The Word Detective

by John Simpson

  It took us a long time to get there, but as the work went on I became more and more proud of what the editors were achieving. What had seemed to some like an impossible project was finally starting to come into its own.

  TEN

  At the Top of the Crazy Tree

  The Third Edition of the OED was now approved and funded by the University, and a draconian deadline of 2000—only six years hence—had been attached to the project. Someone clearly thought that the easiest way to ensure that the project did not overrun was to set a target date, as loudly as possible. I once even heard 1999 suggested as our target. Had these guys ever looked into the OED? If we were to stand any chance of approaching that goal, we would need to recruit more lexicographers. Unfortunately it is hard to recruit good lexicographers. They are not available on supermarket shelves.

  From time to time I would imagine famous writers and scholars from the past finding their way to the dictionary offices for an interview. Charles Dickens would have been exasperatingly fond of lengthy, indulgent, and detailed description. Lexicographers need to be concise. Keep your definitions to a single sentence and don’t continually launch off into secondary clauses. We don’t need a paragraph of introduction, scene-setting, and certainly not four paragraphs. I appreciate your handling of music-hall evidence—do you have an interest in the theatre? Are you familiar with Word? No, well, we have other systems too. Have you been keeping up with post-nineteenth-century usage at all? Like you, we are thinking of serial publication: What are the upsides and downsides? Thank you, we’ll be in contact with your secretary.

  How about philosophers? Immanuel Kant? Mr Kant, had you considered the language barrier when framing your application? Do you speak any languages other than German and Latin? No, we no longer write our definitions in Latin. In the aptitude test you demonstrated a weighty command of large abstract concepts, but do you feel comfortable reducing these to simple, approachable terms? What do you mean when you talk about the “transcendental formula of public right”? How would you critique the prospective definition of an intellectual as a person who speaks at the same time as he thinks? What other interests do you have? “None” is an unusual answer. We are looking for candidates with a top-class English style and the ability to pinpoint and clarify problems, not leave the reader more confused than when they started.

  And then there was Archimedes, over on a graduate scholarship at the moment in Oxford. In my imagination, we had high hopes for this candidate, as he might handle some of our scientific terminology as well as the simpler non-science vocabulary. But we weren’t expecting the hair, pretty unkempt; normally those guys from research centres have got it nailed down in a pigtail. Fortunately, he started to pull things back with the first few questions: he’d seen a bit of the world, had done some teaching and (we hoped) had got that out of his system. He was direct and to the point. But overall he seemed a numbers man, not a letters one. We’d mention a word or two, and he’d reduce it to how many letters it had; what the frequency of those letters was in normal written British English; and the maximum Scrabble score you could achieve with its constituent letters. He was bony and angular, too. Sometimes went off at a tangent. That’s not something you want in a lexicographer.

  Agatha Christie was careful with her words, picky almost. We ask the normal questions: for example, “How does your previous life prepare you for dictionary work?” She jumps on that one quickly, and wonders if we believe she may have had a previous life, and what it might have consisted of. Sadly, that’s one of the over-literal ways lexicographers would respond to that question. “What aspects of working on the dictionary appeal to you most?” She informs us that she believes she has a penchant for detection. (Do we want someone who believes they have a “penchant” for anything?) “Etymology,” she informs us—as if we were relaxing unsuspecting in our armchairs as the murder is unfolded—“Etymology is the science of fingerprinting words to establish their whereabouts during history.” This is certainly a new angle. “Definition is the ability to say what you mean in fewer words than you intended.” She tells us of a Belgian friend of hers who would also be just right for this job. We thank her and put her on the maybe file—which is two stages further than the earlier candidates got.

  There is always a succession of Ginnys and Oscars, and sometimes even a fiery Shelley. Some ask if they can bring their dog. They’ve not succeeded yet. Mainly they are worried about the pressure: Will they have their own office, or is it open-plan? There are some lovely little words they would love to see in the OED and would there be any chance that they might be able to draft them? Would they be able to take a desk by the window, because they like to listen to the water dimpling—or the traffic roaring? One had written a little story about what it would be like working on the OED and would we mind if he left it behind for us afterwards. That hit the nail on the thumb for us. As if we haven’t already got enough paper. Lexicography isn’t for budding writers who just want an atmosphere of books and industry.

  When we might be just about turning in for the day, James Joyce (Jim, not Jimbo at interview) turns up. He’s slightly late because he’s decided to take a walk round Oxford. He might write about it. He hasn’t visited the city before, but has a couple of mates who put him up the previous night. On the face of it he looks austere, with those wire-rimmed specs. But we’re pretty used to that look, too. He asks about the hours—Will he be able to take time off in the afternoon if he needs to? He can make it up way into the night. No. But he doesn’t really like that sort of negative response. We get the impression that he’s used to having his own way. We try him on a few words that had amused Archimedes: leatherette, gumption, selfie. He picked up on selfie but wasn’t too sure what it meant. “Is it a hyper-referential term for introspective monologue?” he asks. We ask him in return why he thinks that. “Because that’s the way literature is moving. You must see that in every word and phrase that you define.” Has he ever used the OED? Yes, he’s currently working on a long novel and he’s peeked at a few entries. It’s, like, an epic reference book, yes? He’d be glad to help out for a bit, but he might be a bit ahead of us all most of the time. He’s not endearing himself to me or my colleagues. Fortunately he’s got a ferry to catch, so we say our goodbyes.

  The author Julian Barnes (Flaubert’s Parrot, A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, etc.): well, he really did turn up for interview, but before my time—and his. Julian was even a member of the OED Supplement’s editorial staff in the late 1960s, but moved on early.

  With the ever-present deadline of the year 2000 looming, we needed to take serious action to recruit staff. What we needed were good editors, and preferably excellent, qualified, historical-dictionary editors who would just slot into the work and power ahead indefinitely, giving us perfect, publishable dictionary text meeting the highest scholarly standards. There were a number of trained editors elsewhere in the Oxford Dictionaries department who were emerging from their previous assignments and might help us out. Some wanted to, and others didn’t. (Curiously enough, not everyone wants to commit themselves to a long-term historical dictionary project, when there appear to be more exciting things in the world to set your sights on.) We did manage to bring into (or back into) the fold several colleagues willing to give it all a shot. But we still needed more hands on deck, and we needed them quickly.

  Generally speaking, people ask one of two questions when they hear about the dictionary and what it does. The first is, “How does a new word get into the dictionary?” (remember: usage over time and normally evidence from various genres). Once an editor has answered this question, and has described what a remarkable document the OED represents, the second question often is, “How can I get a job on the dictionary?”

  When we advertise for editorial posts, we have to be very careful not to open the net too wide. We did once, in the early days, and received over a thousand applications for three jobs. It’s not worth the time spent reading through those applications. If the
job is described in too open a fashion, you just encourage anyone who loves words, or who wants an excuse to extend their adolescence in Oxford, to throw their hat into the ring. Those are our two biggest bugbears: people who love words, and people who want to stay on in Oxford. People who think they love words are the last people we need working on dictionaries. What are we: word-keepers in a petting zoo? Wanting to stay in Oxford only seems to perpetuate and strengthen this propensity on the part of prospective candidates.

  I should state it outright: lexicographers are not people who “love words”—at least, not in a schmaltzy, sentimental way. Years ago, I had an aunt who once asked me if I loved books. I don’t think she received a very helpful answer; I think I managed a hopeless stare, as if I couldn’t even understand the question. To tell you the truth, lexicographers veer as far away as they can from people who claim to love words. What is the point of loving words and at the same time expecting to analyse and classify them? It’s a grumble of mine, and I know it’s a rumbling grumble of other lexicographers too. I’ve even listened to one lecture on lexicography where the final PowerPoint slide ended, “I HATE words.” Okay, so that’s a bit extreme, but it reinforces the point.

  The meaning of words can “weaken” over the centuries. What was once a very forceful way of expressing an idea can be watered down so that the original power evaporates. A crime can be a “criminal event” or a fashion fail. An action can be life-saving if it saves a life, but also if it saves you from embarrassment. Bugbear went the same way. What do you make of it: Is it something really scary, or just (in its weakened use) just a minor irritant? It feels like a word from around 1600: you can imagine it in the drama of the day. It doesn’t look Anglo-Saxon, and it’s not French—so sometime after around 1600 would seem to fit.

  The “annoyance” and “irritation” sense of bugbear is very much secondary. The stronger meaning, which dates from around 1586, as it turns out, is “an object of dread,” “an imaginary terror”—something that frightens the living daylights out of you. That sounds about right for all of those dire Jacobean tragedies that were just over the horizon then.

  But even that isn’t the primary and original meaning, which is stronger still. Star-date 1581 and we have bugbear in the sense of (according to the OED) “a sort of hobgoblin (presumably in the shape of a bear) supposed to devour naughty children.” Apparently nursery nurses would tell innocent and yet inherently mischievous children that these sprites would creep up and scare them. So a bugbear was a hobgoblin (a mischievous imp, again from the sixteenth century). And how is the word constructed? The OED isn’t 100 percent sure, but its best guess is that it’s the old word bear (grizzly animal) latched on to bug. This bug isn’t the insect, but is an older medieval word meaning “an object of terror” or a “bogy,” or even—as the OED sometimes throws in for good measure in cases such as this, a “bogle.” There’s a Welsh word bwg which means a ghost, and the OED currently places its eggs in that basket as regards the origin of this bug.

  So how do we weed out these word-lovers? We give them an aptitude test. The reason we do that is that Hilary said we should, back in the 1980s when I started having to recruit editors for our New Words group. I might have got round to it anyway, but at the time she was in HR and fighting against the inertia which leads interviewers to decide in the first few seconds of an interview which of the candidates is their favourite. A neutral but job-related test gives you a much better assessment of the candidates’ capabilities.

  Mind you, we had a Plan B for identifying likely lexicographers. This is the left-handedness test. Instead of marking scripts at the end of an assessment session, you just look around the room and see who is left-handed, and then appoint them. It’s a scandalous approach for a professional, but it’s backed up by real data. There was a time when the whole staff of the Concise Oxford was left-handed, as was the chief editor of the OED (that’s me), of the Australian National Dictionary, of the Dictionary of South African English, and several more. I’ve heard ruminations that there is a correlation between left-handedness and programming/analytical skills: creativity, lateral thinking. Still, Ed Weiner is right-handed, so that’s a good call for the opposite view.

  Perhaps surprisingly, we would allow candidates to complete their aptitude test in the comfort of their own homes, with whatever reference books or (nowadays) computer resources they had at their command. Back in the days of my own interview I remember boasting to the chief editor that I mightn’t know everything but I generally knew where to look for anything, and that was the line we took now. It didn’t matter what resources the applicants secretly used, because if they became editors they’d have access to just the same resources anyway. Knowing how to use the resources was the key part of the job. We didn’t really want their clever friends to help them, but we guessed that if they did phone a friend to help with the test, we’d catch them out anyway because they’d come unstuck when we talked them through their test at interview.

  So we’d publish ads in the national papers—and more recently internationally, too, and on the Internet—inviting prospective lexicographers to try their luck in the words lottery. We’d tell them they would have to complete a test, and hoped that that would put off some of the more left-field candidates. We knew that out of every five hundred applicants, only around two would be any use to us, and a fair number might not be any use to anyone.

  Stage one involved receiving the letters of application which all and sundry from deep in the centre and around the outer periphery of the academic world decided to send us. We had several rules of thumb.

  Short letters were better than long letters, even if they only consisted of three sentences—as long as they were crisp and intriguing. Some candidates seemed to think that we were interested in the remoter details of their thesis and of their personality, but generally speaking we weren’t. Handwritten letters were more helpful than typed or keyboarded ones, because clear handwriting, as well as clear thinking, was, at the time, part of the job. We normally asked for handwritten letters, but some people seemed unable to comply. It can normally be taken as a good rule that we didn’t need to know whether an applicant had a clean driving licence, though we were often told. The job doesn’t involve driving: it’s worth remembering that. Similarly, we came to expect that every sensitive applicant would claim an interest in reading, film, and walking. Try to think of something more original than that.

  Occasionally candidates would suggest that they enjoyed crosswords. I’m not sure if that was for my benefit or for theirs. Do you “enjoy” crosswords? You solve them, and you might marvel at a particularly clever or witty cryptic clue, but I’m not sure about “enjoy.” Personally I’ve never been any good at cryptic puzzles—I’d rather be sorting out real problems. So I’m not sympathetic to crossword-solvers. We were not playing games on the OED, we were researching language history. Some of my best friends are crossword compilers: I tend to steer the conversation in other directions if they want to talk about their clues. Still, I don’t think I held this one against starry-eyed applicants.

  Spelling mistakes should obviously be avoided in application letters to dictionaries. When we are hunting for reasons to jettison an application, that is just playing into our hands. But what I looked out for most was the word hone. I’m surprised how often people had apparently spent their whole lives honing their skills to be ready for this particular job application. Probably one in three application letters offered honing in some form or other, in much the same way as any novel written since around 2005 has to include the word heft somewhere along the line (watch out for it). That is, if they have forgotten to include hunker (watch out for it, too). I doubt whether the applicants ever used hone at any other time in their lives. They seemed to think that it gave their previous life some sort of developmental focus, as if all the time they were sharpening their skills for the very point at which they encountered the OED. It just felt false. Look for it if you are ever scanning through applica
tion letters: it’ll be there. In my book, the appearance of the hone word certainly helped to shift their letters over towards the growing reject pile.

  Homonyms (or words spelt or pronounced the same, but coming from different origins) can be problematic for non-native speakers, but the English language often has a way of dealing with them. It allows one of the homonyms to become dominant, and the others sometimes fall away from use. There are four verbs to hone in English, according to the OED. The oldest one has already fallen into obsolescence: that’s to hone meaning “to delay or dawdle.” It couldn’t stand the pressure applied by the three remaining hones. Verb number two means “to hanker after or pine for,” or just “to grumble or moan.” Nowadays it’s a dialect word (the West Midlands and the southern United States), not in general use. The most recent verb to hone (to “hone” in on something) is just a mid-twentieth-century garbling of home (in on).

  Our verb to hone (to sharpen a blade and hence your wits and skills) is a fairly late arrival in English. It wasn’t around when people were applying for jobs on Dr Johnson’s dictionary in the 1750s, so he would have needed some other word to trigger the interviewer’s trap-door (and I doubt he would have found that too hard). Our first known use of hone in the sense of “to sharpen (a razor)” occurs in the works of the seriously under-examined poet Ebenezer Picken (1769–1816). The curious thing about Mr Picken, who died quite young and in poverty in Edinburgh after a brief life of literary endeavour, is that he wrote a short dictionary which was important in the lives of later Scottish lexicographers. So I am sorry to have to relate that at this moment another lexicographer must be held responsible for the popularity of the word hone. The meaning of sharpening your skills—as opposed to sharpening an object—dates from the twentieth century, however, so Picken receives a partial reprieve.