The Word Detective

by John Simpson

  But these inexactitudes weren’t restricted to my family. It was similar OED-related themes that warmed me to James Joyce, as I came to unbutton myself from the OED. Since I left the dictionary (and for several years before that), I’ve been researching Joyce’s usage and perspectives. He’s the obvious author for an OED editor to investigate, I think. I was rather surprised to find that Joyce used techniques in constructing Ulysses which were rather similar to those I’d become familiar with in constructing entries for the OED. Both texts are woven together from the shreds of the civilisations which the authors observed from a distance in time or space.

  One of the OED’s contributors, Harald Beck—from deep in Germany—had cottoned on to the lexical implication of Joyce’s method of composition several years before I did. We were discussing Harald’s contributions to the OED (antedatings collected using the new and publicly available online resources such as Google Books) when he mentioned his interest in Joyce. Most people say they’ve read some of Ulysses. Some even wish they had time to read the rest. Harald, on the other hand, is translating Ulysses into German. He explained a couple of his current textual problems, which, using OED research methods and materials, I was able to solve rapidly. We continued to exchange ideas and encourage each other to further research, and in the end we decided to set up a scholarly online journal, the James Joyce Online Notes, as a forum for discovering and publishing more historically accurate information about the real people and the unfamiliar words of Joyce’s novels than was generally available to the interested public. We spend a lot of time resuscitating forgotten lives and expressions.

  Ulysses was first published in 1922. In it, Joyce merges together the collective memories of many people—his own memories and (particularly) those of his father, who moved to Dublin from Cork before Joyce was born, and who drifted several steps down the Dublin social ladder as the nineteenth century progressed. It also incorporates the collective memory of Dubliners, recalled by Joyce from his eyries of exile in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris. Joyce’s Dublin, re-created on one day in 1904, never really existed, but it could have. Similarly, the OED’s re-creation of the language of the past did exist in a way, but we can never really appreciate what it was like back then. We create flickering images, and all the while we and our contemporaries forget more and more of our shared past.

  One of the first of Joyce’s silent and forgotten Dubliners whom I managed to revive was the real-life boxer Myler Keogh, just mentioned in passing in Ulysses, and of whom no one you meet has ever heard. He was a puzzle for Joyce scholars, but by consulting old Irish newspapers online I was able to pull together a bruising life for him as an Irish middleweight champion in the 1890s. The information about Myler arose by imagining he was a word, and employing the OED’s research methods to uncover the facts. I did much the same with Marcella the Midget Queen, a sideshow act above a World’s Fair shop in central Dublin, and then again with Annie Mack, ringleader of the Dublin prostitutes—according to traditional Joycean commentary. It turned out she was a Scottish lady with a head for lowbrow Dublin business who ran a string of brothels along with some of her cronies. It’s all there, if you care to look. I recommend the Dublin Registry of Deeds. House deeds, that is.

  Not that I restrict myself to researching people. There are plenty of expressions and jokes in Ulysses that require unpicking. The typical problem is that because people don’t know the expressions, they think that Joyce invented them. In fact, he was an avid magpie, copying down expressions he saw and heard, intending to reuse them in his novel. Here’s an example: kidfitting corsets. Molly Bloom lusts after them, as advertised in the Gentlewoman, to restrain her generous figure. But what does kidfitting mean? It isn’t in the dictionaries, and the annotators of Joyce are strangely silent. After a hunt around possible sources, it became clear that kidfitting corsetry meant corsetry that was held together (at least where it rubbed against the skin) by kid fittings, or fittings made of soft goatskin. At around the time Ulysses was published in 1922, you could buy these in Dublin: “Royal Worcester Kidfitting Corsets. The Corsets of Style Superiority. Light and Flexible. . . . There is a model for every type of figure—slender, medium, or full—in the Royal Worcester Kidfitting Corsets. Pim Bros., Ltd., South Great George’s Street, Dublin.” Please form an orderly queue.

  The fact that the dictionary was flourishing, and finding that I could carry on researching and writing on topics outside the OED, were two things that made leaving the dictionary easier. But realistically there were many other factors as well. I’d always had a large extended family of aunts and uncles, but within a decade that whole generation of the family seemed to have been swept away. Then, at a family party in 2011, my sister told me she had to visit a cancer specialist the following week, and the prognosis was not good. She died of an inoperable tumour three months later. I think Hilary and I both felt that it was time to think of making a fresh start.

  After considering things for a while, we decided to make an (almost) complete break from Oxford and move forty miles west to Cheltenham, where I had lived as a child and had been to school. It’s a strange place, in some ways, as it’s set right in the heart of the Cotswolds, but doesn’t share much with the agricultural, county interests of the neighbouring towns and villages. Its life changed overnight when someone discovered a natural spring there in the eighteenth century and came to the conclusion that Cheltenham should become a spa. When the king visited a few decades later, he bestowed upon the place everlasting celebrity as a health resort. His courtiers mentioned it to most of their military friends in British India, and on retirement they all rushed back here to take the waters and expire.

  When the OED decides to include place names as dictionary entries, it needs to know that the name has developed new meanings, and doesn’t just refer to the one and only place of that name. American dictionaries don’t follow these rules, and unusually the British are the purists here. Needless to say, it comes as a surprise to most people that the word spa derives from a place name. A spa is, according to the OED, “a town, locality, or resort possessing a mineral spring or springs.” It comes directly from the name of Spa, a town south-west of Liège in Belgium. We spelt it Spaw in the early days. The Continentals liked to think it was called Spau, and so we altered this to what passed as English. Intrepid English travellers discovered the Belgian Spa in the mid-sixteenth century. Even Edmund Spenser refers to it rather cryptically in the Faerie Queene (1590): “Both Silo this, and Iordan did excell, / And th’ English Bath, and eke the german Spau.” Clearly he didn’t know that the region was going to become Belgium, and thought of it as a Germanic stronghold.

  The rise and rise of Cheltenham in the late eighteenth century coincides with the emergence of the word spa in the general sense of a health resort that capitalises on its mineral springs. We can date this, at the moment, to 1781, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s play A Trip to Scarborough (another place where the Simpsons have washed up over the years). Sheridan’s play was a polite reworking of John Vanbrugh’s rather cheeky Relapse. I think nowadays a spa can be something you put your feet into, but that just goes to show the curative powers of language.

  The more alert readers will have noticed that I have peppered the text with little discussions like this about the history and usage of words. Those are the bits, I discovered, that Hilary skipped over when she read the typescript, but it may be something she regrets. For the most part, I wanted to demonstrate the fascination that more or less any word in the language holds, if you can be bothered to settle back and look at it for a while without rushing on to the next thing. But more importantly, I wanted to take you surreptitiously through a brief history of the English language, so that if you read the gobbets and snippets, you would at least have got something out of this book. If none of that interested you, then I tried to add in a few episodes from the Theory of Lexicography in palatable portions.

  The purpose was not to present a rounded course on the English language, but to t
ry to instil the idea that if you took the time to investigate any word in the language, you would see that it had a history, and that that history ran parallel to the histories of many other words that entered or developed in English at the same time; that there is a patterning in the language over the centuries that mirrors and comments on the emergence of peoples and nations in different eras. Nothing exists on its own. It may not seem likely, but there was even a reason for selfie.

  It is a truism known only to lexicographers that every new word is at least ten years older than you think. You might think selfie, for instance, is as recent as this morning’s newspaper, but its history actually does stretch back beyond the OED’s self-imposed ten-year inclusion rule. The first reference our bloodhounds tracked down for the term dates from 2002. It first appears—perhaps surprisingly—in Australia, and it seems that Europeans didn’t take any particular notice for a while. Here’s the original online posting from an Australian Broadcasting Corporation online tech forum (still there when I last checked): “Um, drunk at a mates 21st, I tripped ofer [that’s there in the original—it’s not my typo] and landed lip first (with front teeth coming a very close second) on a set of steps. I had a hole about 1cm long right through my bottom lip. And sorry about the focus, it was a selfie.”

  One guess is that selfie was a shortening of “self-portrait,” but we might need to be cautious. These days you can go straight from “This is a photo of myself” to “This is a selfie.” So don’t be too precipitate with your etymological ideas.

  Selfie came to unnatural prominence in the world of lexicography when it was chosen as the Oxford Dictionaries WOTY in 2013. Despite its awkwardness as an abbreviation, WOTY is regularly used in lexicographical circles for “Word of the Year.” You might imagine that as I’m never prepared to admit to a Favourite Word of All Time, then I am equally unlikely to have a favourite Word of the Day, Month, or Year. Although something called the Oxford Dictionaries WOTY sounds as if it comes with the imprimatur of the big Oxford English Dictionary, it never did (back in my day), as we always refused to play along. It was all decided elsewhere. I’m not sure what happens nowadays. Maybe the OED could have settled on a Word of the Year 1563, or something along those lines, but I’d probably have vetoed that, too. All the same, I actually thought selfie was a good choice. It was obviously an overused word in 2013 (the year it won the ultimate accolade), but even more it told us something about the sort of people and society we had become. Not thoughtful and reflective, but self-obsessed, capturing images of ourselves in rear-view mirrors, like selfies on sticks.

  The OED today is very different from the dictionary I first encountered at first hand in the 1970s. The same is true of Oxford and its University Press. I might go back to the past for some things, if I could. There’s a romantic aspect to writing out definitions late on a cold October evening, lit only by a bright desk-light, to the accompaniment of the shuffle of paper as your colleagues sort their index cards into order, ready to attack their next word. The smell of the loosely folded, freshly printed galley proofs returned to your desk from the printer and waiting to be corrected is something that editors won’t experience again. That has all given way to greater accuracy, more and better evidence, and a sense that the dictionary is now accessible to so many more people. But those old ways should be remembered, because they were essential steps to the present, which will eventually be other editors’ pasts.

  In the end we had decided that Oxford itself might be best observed from a distance: easy to return to, but not the focus of everyday life. Hilary retired a few years before me, and since we moved to Cheltenham she has—amongst other things—become involved in running various local charities, as usual taking a strategic approach to any available problem.

  Kate has two children, Laura and Evie, and she now works as a special educational needs and disability manager in a large secondary school. Kate shied away from the disability environment for many years, grieving for the mainstream sister she never had and for whom she somehow felt guilty. Ellie has made all of us more tolerant and caring. Laura talks of Ellie as her “very special auntie,” without realising the significance of “special (needs, education, etc.)” in this context.

  Ellie is a disabled “adult”: really she hasn’t changed a lot since she was two or three, but she’s inspirational for me and I hope for other people with whom she comes into contact. She lives quite close by—in Oxfordshire, so we and Kate can visit her easily. She’s in a house with three other young people with similar disabilities, and they are cared for by support workers from a local care charity. There are normally three or more supporters on hand when we visit, and Ellie and the others have a full programme of activities—far fuller than we would be able to give her these days: horse-riding, drumming and dance, wall-mounted digital iPads, sensory equipment, love, care, and entertainment. You hope it will all continue. . . . If there is something that chills me in the middle of the night, it’s that something may go wrong for Ellie in the future, and no one will be there to fix it for her.

  Even if I can’t communicate with her verbally, spending time with her reminds me that interaction isn’t only verbal. Seeing her takes you into a corridor where communication fluctuates with the passage of time: sometimes stronger, sometimes weaker. When it’s weak, it seems almost to vanish away, and you wonder if you will see it again. When it’s strong, it’s the most important thing there is. Wordless, but powerful.

  As for me? Mainly I’m just working on various projects that scoop up aspects of the past that we’ve forgotten and re-running them for a new age online. It took me a while to realise that that was what I liked doing, and was what I was best at. Not everyone’s got the patience. But then Hilary says I’m just an ordinary bloke who’s been lucky enough to do an extraordinary job. I suppose she’s right. She usually is.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book couldn’t have been written without two things: my remarkable colleagues on the Oxford English Dictionary and more generally within Oxford University Press, with whom I’ve shared many years of lexicographical thrills and spills as we tussled the venerable OED out of its Victorian straitjacket and into the new, elegant garb it displays today on the Internet; and David Kuhn, the New York literary agent who saw a piece about my impending retirement on the Time magazine online site and—apparently able to see round corners—thought to pick up his phone and give me a ring. There are lots of other people and things without which it could not have been written, but these two deserve the lead-off places.

  It had never really occurred to me that anyone might be interested in the thoughts I had while working on the dictionary. It’s true that while I was being shown round the Library of Congress in Washington many years ago, my guide—listening to what I was telling him about my work—whispered, “Well, I hope you are keeping a diary of all this.” Of course I wasn’t. And I don’t think a journal would have served me much better. If you’ve read the narrative, you’ll remember that my last diary ended up in the washing-machine.

  I’ve learnt a lot about how to write a book since I started. Thanks to David Kuhn and his colleague Becky Sweren for walking me through the early stages and for setting me up in the right direction, and then for critiquing my early naive efforts. Thanks, too, to my editor and publisher at Basic Books, Lara Heimert, and to her colleagues Michelle Welsh-Horst and Kathy Streckfus, for guiding the book through the publication process. I owe Lara a debt of gratitude for insisting that the book should have a sharper structure and that its text should follow a more logical trajectory than would otherwise have been the case, as well as for her infectious encouragement throughout. And many thanks also to Richard Beswick, my editor as publishing director of Little, Brown—calm and unflustered—who came along to a talk I gave about the OED, and then quietly and politely told me all the stories from my talk that I needed to add to the book.

  Finally, I’m grateful to Yvonne Warburton, Ed Weiner, and Robert Ritter, all at some time editors at Oxf
ord University Press, and to Harald Beck, for reading versions of the text and improving it immeasurably by their comments; and to my wife, Hilary, for remembering with me.

  FURTHER READING

  My 100 Favourite Books on the OED

  Fortunately there aren’t 100 books on the OED (I hope). To make up for this, I’ve come up with a cut-down hit parade of twelve books about the dictionary which will help to fill in any gaps I may have left. I’ve slotted these titles into an imaginary ranking list, supposedly for ease of reference.

  No. 43 belongs to Jeremy Marshall and Fred McDonald’s Questions of English—a survey of FAQs about English from the postbag of the Oxford English Dictionary in the 1990s. The idea was that it might stop some enquirers from writing in to ask us the same “Questions of English” which other people were continually asking us. It didn’t work, of course.

  No. 37 is John Willinsky’s Empire of Words—a good early effort at interpreting the online data which goes to form the dictionary, but probably a book to encourage others to leap over its shoulders rather than one which challenges for the lead itself.

  Jumping up to No. 32 in the dictionary charts we find Sarah Ogilvie’s Words of the World: A Global History of the ‘Oxford English Dictionary’. Sarah is a former colleague who can tell a fine story. It’s down at No. 32 because although the story is well told, there are bits I don’t agree with. Maybe that’s my fault.

  Just on the southward side of Sarah’s book, at No. 28, comes Jeff Prucher’s Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction. See pages 327–328 above for the lowdown on this, and use it to help you contribute to the future of the OED.