Oh my word, what an engrossing talk on the many weird and wonderful people who created the Oxford English Dictionary. Professor Sarah Ogilvy eloquently took her audience lightly and brightly into this astonishing publication.
We met the creatives, crackpots and criminals who drove the original project, contributed to its content, defended its standards and ambitions, added to its colourful backstory, and in so doing enabled the English-speaking world to hold on to, cherish and burnish one of its greatest treasures: its own language. But why? Language, according to Professor Ogilvie, “is a symbol of identity”. With an identity, you can set yourself more distinctly within the context of your family, your community, your nation and the world. Without an identity, who are you? Professor Ogilvie is Australian but her Scottish grandfather, having settled in Australia, often sat reading his Scots Dictionary, reminding himself of his homeland. (Let’s hope it was a fond reminiscence and not a thrawn delight in being anywhere but dreich Caledonia.) A dictionary can be an umbilical cord to the past and the faraway; it can be an anchor, a solace.
As befits the talk taking place in Glasgow, Scots have played major roles in lexicography. (Is the city’s full motto not, “Let Glasgow flourish… by the preaching of the word”?) Consider one of the mainstays in the mission: the braggadociously bearded and mortar-boarded Scotsman James Murray, who taught himself 25 languages by reading 25 translations of the Bible. He worked obsessively (the project attracts obsessives) twenty hours a day towards the compilation of the OED. He built a ‘Scriptorium’ (aka garden shed) where he and assistants collated correspondence from around the world.
In Murray’s early exercise in crowd-sourcing, suggestions arrived on small slips of paper (the occasional sweetie wrapper sufficed) bearing a word, its source, and a definition. Slips arrived in hundreds and thousands, each to be meticulously filed (and often rejected: “No good” and “Hopeless” were among Murray’s annotations). His was an endless quest to, “create the biography of every word in the English language.” Murray was a religious man, no doubt familiar with John 1:1 – “In the beginning was the word. And the word was God.” His project probably gave him a grasp of the concept of eternity.
Nowadays we have soulless AI to scrape up every last word of the logosphere, instantly: how did Victorians ever do what they did, by hand, with inky fingers on crumply paper? Well, they were zealots and having committed to the cause, they kept on ‘til the job was done. Except it isn’t done and never will be. To this day, 75 people in Oxford are wordivating away; a Mr Collier in Brisbane is scouring the local Courier Mail newspaper for neologisms (300,000 suggestions and counting). That’s on top of work by the 19th century Brown Sisters (23,000 slips), at least one certified but brilliant lunatic, a pornographer, three women writing in as one man, three murderers, Karl Marx’s granddaughter Eleanor and the phonetics expert A J Ellis who carried so many items in his 28-pocket overcoat that when he walked, “he sounded like a kitchen drawer”. And many others. As for the impact of AI on lexicography, “It’s getting better on nuances, but scholarly rigour outperforms AI”.
One of the ultimate Dictionary People has to be Professor Ogilvie. She has tirelessly mined previously untouched archives, including Murray’s handwritten address books, and furthered the efforts of the pioneering legions of lexicographers. They’d be nothing if not gruntled, bigly. Sarah Ogilvie is Professor of Language & Lexicography at the University of Oxford. Her latest book is The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes of the Oxford English Dictionary. Chair Professor Felicity Huntingford presented Sarah with a Society paperweight, which should help keep all those slips of paper in place. This most definitive of talks is available online.