The Word Detective

by John Simpson

  Acquired immune deficiency syndrome: an illness (often but not always fatal) in which opportunistic infections or malignant tumours develop as a result of a severe loss of cellular immunity, which is itself caused by earlier infection with a retrovirus, HIV, transmitted in sexual fluids and blood.

  That was all very well at the time, but before very long I found that science editors would be knocking on my office door saying respectfully that the definition should be updated. Over the years we have made several changes to the definition to accommodate new medical knowledge and public perceptions about AIDS, and an altered sense of what the OED’s readership wanted to know about the condition. As public perception of the term changed, we needed to shift the tenor of our definition gradually from a simple statement of what was known about the condition to more complex information—only known later—about how the condition interacts with HIV. At the same time, the entry was expanding, almost daily, to incorporate other supporting data for related compounds (AIDS crisis, AIDS awareness, etc.) which showed that the term had a social weighting as well as a medical one. Compare that first effort at a definition with the 2014 version:

  A disease characterized by fever, weight loss, lymphadenopathy, and the occurrence of opportunistic infections and malignant tumours, associated with a reduction in the number of helper T lymphocytes in the blood, and now known to occur as a late stage of infection with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV); = acquired immune deficiency syndrome at ACQUIRED adj. Special uses. Also (more generally): infection with HIV.

  But then consider methods by which dictionary editors can quantify social significance. It’s often the case, linguistically speaking, that you can’t determine social or cultural significance simply by staring at the word itself. Words exist in context. We use context to help refine a definition. That’s fairly obvious. There would be no point in the OED carrying millions of illustrative quotations showing how a word can be used in context if this wasn’t somehow important to our understanding of the word.

  Cultural context is bigger than that, and is something that applies to every word, however insignificant it might be. One of the best ways for the lexicographer to judge cultural context—in order to supply additional fact and nuance to a basic definition—is to investigate what compounds and derivatives a word can be found in over the years.

  This probably needs a little more explanation. The basic sense of AIDS (with all of its accompanying quotations) represents only about a quarter of the full entry in the OED. So what is the rest, and what does it tell us about the word? As we carry on down the entry, we find a long tranche of compounds of which AIDS is the first element (AIDS sufferer, AIDS test, etc.). These can be subdivided (as lexicographers like to do—some more than others) into various types, all symptomatic of how society has come to think about and handle AIDS.

  First of all, there are the neutral compounds which just help to explain what AIDS is, in the public perception: AIDS virus is the key one here. Then there are compounds that show that we have a basic medical approach to the condition: AIDS treatment, AIDS drug, AIDS patient. There is nothing surprising there. Next the detective lexicographer can see—from our word data—that the scientific community is busy researching the condition, which shows that it is a fairly significant problem: AIDS research and AIDS researcher. As a result of this medical research, people might be offered an AIDS test, which again raises the game slightly, and then we notice AIDS awareness, with its implication of public concern about the condition. Finally, a residual cluster of compounds takes us up to a new level: AIDS crisis, AIDS hysteria, and AIDS epidemic.

  These days, with the OED Online, you can take this kind of analysis a stage further and look for definitions elsewhere in the dictionary that contain the word AIDS, in search of more information about popular perceptions and misconceptions. Among others, you turn up buddy and gay plague, which are reminders that the dictionary reflects a blunt, hard-nosed picture of what exists linguistically in the real world, not a pre-packaged and socially acceptable version.

  The list of new words and new meanings that we worked on provided an arresting cultural index to the 1980s. But although I was now well and truly the New Words editor of the OED, I was gradually coming to feel that the real business of lexicography related to much earlier periods in the history of English. Much as it was fascinating to trace each of these modern and often frothy words back to their source (often many years before the general public thought they existed), and to add them like coat-hangers to the meanings already present in the main dictionary, hoping they might one day be published, there was always a feeling that most of them would disappear, to be replaced in a few years by a new crop of equally transient ephemera. I was beginning to feel that just working on new words and meanings was not a sufficient end in itself.

  Maybe editing new words—like reading Christian Metz’s Film Language—was just a phase I had to go through. It was a remarkable training in many areas of dictionary methodology, but you didn’t end up with a complete picture. You were continuously painting images of shreds and fragments of language. We had selected the right words—it’s not as if many of the words we worked on disappeared: they are predominantly still around in the language.

  Some well-informed journalists, unlike the earlier ones who had seemed ready to accept any offering about the language, were becoming jaundiced about the lists of the latest dictionary additions that dictionary houses published. They suspected they were simply being targeted with glossy additions by the publisher’s publicity department. It was a view I was tempted to share. It didn’t worry me that aspects of language could be transient, but I did worry that concentrating principally on new words trivialised what we could and should be doing.

  But there were always plenty of new lessons I could still learn from the work on neologisms. One of them was that it is preferable to document the language from everyday sources—the sort of sources that people encounter in their day-to-day lives—rather than from the classic authors. We didn’t discover evidence for bean-counter (an accountant), demo (to demonstrate—new music, amongst other things), or toastie (the sandwich) at the time by reading the likes of Charles Dickens, J. D. Salinger, or Harold Pinter. Those terms are cited from sources such as Ski Magazine, Hyperlink Magazine, Plow Snowboarding, Melody Maker, and, of course, the Lawton Constitution—a newspaper in a south-western Oklahoma town, for to demo—and the Scottish Glasgow Herald—for imaginative new foodstuffs, such as the toastie. The Supplement to the OED had already pushed at this door and, as we grew in confidence, we now gave it a healthy shove. The OED, like many other things—such as the teaching of history—was undergoing a quiet democratisation. History no longer concentrated exclusively on the stories of kings and queens and grand political games, but now also on what everyday life felt like for the ordinary person. The OED was starting to do just the same by hunting out everyday sources to document language change.

  While I was feeling as if it might be time for a change at work, my family was on the move, too. My father had retired from the Secrets Emporium in 1980, after moving ten years earlier to work for another of the outposts of the Government Communications business in London. He remained more involved with numerical codes than with language ones throughout his working life. My mother taught office practice (shorthand, etc.) at Croydon Technical College where they lived in Surrey. My sister, Gill, and her husband were by then running a small family business with their children down in Lyme Regis, and my brother, David, was in any of three or four coastal venues, bird-watching and generally participating in conservation projects, such as plotting the migration patterns of sea-birds, documenting the incidence of orchids in field sites, and enquiring into what butterflies had for dinner. Over the next few years we were all about to move on, but it didn’t seem like that in those sunny late-1980s days.

  I like to think there is something interesting that can be said about any word, however unprepossessing it may at first seem. Bird-watching origi
nally appears in the language because there was a need for it, and more recently it has formed the basis for new types of -watching behaviour observed in humans. The OED credits Edmund Selous (1857–1934) with the earliest use of the term: he used it in the title of his book Bird Watching (1901). You can tell he didn’t really think of the term as a familiar compound at the time because (a) he didn’t hyphenate it, and (b) you can imagine that the stress of the compound was bird WATCHing, not BIRD-watching. The important thing is that Selous was trying to publicise a new way of interacting with birds—observing them scientifically, investigating their movements, feeding habits, nesting habits, etc., etc. And not shooting them. So he needed a new term, and the one that naturally suggested itself was bird watching. You can in fact, by going online, find earlier isolated occurrences of the expression before this, but generally speaking, you can do that with any compound. I was quite taken with the rather reclusive Selous when I found that he described the ideal relationship between the bird and the bird-watcher as that maintained between the lexicographer Dr Johnson and his biographer James Boswell: the target of interest was the bird and its behaviour, but everything was filtered through the observant eyes of his scribe. Selous’s chapter titles may not excite the interest of non-ornithologists: the first one is “Watching golden plovers, etc.,” the second is “Watching ringed plovers, redshanks, peewits, etc.,” and the book generally appeals to obsessives by going on like this. But it marked a new era in our engagement with birds, and so a new word was appropriate.

  Another mode of observing the word, from our ivory hide, is as a compound ending in -watching. Before bird-watching, the compounds have to do with watching the passing hours of the night: midnight-watching and night-watching. These two are quite ancient in English, dating from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when there wasn’t much else to do. But bird-watching in 1901 started a new channel of word-formation in which the objects of scientific study, or just of personal interest, can be introduced, like bird, as the initial element: people-watching, whale-watching, weight-watching, and word-watching are four of the “biggest” of these.

  I had just started to feel—by the mid-1980s—that supplementing a big historical dictionary was, ultimately, an unsatisfying task, that it was only piecemeal work, and did not address the core of the language. There were larger objectives that the OED should be directing itself towards. We had previously been held back artificially for many years by our chief editor’s reluctance to involve the OED in the computer revolution going on around us. But the winds of change could penetrate even Oxford, and when they came, they arrived in the form of a typhoon.

  SIX

  Shark-Infested Waters

  The possibility of putting the OED on to computer had never really occurred to us back in the late 1970s and early 1980s. We had a sketchy impression that computers were being used elsewhere to assist lexicographers—by automatically concordancing texts, for example—but in those days the chief editor, Bob Burchfield, was simply preoccupied with leading the charge to reach the end of the Supplement to the OED and didn’t want any of our editorial work to be subjected to unwelcome interruptions. We were already over three-quarters of the way through the project—what would have been the point of upsetting all of our routines?

  But there were plans afoot to jolt Oxford out of the nineteenth century, where its denizens traditionally shambled out of bed in the morning, ambled off to the library to check a few facts (or maybe even ideas), had lunch in college, and then dozed until dinner. While we had been beavering away on assorted editorial matters in St Giles’, things had been changing in the upper echelons of the University Press. Since 1980 we had been distantly aware of a brand-new head of reference at Oxford, Richard Charkin (soon to become our managing director), occasionally referred to whisperingly and behind closed doors as “the Shark.” His word, according to those brave enough to have anything to do with him, was law, and once he had an idea he didn’t drop it. That is precisely how dictionary types behave, but we weren’t used to other people in the Press playing intellectual poker too.

  Gradually the gaze of our new managing director alighted on the OED. Did the Press owe the OED a living, or did the OED need to start earning its keep? The smart money was on option two, but we had our heads down, and some of us didn’t notice that the world was changing.

  The Shark had come to the sleepy old University Press from a “real” commercial publisher, and he was intent on reshaping the destiny of the Press as a world-class educational publisher which would put any other university press around the world far into the shade. I didn’t know anything about the larger politics, as usual, but one day back in late 1982 I had received a phone call from our chief editor to join him in his grand office with my former trainer, Lesley Brown.

  It turned out that the future was opening up before our very eyes. I’m afraid the Chief’s were tightly shut and mine were only slowly prising themselves open. Here was the task, as relayed by the Shark to my boss: take a look at that incredibly slow project you’ve been working on since 1957, with your quill pens, mechanical adding machines, slips of paper, and far too many editors, and see if it’s feasible to put the whole dictionary on to computer so that in future you can race through the work in no time at all (and produce a first-rate dictionary along the way). The University Press would, then, be free to refocus some of its resources on other projects. Not only were we assured that this would be good for the dictionary, but it was strongly intimated that it might be the only hope that the dictionary had of surviving into the future, since the University Press did not wish to fund further supplements.

  Computerising the dictionary would offer editors the opportunity to keep it up to date in the future and might possibly expand the reach of the OED. Readers (who later became known as “users”) would have the opportunity to buy a CD by which they could access the dictionary on their computers, rather than having to make a special journey to their local library (which many of them were patently too idle to do).

  As the meeting progressed, it became clear that Lesley and I were being asked to test out the grand scheme that was slowly taking shape in the mind of the Shark. At first, the University Press had contemplated a mammoth paper-based cut-and-paste job on the dictionary, integrating the old Victorian edition of the OED with its modern supplements and then somehow updating and then republishing the whole thing as a book. The Shark was not interested in that. He could see that the only way to drag the dictionary into the present century was to update it with state-of-the-art computing. But, ironically, to test out the plan, Lesley and I had to pick up our state-of-the-art scissors and pretend that we were computers, literally cutting and pasting together entries from our two sources (the old OED and its modern Supplement). We reasoned that if we could do that in a fairly mechanical way with glue and staples, then maybe a computer could be taught to do the same thing automatically and at great speed, and then perhaps the end result would be worth publishing as a dictionary.

  We produced page after page of stuck-together dictionary text that passed for the blueprint of the dictionary of the future. Then things went quiet for a while. I returned to my New Words work, and Lesley returned to her revision of the Shorter, both of us back contemplating the editorial issues and deadlines with which we had grown familiar.

  Words develop out of the culture in which they are used, and blueprint grows naturally out of the scientific interest shown by the Victorians in light sensitivity (most easily appreciated in photography, of course, but also in any discipline that utilised switches operated by light-sensitive cells). The specialist sense of blueprint is now “a technical drawing”—in architecture, electronics, or anything that needs to display a structure through lines—but the word started off life around 1850 as something rather more specific: it was “a photographic print composed of white lines on a blue background, used chiefly in copying plans, machine drawings, etc.” (OED). Here’s the problem that people had back then: in the early n
ineteenth century there were no copying machines, no Rank Xerox, no Banda machines, no colour reproduction. If you wanted to copy an image, you had to do it yourself, or hire a humble clerk to do it for you. And then if you needed two hundred copies of the plan, you had to stay up all night to finish the job.

  Photography was one of the great successes of the era. As early as 1839 John Herschel (the baronet mathematician, astronomer, chemist, and inventor) wrote exultantly, “I yesterday succeeded in producing a photograph on glass.” This is significant both because it marks the invention of a new technological process and because it is the first known instance of the word photograph.

  A blueprint was a piece of paper washed with the chemical ferro-gallate, which turns blue when exposed to light. If this paper is clamped under glass to a plan or a map drawn on light-transmitting paper, and then put out into the sun, it seems that a “blue print” is formed on the original document. There is one other little point of lexical interest here. The original pronunciation will not have been BLUEprint, as we have it, with the stress on the first syllable. Stress can drift to the front of a word over time. Originally we would have spoken the new compound as it was first spelt, descriptively—as two separate words with equal stress “BLUE PRINT,” or perhaps “blue PRINT,” with stress on the final term. How do we know this? Well, from analysing the older spellings of the term; from examining old dictionaries, which indicate stress patterns; from poetry (though you might struggle to find “blueprint” in early verse); from personal experience; from anywhere else that tells you directly or indirectly about accentuation. As usual, the OED takes its information and knowledge from wherever it can find it, and then makes sure to corroborate it.