The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (5 page)

1621
B
URTON
Anat. Mel.
Democr. to Rdr. (1676) 4/2 To be thought and held Polumathes and Polyhistors.
a
1840
M
OORE
Devil among Schol
. 7 The Polymaths and Polyhistors, Polyglots and all their sisters.
1855
M. P
ATTISON
Ess.
I. 290 He belongs to the class which German writers…have denominated ‘Polymaths’.
1897
O. Smeaton
Smollett
ii. 30 One of the last of the mighty Scots polymaths.

Philology
(
). [In Chaucer, ad. L.
philologia
; in 17th c. prob. a. F.
philologie
, ad. L.
philologia
, a. Gr.
, abstr. sb. from
  fond of speech, talkative; fond of discussion or argument; studious of words; fond of learning and literature, literary; f.
  P
HILO
- +
  word, speech, etc.]

1.
Love of learning and literature; the study of literature, in a wide sense, including grammar, literary criticism and interpretation, the relation of literature and written records to history, etc.; literary or classical scholarship; polite learning.

It took more than seventy years to create the twelve tombstonesize volumes that made up the first edition of what was to become the great
Oxford English Dictionary
. This heroic, royally dedicated literary masterpiece—which was first called the
New English Dictionary
, but eventually became the
Oxford
ditto, and thenceforward was known familiarly by its initials as the
OED
—was completed in 1928; over the following years there were five supplements and then, half a century later, a second edition that integrated the first and all the subsequent supplementary volumes into one new twenty-volume whole. The book remains in all senses a truly monumental work—and with very little serious argument is still regarded as a paragon, the most definitive of all guides to the language that, for good or ill, has become the lingua franca of the civilized modern world.

Just as English is a very large and complex language, so the
OED
is a very large and complex book. It defines well over half a million words. It contains scores of millions of characters, and, at least in its early versions, many miles of hand-set type. Its enormous—and enormously heavy—volumes are bound in dark blue cloth: Printers and designers and bookbinders worldwide see it as an apotheosis of their art, a handsome and elegant creation that looks and feels more than amply suited to its lexical thoroughness and accuracy.

The
OED
’s guiding principle, the one that has set it apart from most other dictionaries, is its rigorous dependence on gathering quotations from published or otherwise recorded uses of English and using them to illustrate the use of the sense of every single word in the language. The reason behind this unusual and tremendously labor-intensive style of editing and compiling was both bold and simple: By gathering and publishing selected quotations, the dictionary could demonstrate the full range of characteristics of each and every word with a very great degree of precision. Quotations could show exactly how a word has been employed over the centuries; how it has undergone subtle changes of shades of meaning, or spelling, or pronunciation; and, perhaps most important of all, how and more exactly
when
each word slipped into the language in the first place. No other means of dictionary compilation could do such a thing: Only by finding and showing examples could the full range of a word’s past possibilities be explored.

The aims of those who began the project, back in the 1850s, were bold and laudable, but there were distinct commercial disadvantages to their methods: It took an immense amount of time to construct a dictionary on this basis, it was too time-consuming to keep up with the evolution of the language it sought to catalog, the work that finally resulted was uncommonly vast and needed to be kept updated with almost equally vast additions, and it remains to this day for all of these reasons a hugely expensive book both to produce and to buy.

But withal it is widely accepted that the
OED
has a value far beyond its price; it remains in print, and it still sells well. It is the unrivaled cornerstone of any good library, an essential work for any reference collection. And it is still cited as a matter of course—“the
OED
says”—in parliaments, courtrooms, schools, and lecture halls in every corner of the English-speaking world, and probably in countless others beyond.

It wears its status with a magisterial self-assurance, not least by giving its half million definitions a robustly Victorian certitude of tone. Some call the language of the dictionary old-fashioned, high-flown, even arrogant. Note well, they say by way of example, how infuriatingly prissy the compilers remain when dealing with even so modest an oath as “bloody”: Though the modern editors place the original
NED
definition between quotation marks—it is a word “now constantly in the mouths of the lowest classes, but by respectable people considered ‘a horrid word’, on a par with obscene or profane language, and usually printed in the newspapers (in police reports, etc.) ‘b——y’”—even the modern definition is too lamely self-regarding for most: “There is no ground for the notion,” the entry reassures us, “that ‘bloody’, offensive as from associations it now is to ears polite, contains any profane allusion….”

It is those with “ears polite,” one supposes, who see in the dictionary something quite different: They worship it as a last bastion of cultured Englishness, a final echo of value from the greatest of all modern empires.

But even they will admit of a number of amusing eccentricities about the book, both in its selections and in the editors’ choice of spellings; a small but veritable academic industry has recently developed in which modern scholars grumble about what they see as the sexism and racism of the work, its fussily and outdated imperial attitude. (And to Oxford’s undying shame there is even one word—though only one—that all admit was actually
lost
during the seven decades of the
OED
’s preparation—though the word was added in a supplement, five years after the first edition appeared.)

There are many such critics, and with the book being such a large and immobile target there will no doubt be many more. And yet most of those who come to use it, no matter how doctrinally critical they may be of its shortcomings, seem duly and inevitably, in the end, to admire it as a work of literature, as well as to marvel at its lexicographical scholarship. It is a book that inspires real and lasting affection: It is an awe-inspiring work, the most important reference book ever made, and, given the unending importance of the English language, probably the most important that is ever likely to be.

The story that follows can fairly be said to have
two
protagonists. One of them is Doctor Minor, the murdering soldier from the United States, and there is one other. To say that a story has two protagonists, or three, or ten, is a perfectly acceptable, unremarkable modern from of speech. It happens, however, that a furious lexicographical controversy once raged over the use of the word—a dispute that helps illustrate the singular and peculiar way in which the
Oxford English Dictionary
has been constructed and how, when it flexes its muscles, it has a witheringly intimidating authority.

The word
protagonist
itself—when used in its general sense of meaning the leading figure in the plot of a story, or in a competition, or as the champion of some cause—is common enough. It is, as might be expected of a familiar word, defined fully and properly in the dictionary’s first edition of 1928.

The entry begins with the customary headings that show its spelling, its pronunciation, and its etymology (it comes from the Greek
  meaning “first” and
  meaning “actor” or, literally, the leading character to appear in a drama). Following this comes the distinguishing additional feature of the
OED
—the editors’ selection of a string of six supporting quotations—which is about the average number for any one
OED
word, though some merit many more. The editors have divided the quotations under two headings.