A triumph of optimism

Christopher Howse

THE MEANING OF EVERYTHING by Simon Winchester OUP, £12.99, pp. 260, ISBN 10198607024 Ada Murray, the wife of the long-bearded progenitor of The Oxford English Dictionary and mother of his 11 children, wasn't going to have the house clogged up with hundreds of thousands of slips of paper, two tons' worth, each bearing a quotation intended in some future year to be embedded in the great work. One day in 1879 she saw an advertisement in a gardening magazine for a kind of corrugatediron shed. Just the thing for the work on which James was embarking. It cost £150 to put up in the small front garden of their house in Mill Hill, where he was a schoolmaster.

It was a hideously ugly construction. Murray called it the Scriptorium, a designation meant at first ironically, but as the years passed used with pride. When the family moved to Oxford as the wave of work overcame them (the children got pocket money for sorting sackloads of those slips of paper), another corrugatediron Scriptorium was built in the back garden, and because of the neighbours' objections half hidden behind an earth mound that guaranteed chill and damp in the winter.

It is a stirring story of Victorian enterprise and perseverance to read of how, largely through James Murray's doggedness in the face of ignorant interference and the disdain of Oxford University, six million slips of paper were laboured over in that dark Scriptorium and the quotations reduced to 1,827,306, illustrating and mapping the history of the 414,825 main words. The Post Office kindly erected a pillar box outside his house, such was the volume of his correspondence. Murray himself, before his death in 1915, 13 years before the dictionary was finished, produced 7,207 of the 15,487 final pages.

It was a triumph of optimism, stemming, although Simon Winchester does not mention it, from the discovery by the Grimms and other stern Germans of iron philological laws by which one could predict changes in word-forms through the ages. Reading backwards it was possible to pos

tulate the original words in proto-IndoEuropean that gave rise to Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Persian, Irish, English. Language itself could be a science. The Oxford English Dictionary is an astonishing monument, built with the volunteer labour of hundreds of word-gatherers, including the homicide Dr W, C. Minor, incarcerated in Broadmoor, whose tale Mr Winchester told in the readable Surgeon of Crowthorne.

The Meaning of Everything is a jolly read too. Really, it is what might be called an Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica book. Take a subject from that work — ice or cod or dye or nutmeg or quinine or coffee or Krakatoa (a recent title from Mr Winchester) — package it in a small-format slim volume and hey presto!

As it happens a book on the same subject, by James Murray's grand-daughter K. M. Elisabeth Murray, Caught in the Web of Words, which Mr Winchester rightly refers to in passing as a classic, was published in 1977. Mr Winchester relies on it very heavily. In the Scriptorium, he writes:

In a nod to the way Samuel Johnson is supposed to have worked, he [Murray] had the chippy build a foot-high dais at one end of the room, on which he could place his own chair and desk, and from which eyrie he could survey the work of his workers.

Elisabeth Murray had written:

Perhaps in memory of descriptions of Dr Johnson at work at his Dictionary, seated at the end of a table supervising his assistants, James constructed a foot-high dais for his own table and placed another at a lower level for the sorters.

You see how it's done. They might have a common source; Mr Winchester's, as a popular work, does not have source notes. Everyone must have some source, except for bits they make up, such as Winchester's suggestion that a pair of spinster sisters who had worked long for the OED got 'mischievously tipsy' on a glass of amontillado at a dinner for the Dictionary in 1897.

Though it need not detract from the reader's enjoyment much, Winchester often does not seem to know the meaning of the words he chooses to employ. He calls the Derby Ball at the Mayfair Hotel, attended by the Prince of Wales, the 'demi-monde'. Demi-monde, the OED tells us, is the 'class of women of doubtful reputation'. He means beau monde. He refers to the 'crest' of the Goldsmiths' Company inside Volume VI (a whacking 1,625 pages), which they helped along with £5,000. I've just had a look and it is not the crest but the coat of arms, the whole achievement with shield and unicorns as supporters and a crest too. He thinks sacerdotal has gone the way of ruffs and periwigs, but sacerdotal with one I is a perfectly ordinary word meaning 'priestly'.

Again, Simon Winchester blames Cicero for inventing the word syllabus by mistransliterating the Greek sittybas. But the OED explains it was an early printed ver

sion of Cicero, relying on a manuscript copied hundreds of years after Cicero's death, that produced this fruitful error.

I am being pedantic. That's what dictionaries do to you. Mr Winchester's book will do very well. But do read too the 30page history of the OED in Volume I at your local library, or better Elisabeth Murray's book (Yale, £8.99, paperback).