What Just Happened: A Chronicle From the Information Frontier

by James Gleick

  Then the vanished world of primary orality was not much missed. Not until the twentieth century, amid a burgeoning of new media for communication, did the qualms and the nostalgia resurface. Marshall McLuhan, who became the most famous spokesman for the bygone oral culture, did so in the service of an argument for modernity. He hailed the new “electric age” not for its newness but for its return to the roots of human creativity. He saw it as a revival of the old orality. “We are in our century ‘winding the tape backward,’ ”♦ he declared, finding his metaphorical tape in one of the newest information technologies. He constructed a series of polemical contrasts: the printed word vs. the spoken word; cold/hot; static/fluid; neutral/magical; impoverished/rich; regimented/creative; mechanical/organic; separatist/integrative. “The alphabet is a technology of visual fragmentation and specialism,” he wrote. It leads to “a desert of classified data.” One way of framing McLuhan’s critique of print would be to say that print offers only a narrow channel of communication. The channel is linear and even fragmented. By contrast, speech—in the primal case, face-to-face human intercourse, alive with gesture and touch—engages all the senses, not just hearing. If the ideal of communication is a meeting of souls, then writing is a sad shadow of the ideal.

  The same criticism was made of other constrained channels, created by later technologies—the telegraph, the telephone, radio, and e-mail. Jonathan Miller rephrases McLuhan’s argument in quasi-technical terms of information: “The larger the number of senses involved, the better the chance of transmitting a reliable copy of the sender’s mental state.”♦♦ In the stream of words past the ear or eye, we sense not just the items one by one but their rhythms and tones, which is to say their music. We, the listener or the reader, do not hear, or read, one word at a time; we get messages in groupings small and large. Human memory being what it is, larger patterns can be grasped in writing than in sound. The eye can glance back. McLuhan considered this damaging, or at least diminishing. “Acoustic space is organic and integral,” he said, “perceived through the simultaneous interplay of all the senses; whereas ‘rational’ or pictorial space is uniform, sequential and continuous and creates a closed world with none of the rich resonance of the tribal echoland.”♦ For McLuhan, the tribal echoland is Eden.

  By their dependence on the spoken word for information, people were drawn together into a tribal mesh … the spoken word is more emotionally laden than the written.… Audile-tactile tribal man partook of the collective unconscious, lived in a magical integral world patterned by myth and ritual, its values divine.♦

  Up to a point, maybe. Yet three centuries earlier, Thomas Hobbes, looking from a vantage where literacy was new, had taken a less rosy view. He could see the preliterate culture more clearly: “Men lived upon gross experience,” he wrote. “There was no method; that is to say, no sowing nor planting of knowledge by itself, apart from the weeds and common plants of error and conjecture.”♦ A sorry place, neither magical nor divine.

  Was McLuhan right, or was Hobbes? If we are ambivalent, the ambivalence began with Plato. He witnessed writing’s rising dominion; he asserted its force and feared its lifelessness. The writer-philosopher embodied a paradox. The same paradox was destined to reappear in different guises, each technology of information bringing its own powers and its own fears. It turns out that the “forgetfulness” Plato feared does not arise. It does not arise because Plato himself, with his mentor Socrates and his disciple Aristotle, designed a vocabulary of ideas, organized them into categories, set down rules of logic, and so fulfilled the promise of the technology of writing. All this made knowledge more durable stuff than before.

  And the atom of knowledge was the word. Or was it? For some time to come, the word continued to elude its pursuers, whether it was a fleeting burst of sound or a fixed cluster of marks. “Most literate persons, when you say, ‘Think of a word,’ at least in some vague fashion think of something before their eyes,” Ong says, “where a real word can never be at all.”♦ Where do we look for the words, then? In the dictionary, of course. Ong also said: “It is demoralizing to remind oneself that there is no dictionary in the mind, that lexicographical apparatus is a very late accretion to language.”♦

  * * *

  ♦ It is customary to transcribe a two-place sexagesimal cuneiform number with a comma—such as “7,30.” But the scribes did not use such punctuation, and in fact their notation left the place values undefined; that is, their numbers were what we would call “floating point.” A two-place number like 7,30 could be 450 (seven 60s + thirty 1s) or 7½ (seven 1s + thirty 1/60s).

  ♦ Not that Miller agrees. On the contrary: “It is hard to overestimate the subtle reflexive effects of literacy upon the creative imagination, providing as it does a cumulative deposit of ideas, images, and idioms upon whose rich and appreciating funds every artist enjoys an unlimited right of withdrawal.”

  ♦ The interviewer asked plaintively, “But aren’t there corresponding gains in insight, understanding and cultural diversity to compensate detribalized man?” McLuhan responded, “Your question reflects all the institutionalized biases of literate man.”

  3 | TWO WORDBOOKS

  (The Uncertainty in Our Writing, the Inconstancy in Our Letters)

  In such busie, and active times, there arise more new thoughts of men, which must be signifi’d, and varied by new expressions.

  —Thomas Sprat (1667)♦

  A VILLAGE SCHOOLMASTER AND PRIEST made a book in 1604 with a rambling title that began “A Table Alphabeticall, conteyning and teaching the true writing, and understanding of hard usuall English wordes,” and went on with more hints to its purpose, which was unusual and needed explanation:♦

  With the interpretation thereof by plaine English words, gathered for the benefit & helpe of Ladies, Gentlewomen, or any other unskilfull persons.

  Whereby they may the more easily and better understand many hard English wordes, which they shall heare or read in Scriptures, Sermons, or elsewhere, and also be made able to use the same aptly themselves.

  The title page omitted the name of the author, Robert Cawdrey, but included a motto from Latin—“As good not read, as not to understand”—and situated the publisher with as much formality and exactness as could be expected in a time when the address, as a specification of place, did not yet exist:

  At London, Printed by I. R. for Edmund Weaver, & are to be sold at his shop at the great North doore of Paules Church.

  CAWDREY’S TITLE PAGE

  Even in London’s densely packed streets, shops and homes were seldom to be found by number. The alphabet, however, had a definite order—the first and second letters providing its very name—and that order had been maintained since the early Phoenician times, through all the borrowing and evolution that followed.

  Cawdrey lived in a time of information poverty. He would not have thought so, even had he possessed the concept. On the contrary, he would have considered himself to be in the midst of an information explosion, which he himself was trying to abet and organize. But four centuries later, his own life is shrouded in the obscurity of missing knowledge. His Table Alphabeticall appears as a milestone in the history of information, yet of its entire first edition, just one worn copy survived into the future. When and where he was born remain unknown—probably in the late 1530s; probably in the Midlands. Parish registers notwithstanding, people’s lives were almost wholly undocumented. No one has even a definitive spelling for Cawdrey’s name (Cowdrey, Cawdry). But then, no one agreed on the spelling of most names: they were spoken, seldom written.

  In fact, few had any concept of “spelling”—the idea that each word, when written, should take a particular predetermined form of letters. The word cony (rabbit) appeared variously as conny, conye, conie, connie, coni, cuny, cunny, and cunnie in a single 1591 pamphlet.♦ Others spelled it differently. And for that matter Cawdrey himself, on the title page of his book for “teaching the true writing,” wrote wordes in one sentence and words i
n the next. Language did not function as a storehouse of words, from which users could summon the correct items, preformed. On the contrary, words were fugitive, on the fly, expected to vanish again thereafter. When spoken, they were not available to be compared with, or measured against, other instantiations of themselves. Every time people dipped quill in ink to form a word on paper they made a fresh choice of whatever letters seemed to suit the task. But this was changing. The availability—the solidity—of the printed book inspired a sense that the written word should be a certain way, that one form was right and others wrong. First this sense was unconscious; then it began to rise toward general awareness. Printers themselves made it their business.

  To spell (from an old Germanic word) first meant to speak or to utter. Then it meant to read, slowly, letter by letter. Then, by extension, just around Cawdrey’s time, it meant to write words letter by letter. The last was a somewhat poetic usage. “Spell Eva back and Ave shall you find,” wrote the Jesuit poet Robert Southwell (shortly before being hanged and quartered in 1595). When certain educators did begin to consider the idea of spelling, they would say “right writing”—or, to borrow from Greek, “orthography.” Few bothered, but one who did was a school headmaster in London, Richard Mulcaster. He assembled a primer, titled “The first part [a second part was not to be] of the Elementarie which entreateth chefelie of the right writing of our English tung.” He published it in 1582 (“at London by Thomas Vautroullier dwelling in the blak-friers by Lud-gate”), including his own list of about eight thousand words and a plea for the idea of a dictionary:

  It were a thing verie praiseworthie in my opinion, and no lesse profitable than praise worthie, if some one well learned and as laborious a man, wold gather all the words which we use in our English tung … into one dictionarie, and besides the right writing, which is incident to the Alphabete, wold open unto us therein, both their naturall force, and their proper use.♦

  He recognized another motivating factor: the quickening pace of commerce and transportation made other languages a palpable presence, forcing an awareness of the English language as just one among many. “Forenners and strangers do wonder at us,” Mulcaster wrote, “both for the uncertaintie in our writing, and the inconstancie in our letters.” Language was no longer invisible like the air.

  Barely 5 million people on earth spoke English (a rough estimate; no one tried to count the population of England, Scotland, or Ireland until 1801). Barely a million of those could write. Of all the world’s languages English was already the most checkered, the most mottled, the most polygenetic. Its history showed continual corruption and enrichment from without. Its oldest core words, the words that felt most basic, came from the language spoken by the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, Germanic tribes that crossed the North Sea into England in the fifth century, pushing aside the Celtic inhabitants. Not much of Celtic penetrated the Anglo-Saxon speech, but Viking invaders brought more words from Norse and Danish: egg, sky, anger, give, get. Latin came by way of Christian missionaries; they wrote in the alphabet of the Romans, which replaced the runic scripts that spread in central and northern Europe early in the first millennium. Then came the influence of French.

  Influence, to Robert Cawdrey, meant “a flowing in.” The Norman Conquest was more like a deluge, linguistically. English peasants of the lower classes continued to breed cows, pigs, and oxen (Germanic words), but in the second millennium the upper classes dined on beef, pork, and mutton (French). By medieval times French and Latin roots accounted for more than half of the common vocabulary. More alien words came when intellectuals began consciously to borrow from Latin and Greek to express concepts the language had not before needed. Cawdrey found this habit irritating. “Some men seek so far for outlandish English, that they forget altogether their mothers language, so that if some of their mothers were alive, they were not able to tell, or understand what they say,”♦ he complained. “One might well charge them, for counterfeyting the Kings English.”

  Four hundred years after Cawdrey published his book of words, John Simpson retraced Cawdrey’s path. Simpson was in certain respects his natural heir: the editor of a grander book of words, the Oxford English Dictionary. Simpson, a pale, soft-spoken man, saw Cawdrey as obstinate, uncompromising, and even pugnacious. The schoolteacher was ordained a deacon and then a priest of the Church of England in a restless time, when Puritanism was on the rise. Nonconformity led him into trouble. He seems to have been guilty of “not Conforming himself” to some of the sacraments, such as “the Cross in Baptism, and the Ring in Marriage.”♦ As a village priest he did not care to bow down to bishops and archbishops. He preached a form of equality unwelcome to church authorities. “There was preferred secretly an Information against him for speaking diverse Words in the Pulpit, tending to the depraving of the Book of Common Prayer.… And so being judged a dangerous Person, if he should continue preaching, but infecting the People with Principles different from the Religion established.” Cawdrey was degraded from the priesthood and deprived of his benefice. He continued to fight the case for years, to no avail.

  All that time, he collected words (“collect, gather”). He published two instructional treatises, one on catechism (“catechiser, that teacheth the principles of Christian religion”) and one on A godlie forme of householde government for the ordering of private families, and in 1604 he produced a different sort of book: nothing more than a list of words, with brief definitions.

  Why? Simpson says, “We have already seen that he was committed to simplicity in language, and that he was strong-minded to the point of obstinacy.” He was still preaching—now, to preachers. “Such as by their place and calling (but especially Preachers) as have occasion to speak publiquely before the ignorant people,” Cawdrey declared in his introductory note, “are to bee admonished.” He admonishes them. “Never affect any strange ynckhorne termes.” (An inkhorn was an inkpot; by inkhorn term he meant a bookish word.) “Labour to speake so as is commonly received, and so as the most ignorant may well understand them.” And above all do not affect to speak like a foreigner:

  Some far journied gentlemen, at their returne home, like as they love to go in forraine apparrell, so they will pouder their talke with over-sea language. He that commeth lately out of France, will talk French English, and never blush at the matter.

  Cawdrey had no idea of listing all the words—whatever that would mean. By 1604 William Shakespeare had written most of his plays, employing a vocabulary of nearly 30,000, but these words were not available to Cawdrey or anyone else. Cawdrey did not bother with the most common words, nor the most inkhorn and Frenchified words; he listed only the “hard usual” words, words difficult enough to need some explanation but still “proper unto the tongue wherein we speake” and “plaine for all men to perceive.” He compiled 2,500. He knew that many were derived from Greek, French, and Latin (“derive, fetch from”), and he marked these accordingly. The book Cawdrey made was the first English dictionary. The word dictionary was not in it.

  Although Cawdrey cited no authorities, he had relied on some. He copied the remarks about inkhorn terms and the far-journeyed gentlemen in their foreign apparel from Thomas Wilson’s successful book The Arte of Rhetorique.♦ For the words themselves he found several sources (“source, wave, or issuing foorth of water”). He found about half his words in a primer for teaching reading, called The English Schoole-maister, by Edmund Coote, first published in 1596 and widely reprinted thereafter. Coote claimed that a schoolmaster could teach a hundred students more quickly with his text than forty without it. He found it worthwhile to explain the benefits of teaching people to read: “So more knowledge will be brought into this Land, and moe bookes bought, than otherwise would have been.”♦ Coote included a long glossary, which Cawdrey plundered.

  That Cawdrey should arrange his words in alphabetical order, to make his Table Alphabeticall, was not self-evident. He knew he could not count on even his educated readers to be versed in alphabetical order, so he
tried to produce a small how-to manual. He struggled with this: whether to describe the ordering in logical, schematic terms or in terms of a step-by-step procedure, an algorithm. “Gentle reader,” he wrote—again adapting freely from Coote—

  thou must learne the Alphabet, to wit, the order of the Letters as they stand, perfectly without booke, and where every Letter standeth: as b neere the beginning, n about the middest, and t toward the end. Nowe if the word, which thou art desirous to finde, begin with a then looke in the beginning of this Table, but if with v looke towards the end. Againe, if thy word beginne with ca looke in the beginning of the letter c but if with cu then looke toward the end of that letter. And so of all the rest. &c.

  It was not easy to explain. Friar Johannes Balbus of Genoa tried in his 1286 Catholicon. Balbus thought he was inventing alphabetical order for the first time, and his instructions were painstaking: “For example I intend to discuss amo and bibo. I will discuss amo before bibo because a is the first letter of amo and b is the first letter of bibo and a is before b in the alphabet. Similarly …”♦ He rehearsed a long list of examples and concluded: “I beg of you, therefore, good reader, do not scorn this great labor of mine and this order as something worthless.”

  In the ancient world, alphabetical lists scarcely appeared until around 250 BCE, in papyrus texts from Alexandria. The great library there seems to have used at least some alphabetization in organizing its books. The need for such an artificial ordering scheme arises only with large collections of data, not otherwise ordered. And the possibility of alphabetical order arises only in languages possessing an alphabet: a discrete small symbol set with its own conventional sequence (“abecedarie, the order of the Letters, or hee that useth them”). Even then the system is unnatural. It forces the user to detach information from meaning; to treat words strictly as character strings; to focus abstractly on the configuration of the word. Furthermore, alphabetical ordering comprises a pair of procedures, one the inverse of the other: organizing a list and looking up items; sorting and searching. In either direction the procedure is recursive (“recourse, a running backe againe”). The basic operation is a binary decision: greater than or less than. This operation is performed first on one letter; then, nested as a subroutine, on the next letter; and (as Cawdrey put it, struggling with the awkwardness) “so of all the rest. &c.” This makes for astounding efficiency. The system scales easily to any size, the macrostructure being identical to the microstructure. A person who understands alphabetical order homes in on any one item in a list of a thousand or a million, unerringly, with perfect confidence. And without knowing anything about the meaning.