Book Review/The Meaning of Everything
The Meaning of Everything
The story of the Oxford English Dictionary
By Simon Winchester
Oxford University Press
Hardcover $25
By BILL DUNCAN
The News-Review
Simon Winchester’s latest book, “The Meaning of Everything,” isn’t the first one he has written how the famous Oxford English dictionary came into being. But this volume is a more comprehensive look than his earlier book, “The Professor and the Madman,” which only centered on one contributor to the massive catalog of words. However, many of the words that fill one of the most complete dictionaries of the English language were the intriguing contributions of William Chester Minor, an American army surgeon confined to the Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane in Berkshire England. He plays an important part in the making of the famous dictionary
Minor was an army surgeon during the American Civil War who was discharged because of his mental state and in 1871 moved his family to London. It was there Minor, suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, shot and killed an innocent man on a London street. He was tried and found innocent by reason of insanity and was confined for life to Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminal Insane.
Minor was a collector of rare books and was allowed to have his library in his cell. Winchester could not discover exactly how Minor learned of the project by Sir James Murray, a Scottish lexicographer and third editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. Murray had sought volunteers to research English word usage in literature, newspapers, magazines and speech throughout the world.
Minor contributed enough words to have filled up four volumes, according to Winchester. The author notes that for years the editors, including Murray, thought the contributor was on the staff of the asylum and never guessed he was an inmate of Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane.
While Minor’s contributions are perhaps the most unique, the entire project is mind boggling and continues today much on the same order that Murray, a former grammar school teacher, organized it so efficiently in the 1800s. When he undertook assembling the vast dictionary, it was his intent to make an inventory in alphabetical order of the words used in English from the mid-12th century.
Murray designed the construction of the dictionary so that it would include historical and descriptive principles. Each definition was to be accompanied by an example, including date of usage. Most of the examples were quotes of the word being properly used. It was Murray’s superior organization skills that made possible the completion of this great undertaking. Murray lived at the university in a room stacked floor to ceiling with a staggering volume of materials until his death, at the time only half the dictionary, up to the letter “T” had been completed.
Winchester notes that the English language is “so vast, so sprawling, so wonderfully unwieldy, so subtle … in its never-ending fullness so undeniably magnificent.” He calls it “the language of invasion,” noting that it is a polyglot language blended from many languages and cultures into the English language.
Murray was actually the third editor to undertake the task. The first editor, Herbert Coleridge, grandson of the poet, was only 27 when he became editor. He died one year into the project.
He was followed by Frederick James Furniall who made little progress in the project until, in 1879, James Augustus Henry Murray took charge and organized a small army of volunteer readers to contribute quotation slips containing word usage found in their research.
Winchester said that there were many talented contributors, “but sadly few are remembered.”
He did note the famous ones, like John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, who is better known today as J.R.R. Tolkien, author of “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings.” Part of Winchester’s massive research into the making of the dictionary discovered a notebook written in Tolkien’s distinctive handwriting “listing a bewildering variety of possible and puzzling etymologies.”
“The Meaning of Everything,” is a word lover’s dream book in which Winchester’s epilog reassure the reader that a dictionary of the English language will never be really finished, saying: “One of the infuriating marvels of the slippery fluidity of the English language is that or all of its 1,500 years of history it has been changing, enlarging, evolving…”
(Bill Duncan can be reached at bduncan@nrtoday..com or by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470)