by deadlines to complete the final two volumes of the Supplement to the OED. I didn’t mind deadlines, as I’d always been a pretty quick worker. Each month the dictionary’s managers would compile progress lists, and I was usually at the top of them. Progress was important. Deadlines were not targets I liked to miss.

  Times of crisis are times when new words are generated. In mid-nineteenth-century America the dangerous and yet thrilling push into the Wild West, and then the California Gold Rush, followed by the Civil War, brought a jumble of new words into the emerging variety called American English. (At the moment, Charlotte Brontë is accredited with the first recorded use of “Wild West”: I don’t think that will last.) Much of this new vocabulary is self-confidently adventurous, like the new country: badlands, bloviate, bodacious, bonanza, braggadocious, buckaroo (sorry: that’s enough of a list).

  The earliest recorded use of the term dead line comes from angling (1860). It’s not a new creation in the world of words, but it takes another approach—it’s a creative metaphor. A dead line is one that doesn’t move or run while it’s lying in wait for fish to bite. To get into the stream of the modern meanings of the term we need to travel over to America around the end of the Civil War, where the same pairing of words produced a new and unrelated meaning. It seems that mid-nineteenth-century Americans did not hold enlightened views on prison management: they apparently used to draw lines around military prisons, and if a prisoner went beyond that line, he would be shot. The dead line. Here’s what the prolific American writer Benson John Lossing said, in his Pictorial History of the Civil War in the United States of America (vol. 3, 1868): “Seventeen feet from the inner stockade was the ‘dead-line’, over which no man could pass and live.” Deadlines became less lethal in early twentieth-century America, when the newspapers picked up the expression to describe their time-limit for receiving copy. Make the deadline or else. Then it drifted into numerous other areas of life, including the OED’s own schedule.

  In the days before the Internet, I came to see that one of the characteristics that really distinguished OED entries was the quality of the historical research that went into their compilation. Later, we had help from all manner of digital resources to discover earlier references to the words or phrases we were working on. Back then, it was just the researcher against a shelf full of books and library catalogues, and no one gave you any hints about where to start looking. A classic example of this is illustrated by the work we conducted to research the history of the expression the thin red line.

  The thin red line was an expression that the original OED compilers had utterly forgotten to include. Arguably, this was rather casual of them. The expression was well established when they reached red, and even if it hadn’t been, there would have been another chance to include it several years later when they reached thin. I presume they thought that, since it consisted of three words, it was more of a phrase than a word, and so its natural right of entry into the dictionary was compromised. We had to be practical: two-word compounds could easily be included if they had gained a firm foothold in the language; three-word compounds were more questionable, and it was sometimes hard to determine whether they were fixed expressions or chance collocations of the three elements; four-word compounds were even less likely to be included.

  By the late 1970s, when we were working on red for the Supplement to the OED, we concluded that thin red line was admissible. Almost all of the work on red had been edited by my old trainer, Lesley, and she was not one to leave any stone unturned. Her bundle of red words included thin red line. Everyone knew, in those days, that this was a historical expression that referred to the British Army in line of battle, in its role as protector—thin and stretched out in its redcoat uniform trying desperately to save the British Empire from the forces of darkness. The more of these forces that came along, the thinner the line be
came.

  Suggestions in our card file indicated that the phrase was redolent of the Battle of Balaclava, in the Crimean War. But Lesley had a serious problem here. She had an armful of documentary evidence for thin red line collected over a hundred years or so by the dictionary’s “readers,” but none of this predated 1935 and a jingoistic occurrence in a novel by George Orwell. The Battle of Balaclava took place on 25 October 1854. So either the expression thin red line had nothing to do with the battle, or our documentary evidence started almost a hundred years too late.

  For the everyday dictionary editor, there were precious few resources on the Crimean War in the language-flavoured OED library. But all was not lost. In researching the expression in the dictionary’s reference library, Lesley had followed protocol and inspected quotations dictionaries, just on the off-chance. As well as the standard Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, we also checked through various editions of John Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, published in America since the mid-nineteenth century and a powerhouse of recondite information on sayings familiar and less so. My personal favourite in this corner of the library was Burton Stevenson’s Home Book of Quotations, a massive red brick of a book published posthumously in New York in 1967, and amalgamating much of Stevenson’s early work on phrases.

  But this time it was John Bartlett who nearly came up trumps, with a reference to The Times report of 25 October 1854 on the Battle of Balaclava, which provided a reference to the “thin red streak tipped with a line of steel” at the battle, and attributed the reference to the paper’s Irish war correspondent (later Sir) William Howard Russell (1820–1907). Problem No. 1: this wasn’t actually the expression we were looking for. It was close, but not close enough.

  Lesley called in the help of our researchers in London and Oxford. At the British Library’s newspaper library in Colindale, out in the north-west suburbs of London, long-time OED word researcher George Chowdharay-Best looked for the 25 October Times report and found that it didn’t exist. That was Problem No. 2. Facts were dissolving like butter in a pan. At this point, the research was transferred back to Oxford, where it was taken up by my colleague Yvonne Warburton. She hunted through issues of The Times, looking for the report, and eventually found it on 14 November—but still it read “thin red streak,” not “thin red line.” We had to put that lead on hold.

  The bloodhounds now picked up another trail. Although John Bartlett hadn’t come up with the goods, a later reference from 1877, in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, offered a fall-back position. This was to another William Russell source, his Expedition to the Crimea (1877 edition). Sure enough, this did contain the “thin red line tipped with steel,” but only twenty-three years after the battle. There was still hope. There always is. Russell’s Expedition to the Crimea (1877) was a later edition of his book The War: From the Landing at Gallipoli (1855), so it would be no trouble to convert thin red line to 1855. No, back then he had still used “thin red streak.” How about his 1858 edition? Back to our London researcher to check this, as the book wasn’t in Oxford. But no, it was still “thin red streak” there.

  We were flummoxed at 1877. We had red line, but not thin red line, from 1855. It was frustrating, but in the absence of any other leads, we had no option but to publish the entry with 1877 as the earliest reference to the precise phrase thin red line.

  There is naturally a postscript to this everyday tale of lexical folk. Several years later Yvonne published a brief article about her research and asked readers to see if they could find earlier evidence for thin red line. Sure enough, the challenge was taken up, with quotations supplied to the dictionary back to 1859, including a commemorative verse contained in Sebastian Evans’s Rhymes Read in the Queens Drawing Room at Aston Hall, which linked the expression directly to the Battle of Balaclava: “How too, on Balaclava’s hills, / Two miles of deadly riding, / That ‘thin red line’ charged,—and returned, / How thin! to tell the tiding!”

  The icing on the cake came a year or two later. More and more historical publications were steadily becoming accessible on the Internet, and the possibilities for lexicographical research were changing dramatically once again. By this time, The Times archives had become searchable online. There was a dash for the keyboards around the world, and one of the OED’s back-room contributors found what we wanted—“The services of that ‘thin red line’ which had met and routed the Russian cavalry”—from an edition of the newspaper published on 24 January 1855. Maybe the quotation marks imply that it was a misremembering of Russell. The text places it all in context, as the British government debated which soldiers should receive medals for their service in the Crimea:

  Where in history was a parallel to be found to the glorious charge of Balaklava? Nor were the services performed by the gallant 93d Regiment, under General Sir Colin Campbell, to be forgotten—the services of that “thin red line” which had met and routed the Russian cavalry.

  Folk-memory and documentary evidence had finally come together to clinch the deal.

  Learning how to edit for the OED wasn’t something that was achieved overnight, or with that very first bundle of work containing the word queen. There were many larger lexicographical issues that I became aware of as I became more experienced. But when, a couple of months after receiving the assignment, I’d finished with the word queen, I’d followed the cycle from beginning to end for the very first time: the laborious and yet exciting collection of material, the solid research in the departmental library, the frustrating struggle with meaning and how to express it succinctly—all parts of a complex procedure that I would conduct hundreds of times in the future, and pass on to those who entered the ranks of the OED staff after me. Many of the details of those early procedures are redundant nowadays, but at the time I felt a thrill of connection with the earlier editors in the nineteenth century, who used precisely those procedures in their own work. I had the best job in Oxford.

  I was also learning a new rigour. The English student in the mid-1970s was not necessarily encouraged to be a rigorous literary analyst. On a spectrum of rigour, I would have proudly put myself towards the more impressionistic, soft-edged end. But I soon learnt, from my trainer, that those were not qualities that marked out the lexicographer. Much as I had the academic background and the natural curiosity, I needed to sharpen up if I was to write curt yet informative definitions based on a careful examination of the evidence. Fortunately, I had the patience to learn, though there were times when it seemed I was going through a tough initiation.

  The future was unknown and we gave it little thought, happy in our little bubble. All we could do in those days was to research and edit with the tools available to us at the time. Subsequent technological developments, which allowed us to discover so much more significant new information (the thin red line at Balaclava, for instance), lay way ahead of us: different from what we knew then, and quite unprecedented. In due course we had to understand how to retain the rigour of old-style lexicography, and yet how to harness the power of the new information networks which were then just hidden from us below the horizon.

  FOUR

  The Longest Way Round

  If my first year at the OED had seemed to last for ages, as I concentrated on learning how to become an editor, the next few years—as we steered the Supplement project to a conclusion and finally brought the curtain down on old-style Oxford lexicography—seemed, in contrast, to rush by. Once I knew how to edit, I found myself working my way up the dictionary ranks, being given new projects, and supervising newer editors in their efforts to achieve editorial competence.

  There was no doubt that the language was changing, too, as it always does, as we entered the Thatcher and the Reagan years. As a contrast to the freedoms of the previous two decades, we were starting to appreciate the benefits and disbenefits of what became known as political correctness: I spent some time working on the entry for -person as a gender-neutral suffix, we reviewed our entries for racism and sexism, and we kept an eye on new
-isms, such as ablism and lookism, both soon to find a place in the dictionary. Lexicographers joined the rest of society in wondering how best to describe peoples that earlier generations were happy to refer to as “tribes.” New technology was seeping through into popular parlance (microcomputer, EFTPOS, data protection, electronic music): sometimes these terms were older in technical use, but they were becoming part of the regular vocabulary of everyone. A new affluence in the West, backed by a new politics of individualism (big bang, debt counsellor, enterprise culture), contrasted with consciousness-raising regarding the environment (biofuel, ecofeminism). In Britain, Estuary English, the mix of standard English and Cockney which seemed to spread out from London from the 1970s and 1980s, identified a new generation of would-be entrepreneurs, and in America ebonics gave a new validity to African American speech. We were entering a new domain, and cutting ourselves off both from the austerity of postwar years and the colourful eccentricities of psychedelia.

  Over the years I worked in several offices in the University Press. Each time, a sense of place was important. Each office seemed to characterise the type of work that I and my fellow editors were doing and somehow epitomised the language changes we were describing. When I joined the editorial staff of the dictionary in 1976, we were working in a quiet Victorian semi-detached house on a residential side-street in Oxford. And the work itself was quiet and gentle—gradually adding new words and meanings to a massive Victorian dictionary. The building fitted the sort of work we were carrying out.

  We didn’t know it in 1976, but our time in those offices was drawing to a close. The dictionary had shifted for itself in Walton Crescent since the chief editor’s appointment back in 1957, but now—in 1977—there were plans to ship us and all of our files up the road to a grand Georgian building on St Giles’, one of the main streets in central Oxford and the former home of the Press’s world-famous cartographic (map-making) department. We had become cramped in Walton Crescent. To me, the new offices symbolised the palatial old-world dignity that people expected of the OED, where an elegant entrance hall led on to rooms crowded with words. We were very much on public display here, pointed out by the tourist buses that edged slowly past as they plied along the road throughout the working day.