The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (33 page)
Authors: Simon Winchester
Tags: #General, #United States, #Biography, #Biography & Autobiography, #Psychiatric Hospital Patients, #Great Britain, #English Language, #English Language - Etymology, #Encyclopedias and Dictionaries - History and Criticism, #United States - History - Civil War; 1861-1865 - Veterans, #Lexicographers - Great Britain, #Minor; William Chester, #Murray; James Augustus Henry - Friends and Associates, #Lexicographers, #History and Criticism, #Encyclopedias and Dictionaries, #English Language - Lexicography, #Psychiatric Hospital Patients - Great Britain, #New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, #Oxford English Dictionary
The nature of the possible mental ailments that plagued Doctor Minor, which may have been triggered by his experiences during the war, are comprehensively explained by Gordon Claridge in
Origins of Mental Illness
(ISHK Malor Books, Cambridge, Mass., 1995). Andrew Scull’s splendid
Masters of Bedlam
(Princeton University Press, 1996) offers a fascinating history of the mad-doctoring trade before the times of psychiatric enlightenment.
I looked to Roy Porter—also an expert on madness and its treatment—for his rightly acclaimed social history of the city where Minor committed his murder:
London: A Social History
(Harvard, 1994) sets the scene admirably, and remains one of the best books on England’s remarkable capital.
But the one book that above all should be read in conjunction with this small volume is one of the biggest and most impressive works of scholarship to be found—the twelve-volume first edition, the 1933 supplement, the four supplementary volumes of Robert Burchfield, or the fully integrated twenty-volume
Second Edition of The Oxford English Dictionary
itself.
It makes for an expensive and bulky set of books—which is why nowadays the CD-ROM is much preferred—but it does, most important of all to his fans, acknowledge formally the existence and contributions of Doctor Minor. And I find that somehow the simple discovery of his name, buried as it is among those of the contributors who helped make the
OED
the great totem that it remains today, is always an intensely touching moment.
While it is of course in and of itself no justification for ever needing to own the great book, the finding of Minor’s name presents perhaps the finest of examples of the kind of serendipitous moment for which the
OED
is justly famous. And few would disagree that serendipity, in dictionaries, is a most splendid thing indeed.
P.S. Insights, Interviews, & More…
Meet Simon Winchester
A Few of Simon Winchester’s Favorite Words
A Reading Excerpt from
A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great American Earthquake of 1906
Have You Read?: More by Simon Winchester
S
IMON
W
INCHESTER
, author, journalist, and broadcaster, has worked as a foreign correspondent for most of his career, although he graduated from Oxford in 1966 with a degree in geology and spent a year working as a geologist in the Ruwenzori Mountains in western Uganda, and on oil rigs in the North Sea, before joining his first newspaper in 1967.
His journalistic work, mainly for
The Guardian
and
The Sunday Times
, has based him in Belfast; Washington, D.C.; New Delhi; New York; London; and Hong Kong, where he covered such stories as the Ulster crisis; the creation of Bangladesh; the fall of President Marcos; the Watergate affair; the Jonestown Massacre; the assassination of Egypt’s President Sadat; the recent death and cremation of Pol Pot; and, in 1982, the Falklands War—during which time he was arrested and spent three months in prison in Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego, on spying charges. He has been a freelance writer since 1987.
He now works principally as an author, although he contributes to a number of American and British magazines and journals, including
Harper’s, Smithsonian, National Geographic, The Spectator, Granta
, the
New York Times
, and
The Atlantic Monthly
. He was appointed Asia-Pacific editor of
Condé Nast Traveler
at its inception in 1987, and later becoming editor-at-large. His writings have won him several awards, including Britain’s Journalist of the Year.
He writes and presents television films—including a series on the final colonial years of Hong Kong and on a variety of other historical topics—and is a frequent contributor to the BBC radio program
From Our Own Correspondent
. Winchester also lectures widely—most recently before London’s Royal Geographical Society (of which he is a Fellow)—and to audiences aboard the cruise liners
QE2
and
Seabourn Pride
.
His books cover a wide range of subjects, including a study of the remaining British Empire, the colonial architecture of India, aristocracy, the American Midwest, his experience of the months spent in an Argentine prison on spying charges, his description of a six-month walk through the Korean peninsula, the Pacific Ocean, and the future of China. Most recently he has written
The River at the Center of the World
, about China’s Yangtze River;
The Fracture Zone: A Return to the Balkans
, which recounts his journey from Austria to Turkey during the 1999 Kosovo crisis; and the bestselling
The Map That Changed the World
, about the nineteenth-century geologist William Smith. His book
Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883
was published by HarperCollins in April 2003. His forthcoming book,
A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906
, will be published by HarperCollins in Fall 2005. Distinguished French director Luc Besson will adapt
The Professor and the Madman
into a major motion picture.
Simon Winchester lives on a small farm in the Berkshires in Massachusetts.
A Few of Simon Winchester’s Favorite Words
M
OST OF US KNOW
about twenty thousand words—a fine number, except that the
Oxford English Dictionary
lists more than
half a million
as making up the entirety of the language. A sobering realization: that of all possible words we know no more than a mere
four percent
.
This list might help improve matters. The entries that follow offer a selection of words that have in each case three characteristics: I like each one of them; I believe most to be shamefully underused; and yet I am sure that all
can
be used—in our daily conversation or our writings—with little risk of the user seeming or sounding foolish, high-flown, or bombastic.
These are all treasure-words, from the vast storehouse that is the
OED
. Each is worth considering, savoring, admiring, and employing. Thus may we begin to nudge our way up from four percent to five—about half the percentage of the sixteenth-century English word-stock that William Shakespeare supposedly knew. Not a bad ambition, to be half as good as the Bard.
Philogyny
At first blush this word seems little different from
phylogeny
, encountered most often in biology and meaning
the evolutionary pedigree
of a particular plant or animal. The marginally different spelling
philogyny
marks out a very different word, the meaning of which can be deduced by remembering the much more common
misogyny. Of course
! readers will be saying—if a misogynist is a man uninclined to seek out female company, so the opposite must be a man who suffers from or enjoys the fact of his philogyny, his
love of women
The man who seeks out feminine company in preference to bonding with his brothers is much derided—or much envied. One of the less attractive terms used to describe a philogynist is used by soldiers to describe a ladies’ man—a
poodlefaker
.
Tourbillion
, (turbij5)
Come the summer solstice, and with it a reminder of the importance of time and the need for the accurate keeping of it—and we have a word we see all too often in advertisements for very expensive clocks and wristwatches. A
tourbillion
(or with the second
i
omitted) is explained by a quotation about
the escapement of a watch…fitted so that it revolves round the fourth wheel. The idea of the tourbillon…is to get rid of position errors
.
In fact the word, perhaps coming from the Latin
turbela
meaning
bustle
or
stir
, and which itself comes from
turba
, a crowd, and which has links with
turbine, disturb
, and
perturbation
, means
a whirlwind; a whirling storm; a whirling mass or system; a vortex; a whirl; an eddy; a whirlpool
It has been around since the late fifteenth century, though in the watchmakers’ hands for only the last century.
Sainfoin
’seinf
in
Given the complexity of modern menus I am a little surprised never to have seen the pretty word
sainfoin
mentioned as a possible ingredient for a vegetarian dish, not least because its origins are in the French for
health-giving
. Possibly its absence comes because even the most modish café owner would balk at giving customers what is usually reserved for cattle,
a low-growing perennial herb
, Onobrychis sativa (
formerly
Hedysarum Onobrychis),
much grown as a forage plant. Also, locally, lucerne
.
Since
lucerne
is another word for the purple medick, a cloverlike growth that in America is called alfalfa and is almost exclusively used for feeding cows, one can appreciate the restaurateurs’ reluctance. A few further years’ searching for fresh inspiration, however, and we may yet find it: arugula, endive, and sainfoin salad, $9.95. And people will pay, eat, and insist they Enjoy.
Terebinth