The Word Detective

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by John Simpson


  The first records in English of the word juggernaut date from the early years of the seventeenth century. It goes without saying that not everybody knew about the word then, but those who were alert to language change did. This was a time when the British Empire was expanding. Britons were travelling and trading far away from London, and they were bringing strange words back from their journeys, many of which eventually found a place in the English language.

  Early travellers to the Indian Subcontinent were amazed by the enormous processions they witnessed at Puri in Odhisa, on the Bay of Bengal. An idol of Lord Vishnu was led through the city on an enormous “car” (a ramshackle vehicle maybe four storeys high, according to one account), followed by thousands of adherents. This great crush of people made the procession a potentially dangerous event, at which over the years many people were said to have met their death. Stories like this were lapped up by the travellers and their subsequent readers.

  European visitors came to hear of this “Jagannath” festival: they adapted the spelling to the way they heard the word pronounced in India (the OED explains our spelling of the first vowel by saying that the short a in Hindi is pronounced like the English u in cut, mutt, etc.). What they may not have known was that “Jagannath” (lord of the world) was a Hindi name for the Lord Vishnu. Travellers used the word as if it applied specifically to the glorious car (or “Juggernaut”) on which the idol of Lord Vishnu was carried. By the early nineteenth century we were happily using the word of any large cart—and later lorry or truck—that rumbled along our road systems.

  The cabinet of Oxford’s lexicographical delights was completed by the Compact—the two-volume version of the big dictionary sold with a magnifying glass! What a fantastic idea that was. The whole dictionary had originally been published in this format in 1971, with nine pages to a compact page. You wouldn’t think it would be popular, but it certainly was—especially amongst people who loved the idea that they were still sharp-eyed enough to read the tiny print without the need for the magnifying glass. It had found its way on to the shelves of many English academics in the early 1970s, especially through rock-bottom book offers in the Sunday newspaper supplements. In retrospect, this was old technology used to revivify old text: but there weren’t any other options at the time. The little Oxford dictionaries were being updated rapidly, and the bigger ones were being updated at longer intervals. The Compact was eventually just provided with a stronger magnifying glass. And sadly, this meant that the big, multi-volume OED was not being properly updated at all, but was just being given a big add-on addendum (its “supplement”), because it was too much of a task to update it properly all the way from A to Z.

  My interview at the dictionary was in June, at the beginning of the long hot summer of 1976, and Hilary and I took the train up from the earnest red brick of Reading to the medieval grandeur of Oxford to see if I could be settled into steady employment and the salary-earning classes. We arrived at the railway station and made our way to the Oxford University Press offices in Walton Street—to what I later came to regard as the epicentre of dictionary-making in the Western world. From here I was on my own. Hilary decided to look around the local shops, confidently but naively expecting me to reappear—elated or dejected—about thirty minutes later.

  You and I would think epicentre was a good classical word, maybe arising in English around 1660, with the birth of the new, empirical sciences and the Renaissance affection for ancient words. But it’s not; we know it entered into the English language considerably later than that (1880). Scientists typically reach for classical words—or just broken twigs of classical words—when creating a new term, in a tradition of pan-European scientific enquiry that reaches up to the present day. The immediate predecessor of epicentre in English was epicentrum (1874), used in the same sense (“the point above the centre,” especially in seismology). Maybe epicentrum looks barbaric to us, but that’s the word the German scientist Karl von Seebach invented in 1873, in German but from Greek elements, for his new word in the new science of seismology (itself from Greek elements: the study of earthquakes). We just made the new word look English, by changing epicentrum to epicentre. Try not to make assumptions about the origin and usage of words; there may be more of a story to it, especially when it is in the hands of white-coated scientists.

  The front of the Oxford University Press was imposing, especially to someone whose only experience of Oxford until then derived from regular trips over the county border from where I lived in Gloucestershire, as part of a school sports team. The massive black wrought-iron gates set between thick stone columns were designed to exclude and yet—by offering a passing glimpse on to a college-style lawn and quadrangle, with a towering copper beech tree leaning over an idle pond—to incite wonder and fascination. The building itself looked classically eighteenth century, as was intended when it was built in the early nineteenth century to house under one collective roof the University Press’s editorial staff and print workers, who were previously scattered elsewhere in Oxford. I was, needless to say, suitably impressed.

  The University Press porter let me into the grand quadrangle, or “quad.” Before I had a chance to reach the sumptuous lawn, I was directed off to one side—you didn’t get to experience the full splendour of the place unless you deserved it—where I found the Personnel Department and my recent correspondent, the Colonel.

  The Colonel was the human face of the Personnel Department at OUP in those days: he was a delightful military chap—“(ret’d)” of course—and something of a leftover from the days when old soldiers ruled Personnel. He was almost certainly modelled closely on the character actor Wilfrid Hyde-White, Colonel Pickering of My Fair Lady: quite short, dapper, balding, chatty, and charmingly military in tenor. We shook hands, and then he sank into his seat behind a substantial desk while I was directed towards an easy chair designed principally to make you feel that you weren’t the most important person in the room. We talked about the magnificent history of the University Press, as seen through the eyes of the Personnel Department, and we wondered jointly how easy I might find it moving from Reading to Oxford, should I be fortunate enough to be offered the opportunity. The distance between the two places is about twenty-five miles, but I discovered much later that there were people in Oxford who thought civilisation ended just a few hundred feet outside the old city walls, where the barbarian hordes were dug in for the foreseeable future. Others are said to believe that “the sun rises over Wadham [College] and sets over Worcester.” Worcester College, that is: there wouldn’t be much point in referring to the City of Worcester here.

  Once we had exhausted all possible areas of conversation, he took me on a little walk round to the dictionary department. In those days most of the University Press operated out of a single large block of buildings tucked away amongst the terraces of Jericho—an area of Oxford by the canal, made famous as Beersheba in Jude the Obscure. The dictionary occupied two small terraced houses, No. 40 and No. 41 Walton Crescent, on the edge of the main site. Its offices were very close to the centre of the University Press’s publishing control rooms, and so the Colonel and I did not have far to walk. I was taken through the corridor-snaking interior of the University Press and debouched at No. 40 Walton Crescent.

  According to its entry in the OED, the verb to debouch entered English in the mid-eighteenth century from French. It’s not a particularly common word these days, but this again illustrates how we pluck out and make use of words from different layers of the contemporary language—archaic, historical, geographically distant, upper-class, or whatever. French words had been storming into English since at least the days of the Norman Conquest in 1066, but debouch apparently had seen no need to seek asylum here until quite late in the day, around the year 1740. It derives directly from the French word déboucher, “to unblock, uncork—let run out freely.” It’s quite unrelated to the word debauch (which originally meant “to lead from the straight and narrow, or from the path of virtue”), also
borrowed from French, but several centuries earlier. A river can debouch into the sea, after having been pent up by its banks; a military force can debouch into open country after marching under cover of a forest; I was debouched unceremoniously by my guide in front of the dictionary department.

  No. 40 Walton Crescent was the nerve centre of the OED in those days. The Colonel chattered away as he led me up to a room on the first floor, where he introduced me to the departmental secretary, and then left me to await my interview with the OED’s chief. I was told that my waiting room was the departmental library. There was a central table around which editors would sit while consulting the weighty books arrayed on shelves throughout the room; and right in the centre of the table was a book-rest displaying the latest texts that had been voraciously consumed (it was carefully explained to me by my guide) by the dictionary’s stable of “readers”—that is, the people who volunteered to make their way steadily through countless works of literature, hunting down words and expressions which they wrote out on index cards and sent to Oxford for possible inclusion in the dictionary. The Collected Letters of George Bernard Shaw had made its appearance there that week, along with several other books and magazines whose titles I forget.

  The possibility of a group of OED readers scattered around the world, whose sole objective in life was to collect extracts from books such as Shaw’s Letters, exclusively for the files of the dictionary, was an entrancing prospect. I envisaged these troops of readers being asked to read the latest prize-winning novels, or a run of racy tabloid newspapers, just looking out for new words. Who were these people? How did they land a job like that? Did anyone ever meet them? But this was just something to mull over. I didn’t need to think out all the implications just yet.

  Though I did not realise it at the time, I was at that very moment the object of all-consuming attention to numerous dictionary editors, keen to spot what their potential new colleague might look like. I affected nonchalance as I investigated the contents of the library, but I was left to await my fate.

  I was nervous about the interview—there were so many questions I could be asked to which I would not want to commit an answer. I think I’m quite a slow learner. At least I don’t like to commit myself until I know what I’m talking about. Given time I can usually work things out, but not necessarily right away. Hilary would have had no problem in the same situation, because even if she did not know how to respond correctly to any particular question, she would have answered at length and convincingly on what was the nearest thing she knew a bit about. I would just dry up, not wanting to commit myself and be wrong. I’m fine after a while—after I’ve had a chance to absorb things. But for those first crucial ten seconds of an interview I wouldn’t put my money on me.

  My anxious wait was soon at an end as a door across the landing opened and an elderly, academic-looking gentleman peeked out and beckoned me into his office. This was Robert Burchfield, the chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. I tried to remember what little I knew about him from my cursory pre-interview research: (a) he had been appointed back in 1957, and (b) his job was to produce a scholarly addendum or supplement to the big dictionary.

  I knew that this plan for producing one long single-volume supplement had soon crashed. There was just far too much new twentieth-century language that needed to be crammed into the dictionary. Had no one ever heard of the rise of the film and music business, the Depression, the Second World War, radar, the mini-skirt, psychedelia, and everything else that had acted as a crucible for the appearance of new words throughout the twentieth century? By now it had been generally accepted by all and sundry that the Supplement would eventually fill four volumes. Volume One had already been published (1972), and Volume Two was all set up in type, bound, and ready to be released almost as soon as my interview was over.

  As I edged uncertainly into the editor’s lair, I think I imagined I’d find him lying languidly on a chaise longue with a pipe in one hand and an ancient Sumerian text in the other, mulling desultorily over a definition. But my romantic preconceptions were quickly quashed. The chief editor had a small, long office demonstrating a determined absence of design and decoration. Clearly location was its best quality: easy access to the books, the departmental secretary, and the editorial staff. There wasn’t room for a chaise longue in there. There was room, however, for an armchair, in which the editor was reclining, doubtless ready to roast me with impossible questions about the English language. I regarded myself as being reasonably well-informed about language and the dictionary, but in this extreme, hot-house context I was concerned that the level of my knowledge was likely to prove quite unserviceable.

  At the time, I had only a hazy conception of the work of a “lexicographer.” On the one hand, I had read about the physically imposing, socially assertive, and convivial wordmonger Dr Samuel Johnson, whose mould-breaking dictionary was published in 1755, and on the other hand I knew a very small amount about the painstakingly sinewy Scottish erudition of the OED’s founder editor, Sir James Murray, which I had gained from reading up on the subject for my interview. The current chief editor, Bob Burchfield, matched neither Johnson’s nor Murray’s stereotype. At this stage of his career he was just over fifty, with an approachably kind smile and full but greying hair; he was very amiable but had a quietly insistent and penetrating voice which seemed to me excessively prissy—as if he were weighing every word and didn’t want to waste time with redundant ones. There was a beaky, pecky air to him—the air of a scholar searching austerely for wheat amongst chaff. He’d say something and wait for a response, rather than giving you much of a lead as to what was expected of you.

  I chose a seat in his office—slightly better than the one I’d occupied in the Personnel Department, but, truth to tell, the only one available that he wasn’t already sitting on—and said my hellos. I had had little experience of indulging in even the smallest of talk with Oxford academics, but I knew I was ready to chat about medieval Latin poetry or St Anselm, should that prove to be absolutely necessary.

  As luck would have it, there was no need for St Anselm, John of Salisbury, Walter Map, the Arch-Poet, or any other old friends from my recent medieval studies to make an appearance. In fact, after the statutory preliminaries (name, rank, and serial number), we settled down to a quarter of an hour in which he told me all about the dictionary, himself, and life in Oxford generally. He made it sound like a fairy-tale town, and despite his (to me) unnatural precision in all things, he was a charming host. He had himself come over to Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship following his university studies in New Zealand, and he had lapped up Oxford and its close-knit scholarly community. He had never returned to New Zealand to live, but had plunged himself into Oxford academic life. In those days he was best known for his exacting work on a difficult medieval text called the Ormulum, written by a monk called Orm. I, in my turn, dredged up the name of the long-dead editor of a medieval Swedish dictionary I had encountered along the shelves of the university library at York—Knut Fredrik Soderwall—and we chatted about him for a while. It couldn’t have been long, as the amount of information I possessed about Soderwall extended just beyond his name and was clearly less comprehensive than that of the chief editor, who displayed an alarmingly sharp overall appreciation of Swedish medieval studies.

  As the interview with the chief editor progressed, we suddenly encountered a topic of mutual interest. For the previous few months, I’d been working day and night on my master’s dissertation, which, by the sort of chance that changes your life, had a crucial link with the OED.

  When I was studying for my first degree, and had been struggling manfully through the poetry and prose of our forefathers and mothers, it had occurred to me that the earliest period of English, Old English, might be more exciting if I could understand the more colourful (and linguistically related) Icelandic sagas: tales of families torn apart, countries ravaged, and helmets adorned with pointy horns (though it turned out that the pointy horns we
re a later invention). Most surviving Old English is historical or ecclesiastical, not creative and narrative, and therefore on the surface less appealing.

  The problem with this approach (as I had immediately appreciated) was that the Icelandic sagas were not written in Old English, but in medieval Icelandic. And by dint of switching classes, I had (surprisingly) mastered enough of this language to read the sagas, or at least some of them—which led to my aforementioned master’s work analysing the medieval Icelandic words which had filtered through into the Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

  This led to my tenuous link with the OED: J. R. R. Tolkien. It happened that a modern edition of Sir Gawain had been edited by Tolkien—at the time a young professor at the University of Leeds, and before that an assistant on the OED—in his academic guise as a medievalist rather than as a Hobbit-weaver.

  I explained to the chief editor that I had scoured through the glossary that Tolkien and others had put together at the end of his edition, looking for the words that Tolkien had thought were of Icelandic origin. I had made a list of these words, proceeded to subject each of them to my own razor-sharp intellect, and usually came up with exactly the same conclusion as Tolkien (especially if I’d peeked to see what he had said first). From time to time my opinion differed from his—or my professor’s did—and I accordingly wrote a little note to put the academic world back on its axis. (Several years later, after I’d started to work on the OED, a very few of these learned interventions would be published in the medieval periodical Medium Aevum, to my personal joy and to the combined and everlasting silence of the academic community, who were obviously off at a conference somewhere else when the issue was published.)

 

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