Lost for Words

http://www.the-tls.co.uk/this_week/story.aspx?story_id=2111975
Dictionary skirmishes
Eric Korn
14 September 2005


LOST FOR WORDS
The hidden history of The Oxford English Dictionary
Lynda Mugglestone

273pp. | Yale University Press. £19.95 (US $30). | 0 300 10699 8








Luck does not always come to the undeserving. Lynda Mugglestone, editor of the Oxford History of the English Language and author of the invitingly subtitled Lexicography and the OED: Pioneers in the untrodden forest (2002), speaks of “a chance finding” of a set of vigorously corrected proof sheets from the first fascicle of the first edition of the OED, to be precise “Abandon– Anglosaxon”. (Quite a few of the sections have similarly hortatory or sententious titles.) But they were chance-found by a rare intelligence which was not daunted by the unordered mass of fossil lexicography that further digging yielded (in the Bodleian’s Murray Papers and the Oxford University Press’s dictionary archive). This massive unwiped palimpsest of correction and counter-correction, these raw data, in many diverse hands, not all easily legible, lay just beneath the surface alluvium for more than a century, but to Professor Mugglestone they unlocked a whole archaeological horizon; fifty years of struggle, of changing priorities, of continual frontier wars, as the Dictionary went endlessly over budget, hugely oversize, and half a century behind schedule. Rude reality, or as rude as it gets in Oxford, came to affect the straightforward methodology with which James Murray had begun the project: to include rather than exclude, to produce a complete inventory of the language. Mugglestone’s account of the dictionary wars, or rather the endless skirmishes that never became anything as definite as a war, in Lost for Words, is enlightening, and hugely entertaining.

She deals extensively with scientific terminology, with neologisms and nonce-words, with foreign words incompletely nativized, and especially with the principles, conscious and unconscious, by which Murray and his contributors and critics selected, as selection became more and more an economic necessity. One pleasing critical insight in particular informs Lynda Mugglestone’s work. Lexicographers define their terms, as all good disputants should. All their terms. The progress of the battle of real word versus nonce-word, native versus naturalized or exotic, is thus regularly and refreshingly illuminated by tracking the definitions of these very words as they appear in the Dictionary. More important even than the meaning attributed to the words native and naturalized (as opposed to foreign), nonce-word, and so on, was the intended purpose of the dictionary, which was endlessly discussed. Samuel Johnson had started with the purpose of stabilizing the language at what he considered its peak of elegance and correctness, and ending the natural processes of change. By the end of his work, this ambition was chastened; though whimsical omissions continue throughout the alphabet, the task of recording historical change had its effect on him. The century after Johnson was one of the great ages of natural
history: natural philosophers turned from philosophy, scientists, not yet called scientists, learned the virtues of observation unfreighted with theory. The London Philological Society, based in University College London, understood that the study of language “on historical principles” meant that words used by any section (or almost any section) of the community had a place in the grand index, or inventory of words. This was clear to Franz Passow in 1819, when he declared that “every word should be made to tell its own story”; to Richard Chevenix Trench, lecturing to a largely like-minded audience at the Philological Society on the deficiencies of dictionaries in 1857; and to James Murray, teaching in a school in Mill Hill twenty years later, but it was far from clear to the non-philological public. When the launch of the Dictionary came to public notice, they communicated with Murray as though he were a call centre for sociolinguistic complaints. The public, or at least the clerisy, rushed to denounce their favourite hate words, confident that Murray’s job was to keep out lexicographical riff-raff: low-bred, incorrectly formed, commercial, or un-English vocabulary. They wrote with the sublime confidence of the deeply ignorant. Of course actual usage was important, the more advanced complainers granted, but only usage, naturally, by writers of correct English. The Dictionary would be the equivalent of an Academy, said many, curbing unwarranted changes. (This was Johnson’s fancy also, before reality taught him better: change was bad, and so it must and could be stopped.) Murray’s breezy tolerance must have shocked his correspondents. Whisky or whiskey, asked one. “When in a hurry you may save a fraction of time by writing whisky, and when lingering over it you may prolong it to whiskey . . . in matters of taste there is liberty of the subject.” “No wise person would wish to impose his or her taste on others”, he remarked urbanely, gracefully ignoring the fact that this was what all his acolytes wanted to do. “I am not the editor of the English language”, he remarked, for once goaded out of urbanity. For Henry Alford, author of A Plea for the Queen’s English, editing the English language was precisely his intention. Sheep and goats were driven hither and yon; usage gave no authority. “Different to” was very common of late but was to be avoided. And evince was, for some reason, “one of the most odious words in all this catalogue of vulgarities”. Mugglestone has also taken account of Mrs Oliver Bunce’s anonymous and oft reprinted Don’t: A manual of Mistakes and Improprieties More or Less prevalent in conduct or speech (1883). An early member of the Philological Society, which was supposedly committed to objectivity, thought that their task was that of the sharp-eyed gamekeeper “who nails up rows of dead vermin on a barn door”. The pesky corpses included some collateral damage: innocent passer-by words that excited the trigger-happy Bunce included solidarity, egoism, acerbity, donate and banalities. R. Heald, who wrote (as “Anglophil”) The Queen’s (?) English Up to Date: An exposition of the prevailing grammatical errors of the day, had a fine lack of concern for convenience: twins was a collective noun like tongs and tweezers, and the use of the false singular “twin” was a solecism. This would leave a geminated person at some disadvantage in describing his situation (“I have an identical brother who is a member of the same pair of twins as I am”). The venom of the prescriptivists, the strident Canutism of their desire to see language as a temple instead of a torrent, is still astonishing. Men of the calibre of W. W. Skeat and Benjamin Jowett, masters of languages that were stationary, because dead, sought to treat English as though it were equally fixed: a sort of Neo-Anglo-Saxon.

The production of the Dictionary was begun by James Murray for the Clarendon Press in 1879 with a prospective completion in ten years and in four volumes. It was finished in 1928, three editors later, in ten volumes, forty years late. The operation had some of the qualities of a majestic slo-mo calamity, like some cursed civil engineering project where the geology turns out not to be stable, the main span is so many thousand metres, not feet, and the new partners want it to serve a different city entirely. The Delegates of the Press, in a sort of leisurely panic, began to pressure the lexicographers. Are all those obscure, foreign, or obsolete words really part of the English Language? Does every nonce-word, poetic invention, or trade name really form part of the fabric of English? Murray, whose original stance was that the Dictionary should be a complete inventory of the language’s word-hoard, found himself asking the weaselling, practical questions the officers of the Press required: does this refugee earn asylum in our volumes? More tersely, as in the margin of an entry for “loosening-bar” (“a stiff iron bar used . . . to loosen”): “Worth the space?”.

The notion that a place had to be earned must have caused Murray considerable anguish at first, but he hardened his resolve. In a particularly entertaining chapter, “Lost Words”, Lynda Mugglestone illustrates the various kinds of losing distinguished in the Dictionary’s large entry, the various losses, from the inevitable loss of completeness to the entirely accidental loss of bondmaid, for which Murray apologized in a sackcloth-and-ashes reply to a puzzled reader, to the deliberate loss of an embarrassing object or person, as demanded by movie directors and gangsters, and as applied with equal unceremoniousness by Murray to words considered too indecent to appear in a respectable household volume. She quotes with relish an absurd letter from a surgeon about condom: “a contrivance used by fornicators, to save themselves from a well-deserved clap”: he thought it “too utterly obscene” for inclusion; “clap” in the relevant sense is described, inaccurately, as “obsolete in polite use”. Murray was obliged to compromise, but for the taboo words the research was done, the literary citations were chosen and edited and then hidden away along with the obscene tetragrammata, for a more liberal future. “The loss of cunt occurred”, Murray remarked, “after wide consultation and much discussion.” A slow-developing sense of urgency further meant that a late addition to a page proof, if accepted, must be justified by the removal of another word to make room, and nonce-words often suffered: when glossomachicall (verbally quarrelsome) was approved, glossocracy had to go. There was less discussion over the loss of glouglou, grogging, governmentless and grigginess, the last of these defined as “pertaining to a small eel” which seems potentially useful, if only as a term of abuse. Lunching, limeade and landscaping were all pruned. The boundary between acceptable and dispensable trembled like a geological fault. Corruption, moral corruption crept in: the status of the utterer became important. Accentedest was listed for removal on the grounds that the source was the novelist Rhoda Broughton, known to be a hasty writer. But Murray remembered that censuring and censoring were alike against the spirit of his historical lexicography, and in this case at least, he stood firm. Accentedest survived, as did many less cogent locutions that had a correct author to back them, like Emerson’s fringent and Coleridge’s literata.

The years of the making of the Dictionary were also the years of the most frenzied neologizing by scientists: the number of good botanical and zoological genera certainly reaches six figures, and the number of organic compounds named according to the rules is, though technically finite, very large indeed. The luckiest lexicographer would not pick the right research horse every time. Radium, named in 1899, was passed over in 1904 (perhaps as just a flash in the pan) and had to wait for the 1933 Supplement. (Even a modest dictionary today would be expected to include all the chemical elements – except perhaps masurium, which turned out not to exist, and praseodymium, deservedly obscure.) Radioactivity, by the luck of the alphabet, and X-rays (1896 in English) were accepted, and managed to catch their appropriate volumes.

This salutary, scholarly and entertaining book will not make future dictionaries free of cultural or social discrimination, but may make us all more aware of our prejudices. When someone asks if you are mobled, smile and point to the telephone in your pocket: it was only Polonius (not named for the element polonium) who called the word vile. And if Lynda Mugglestone finds herself some day an entry in the online OED (“a rock devoid of necromantic power”), let her accept that immortality.