You Could Look It Up: The Reference Shelf From Ancient Babylon to Wikipedia

by Jack Lynch

  CHAPTER 9 ½

  IGNORANCE, PURE IGNORANCE

  Of Omissions, Ambiguities, and Plain Old Blunders

  Reference works have a strange authority. Words are words because they are “in the dictionary,” and angry debates are settled after a glance into an encyclopedia. But these books are not infallible—as their compilers will be the first to admit. There is never a question of whether they contain errors, just how many and how embarrassing those errors are.

  Still, the notion that reference works are authoritative oracles dies hard. In 1954, one critic advised his readers to stop worshiping the dictionary—too many people “think that every word has a correct meaning, and that dictionaries and grammars are the supreme authority in matters of meaning and usage.” (That was a not-so-subtle dig at the G. & C. Merriam Company, which had been using the phrase “supreme authority” in its advertisements for two decades.) “These people,” the writer complained, “never inquire by what authority the writers of dictionaries and grammars say what they say. It is incredible to see teachers bow down to the dictionary. If a person says, ‘The dictionary is wrong!’ he is looked upon as out of his mind.”1

  Actually, dictionaries and encyclopedias are often wrong. Edward Phillips’s New World of Words (1656) contains some glaring goofs: Phillips defined gallon as “a measure of two quarts” (it should be four), and the musical note called a quaver is “half of a crotchet, as a crotchet is the half of a quaver,” which creates a challenging mathematical problem.2 John Ash’s dictionary of 1775 defined esoteric and exoteric—opposites—as two spellings of the same word. In 1728, Ephraim Chambers tried to anticipate criticism by declaring to the world that his Cyclopædia was probably teeming with mistakes: “For Errors, they cannot be very few, considering the Hands thro’ which most Parts of our Knowledge have passed, and from whom we are obliged to take our Accounts.” He could only plead that the offense was nearly universal: “What one Author, upon the most particular Subject, will you produce, that has not his share of ’em? and what Argus could possibly see, and correct the Errors in all the Authors he had to do with?”3

  The first really great English lexicographer, Samuel Johnson, knew this better than most. Lexicographers, he explained, can never hope for actual praise; the most they can hope for is “to escape reproach”—but “even this negative recompence has been yet granted to very few.”4 His prediction was accurate: his own dictionary was widely criticized for its mistakes, the most famous of which concerned his definition of the word pastern. The pastern is actually the part of a horse’s foot between the fetlock and the hoof, but Johnson’s entry reads, “The knee of an horse.” At least he was forthright about it. “A lady once asked him how he came to define Pastern” that way, recorded James Boswell. “Instead of making an elaborate defence, as she expected, he at once answered, ‘Ignorance, Madam, pure ignorance.” ’5

  Ignorance led Johnson into some of his other errors. Although windward and leeward are antonyms, for instance, Johnson defined them identically, as “Towards the wind.” But other failures in defining apparently came from his knowing too much. Readers informed that a cough is “A convulsion of the lungs, vellicated by some sharp serosity,” or that a network is “Any thing reticulated or decussated, at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections,” come away knowing little more than when they began.

  Errors come in many varieties. Some entries are bad because they tell us nothing. John Kersey was a master of the non-definition definition: his New English Dictionary (1702) defined fork as “a well-known instrument,” cat as “a well-known creature,” and dog simply as “a beast.” Here are two more entries in their entirety:

  Ake, as, my head akes.

  An Apron, for a Woman, &c.

  And while Benedykt Chmielowski deserves full credit for writing the first Polish encyclopedia, Nowe Ateny albo Akademia wszelkiej sciencyi pełna (New Athens; or, The Academy Full of All Science), in 1745–46, his no-nonsense entry for horse—“Koń—jaki jest, kaźdy widzi” (“Horse: everyone can see what it is”)—is still proverbial in Polish.

  “I’d long wondered,” writer Ammon Shea recently mused, “why it was that people seemingly felt an irresistible urge to write in with corrections for dictionaries—until I began reading the OED and realized what a powerful urge I have, when I find a mistake in the dictionary, to share it with someone… . When I find a simple typo, I get a feeling of minor triumph. When I find something more substantial, such as a misspelled word, I begin to think I should set about applying for a professorship somewhere.”6 A. J. Jacobs felt the same rush when he spotted a lapse in the most important English-language encyclopedia, as he did “maybe once every four hundred pages” when he read the Britannica: “I feel like the middling student with a C average who has somehow busted the smartest kid in the class as he was writing an equation on the blackboard. I still remember fondly when I discovered that the entry on Dvur Kralove, a Czech city, had a backward quotation mark.”7

  Many are convinced that Wikipedia, prepared without the benefit of paid and carefully selected experts, is loaded with errors, though the evidence is mixed. Admittedly, “Wikipedia vandals” sometimes intentionally introduce errors out of a mischievous sense of fun: “On January 11, 2008,” Nicholson Baker observes, “the entire fascinating entry on the aardvark was replaced with ‘one ugly animal’; in February the aardvark was briefly described as a ‘medium-sized inflatable banana.’ ”8 When Wikipedia entries begin suffering from too many vandals, as when the late-night television comic Stephen Colbert puckishly urged his viewers to spread the misinformation that wild elephant populations were growing, administrators will “protect” them, and only trusted Wikipedians are permitted to revise them until the vandals have grown bored and turned their attention elsewhere.

  Still, people are convinced that an encyclopedia prepared entirely by volunteers will be riddled with howlers. But a study carried out by the journal Nature compared Wikipedia to the most recent Britannica by surveying scientific articles and found no significant differences in the number of errors.9 Britannica was not happy. “Almost everything about the journal’s investigation,” they said in a press release, “from the criteria for identifying inaccuracies to the discrepancy between the article text and its headline, was wrong and misleading. Dozens of inaccuracies attributed to the Britannica were not inaccuracies at all, and a number of the articles Nature examined were not even in the Encyclopædia Britannica. The study was so poorly carried out and its findings so error-laden that it was completely without merit.” The debate continues.

  CHAPTER 10

  GUARDING THE AVENUES OF LANGUAGE

  Dictionaries in the Eighteenth Century

  Dictionnaire de

  l’Académie françoise

  1694

  Samuel Johnson

  A Dictionary of the English Language

  1755

  By the European Middle Ages, there were dictionaries in great profusion—but hardly any of them addressed the languages people actually spoke. Medieval dictionaries were mostly in Latin, the language of the Church, the language of the law, and the language of scholarship. No one thought a dictionary of Spanish, Swedish, or Dutch worthwhile. By the sixteenth century, though, interest in vernacular languages had begun to grow. Not coincidentally, this was also a time when national identities were coming into focus and the modern nation-state was being invented. People who once thought of themselves as Bourguignons, Lyonnais, or Bordelais started thinking of themselves as French; Prussians, Saxons, and Westphalians were becoming German. These nations defined themselves linguistically: a nation was a group of people sharing a language.

  Starting around the year 1500 a few lexicographers began to treat the modern languages, at least tentatively. The Universal vocabulario en latín y en romance—Latin entries, Spanish definitions—was published in Seville by Alfonso de Palencia in 1490, and two years later Antono de Nebrija’s important Diccionarium latinum–hispanum et hisp
anum–latinum appeared in Salamanca, making possible translation in both directions between Spanish and Latin. It was a substantial work, with nearly twelve thousand entries. An even more significant work came in 1611, when Sebastián de Covarrubias y Orozco published his Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española.1 Still, Covarrubias himself did not create a nationwide consciousness of the language; that had to wait until the Spanish Royal Academy published its Diccionario de la lengua castellana, better known as the Diccionario de autoridades, between 1726 and 1739. It drew its material from the greatest Spanish writers (the autoridades, or “authorities”).2

  The process was much the same in Italy. An Italian dictionary, Memoriale della lingua, published by Giacomo Pergamini in 1602, has been called “the very first dictionary of definitions dealing with a modern language to be published in Europe.”3 The most important early seventeenth-century dictionary in Europe, though, was the work of another academy, the Accademia della Crusca, which began work in Florence in 1583. The result of the academicians’ efforts was the five-volume Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca in 1612. The Vocabolario is self-consciously literary in its orientation: the quotations are drawn from a canon of great Italian writers, especially Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, all from Tuscany, the privileged center of Italianness. No longer a debased modern form of Latin, Italian was now a living language in its own right, capable of expressing everything the classical languages could. The Vocabolario became the basis of Italian lexicography for three centuries: new editions continued appearing as late as 1923, and even today the standard Italian dictionary traces its origins back to the Accademia.

  The most important academic dictionary of all time, though, was that of the Académie Française, the greatest of the national academies then and now. It had its birth in the informal Paris salons of the early seventeenth century. Some of the most famous were held at the fashionable Hôtel de Rambouillet, near the Louvre, where Mme de Rambouillet established a forum in which men and women could discuss books and politics rather than gossip and scandal. News of these gatherings made their way to Cardinal Richelieu, who thought that the French state should recognize linguistic excellence in some official capacity. In January 1635, therefore, the chancellor of France drew up the letters patent establishing the Académie as an official body. No longer merely a club of like-minded amateurs, it was now an official body sanctioned by the crown. It has remained in operation, interrupted only by the French Revolution, ever since.4

  The early members had much in common. They were required by charter to be “of good manners, of good reputation, of good spirit, and suitable for academic functions.”5 Within a few years, the Académie established strict rules for membership. The number of members would be fixed at forty, and they would serve from the time of their appointment until their death—the lifetime term gave them the nickname les Immortels. Over the centuries the members of the Académie have been some of the most distinguished French intellectuals. Early members included some of the brightest lights of France. Although the Immortels have included a few political radicals, the organization itself has been deeply conservative in its operation. The fair sex were excluded: no woman was admitted as one of the forty Immortels until 1980, more than a third of a millennium after the founding of the Académie. Still, the list of members over the centuries is a who’s-who of French cultural life: Pierre Corneille, Jean Racine, François Fénelon, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Alexandre Dumas fils, Victor Hugo, Alexis de Tocqueville, Prosper Mérimée, Louis Pasteur, Paul Valéry, Eugène Ionesco, Fernand Braudel, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jean Cocteau, Jacques Cousteau, Marguerite Yourcenar, and Marc Fumaroli have numbered among the immortals.

  Their founding document declared that “The first mission of the Academy shall be to work, with all possible care and diligence, to give certain rules to our language and to make it pure, eloquent, and more suitable for treating arts and sciences,” and a dictionary was the way to accomplish that purpose. The members read their way through the best authors to produce both a chronicle and an idealized image of the French language. Once a week, a member presented a discourse on a subject the Académie chose, and together they worked to refine the French language of its impurities.

  The first general editor was Claude Favre de Vaugelas, one of the original Academicians. Vaugelas had his virtues, but productivity was not among them. His obsession with correctness slowed progress on the dictionary to a crawl. He spent fifteen years working on A through I, but then died poor, his estate unable to cover his debts. Creditors seized his papers, including the incomplete materials for the dictionary, forcing the other members to negotiate for their return. The dictionary took forty years to complete.

  TITLE: Le Dictionnaire de l’Académie françoise: Dedié au Roy

  COMPILER: Académie française

  ORGANIZATION: Alphabetical by root word, a to zoophyte

  PUBLISHED: August 24, 1694

  VOLUMES: 2

  PAGES: 1,478

  ENTRIES: 5,492 main entries, 13,269 subentries

  TOTAL WORDS: 1.5 million

  SIZE: 14½″ × 9¼″ (36.4 × 23.5 cm)

  AREA: 1,360 ft2 (126.4 m2)

  LATEST EDITION: Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, 8th ed. (Hachette, 1932–35); the 9th ed. is in preparation

  The Academy made a few eccentric decisions. They resolved to exclude all technical and scientific terms from the main dictionary, sponsoring a separate Dictionnaire des arts et des sciences, edited by Thomas Corneille, brother of the playwright. They also took a different approach to alphabetical order from that of most other lexicographers. They alphabetized not by word but by root—that is, all derived forms that share an etymological origin were put under the root word, so invalider ‘to void, to invalidate’ appeared not in the I’s, but under V for the root valoir ‘to be worth,’ and canin ‘canine’ was placed under chien ‘dog’. There is something appealingly logical about having all related words in a cluster, and the standard Latin and Greek dictionaries by Robert and Henri Estienne were organized this way. But it posed real problems for casual users who are not already masters of etymology. As one critic writes, “It was easy … to find devoir [must, ought] in its alphabetical place, but an initial search for such related words as indû [unjustified], endetté [indebted], and debiteur [debtor] would lead only to a cross-reference.”6 The system, moreover, was not followed consistently: atourner ‘to dress’ comes from tourner ‘to turn’, but it appeared under A, not T.7

  Another problem was a failure of execution rather than planning: the definitions were notoriously weak. The dictionary defined homme ‘man’ simply as “animal raisonnable”; femme ‘woman’ is “la femelle de l’homme.” Amour ‘love’ is “sentimens de celuy qui aime” (feeling of one who loves).8 Moreover, they did not draw their examples from actual literature, as the Accademia della Crusca had done, but invented them for the purpose:

  TASTE. n. m. One of the five natural senses by which we make out flavors. Having the right taste, a delicate taste, exquisite taste, depraved taste, tired taste. it pleases the taste, tickles the taste, flatters the taste. each has his own taste, different tastes, not all tastes agree, there’s no arguing over taste.

  It also means, Flavor. Meat that tastes good, tastes bad. this has an excellent taste, a fine taste, a delicate taste, an exquisite taste, a noted taste. this bread has a taste of hazelnut, this wine has a taste of earth, this gives good taste to sauces.

  One says, that A sauce is of high taste, to say, It is salty, spicy, or vinegary.

  It is also used for, Appetite. The patient begins to have a taste for wine. he begins to get his taste back. he finds nothing to his taste.

  They say prov. of Something too expensive, The cost makes you lose your appetite.

  This policy, decided on as early as 1638, was meant to guarantee that there would be no errors or lapses, but it had the strange side effect of suggesting that the work of even the greatest writers did not meet the Académie’s standard of �
�correct” French.

  The appearance of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie françoise in 1694 was something of a damp squib. The volumes were beautifully printed and headed by a grand frontispiece, prompting one commentator to call the book “sumptuous, unforgettable, worthy of a zenith of France.”9 But Vaugelas’s pace was so sluggish that two rival dictionaries had come out before it,10 and the Académie was embarrassed by the omission of so many words that had appeared in the works of their rivals. Louis XIV himself praised the competition, not the official dictionary. Within just six months of publication, therefore, the academicians decided that, instead of turning their attention to a French grammar, they would produce a revised edition to make up for the shortcomings of the first.