Harmless drudgery

I have spent an hour or two glancing through a very academic book about English dictionaries, a collection of essays entitled Words and Dictionaries by John Considine and Giovanno Iamartino.  It’s a bit of a caricature of academic texts  - one of the essays is called “A Synchronic and Diachronic Study of Food Idioms in 200 years of The Times”, which concludes – inter alia – that “the claim that idiom behaviour is erratic can be confuted”; I hope you’re wiser – I’m not.  But most of the essays, though deadly earnest and meant for specialists, have some real interest to the general word lover like myself.  To  save time and patience, I will not reference each essay separately, just give a summary title so that you can find it if you wish.

To “Finde Wordes Newe”  discusses Chaucer’s contribution to the vocabulary of modern English, concluding that while the older view of Chaucer as an almost unique fount of adaptations from Latin, French and other languages, and a creator of neologisms, too, was over-stated, he nevertheless was a very major contributor.  Even more important, in many ways, is the fact that he was widely and lastingly read, so his coinages gained currency; over 1,100 first citations testifies to his influence, and he was quick to take up and popularise others’ coinages, and extend their meanings. Many of these words are now so familiar we normally do not appreciate his inventiveness: imagination, complexion, deface, comparison and compassion are just a few examples.

The Real Richard Howlet attempts – and is gravelled for lack of matter – to write a concise account of the sixteenth century author of the Abcedarium, a Latin-English dictionary of 1552.  He sounds to be important only to specialists in the field, but I enjoyed the frankness of the would-be biographer’s first sub-heading:  1.  Howlet’s obscurity.

Another essay, Alphabet Fatigue, reassures us that lexicographers are only human – most early dictionaries have proportionally more entries in the early letters than the later, as authors became bored, tired, or pressed to meet their deadlines!  And someone has actually measured this: the 1955 OED provides a benchmark, and its mid-point is “machinable”, and the New Penguin of 2004 has “Lycra” - this seems about normal for modern dictionaries.  Johnson, however, had his midpoint at “landmark”, and others in the C17th are so unbalanced as to have midpoints like “insult” and even “humiliate”.  I find this picture of declining energy or will reprehensible but entirely charming.

Probably the best essay in the book, and the most accessible to the lay reader, is Reporting Eighteenth Century Vocabulary in the OED, which argues convincingly that the original OED, magnificent endeavour though it was, is inevitably full of invisible judgements about language which can easily but erroneously be taken as representing scholarly truth.  The two most obvious are the reliance on literary sources and the very significant under-representation of the C18th.  The first of these is easily explicable in terms of both the high canonic view of literature amongst the Victorians, but also the lack of electronic searches and concordances – inevitably, they relied heavily on Shakespeare, the Bible, and a range of well known literary sources.  But the second omission is surprising, particularly in the light of Murray’s desire to have at least one quotation a century for each word; the essay’s author, Charlotte Brewer, puts this down mainly to the disdain in which C18th literature was held in the C19th, a view she illustrates with a quotation from Swinburne (1886): “a time when the very notion of poetry .. had totally died and decayed”.  Knowledge of this bias, and the availability of online searching, means that the current e-revision of the great work is correcting this and other imbalances – Blake had but 108 quotations in the first OED, but in OED3 (which is work in progress) there are 56 from M – philandering alone.

Finally, there is an essay about The Great Un-Crisis, when the huge scale of words beginning in "un-" caused great friction between the editors of the OED and the OUP, which became very worried about cost and time.  It was a serious and prolonged dispute, and while it was eventually resolved, it is interesting to see how un-academic issues threatened the completion of the Dictionary on historical principles for several months or even years.  It was definitely not an uncrisis!

Comments

[Peter the Flautist]

Ah, I misunderstood what was meant by middle here, thank you for the clarification. However it would also be interesting to know if there is any significant difference in the distribution of words, as a function of intial letter, between different era's. Do you know of any work in this area? DP

[lindsay]

But, Dark Puss, that's not the point - the middle could be in h or in r, but we know that in the best modern dictionaries, it actually is about late l or ealy m. Therefore, the fact that early dictionaries mid out much earlier is of interest.

All without worrying of course whether the middle is measured in terms of pages, headwords, subwords etc!!

[Peter the flautist]

Hmm, why would I expect words to be evenly balanced about the "middle"? I'd like to do a bootstrap analysis (a non-parametric test that repeatedly samples a distribution) on the underlying data to see what the median and the standard-error on the median is without any underlying assumptions of symmetry or normality. Anyone know where I could get the appropriate data sets?

Dark Puss (as if I didn't have enough REAL work to do!)

[Harriet]

Sounds fascinating but I admire you for reading it all -- sounds "good but tough" as Huck Finn (I think) said.

[Karen]

Have you read "Caught in the Web of Words" by K. M. Elisabeth Murray? If not, do!