by John Simpson
I realised that the dictionary was, even then, more enlightened than I had expected. The editors were kindly, for the most part, and keen to show me the ropes—though some appeared rather remote and obsessed with words rather than people. Would I make friends here? Would I fit in? Would I be good enough to do the job? I had arrived with preconceptions about Oxford, but the edges of these preconceptions were gradually being knocked off as I engaged more and more closely with the workings of the dictionary and its staff, and, in turn, with the workings of the language. I enjoyed the steady methodology by which you gradually built up information for words. This was a system that had worked in the past, and it still seemed appropriate for the work we were carrying out in the mid-1970s.
At this stage I was really only concerned with what I was given to edit. I hadn’t seen enough of the department to worry about the speed at which the project as a whole was moving (too slowly, I soon learned, for the peace of mind of the University Press), or whether we were editing the right words, in the right way. These were matters that would mean more to me in the future. The more I learnt, the more rapidly I was able to make decisions about the words I had been entrusted with. Could I cope? With the brashness of youth it hardly occurred to me that I could not.
THREE
Marshallers of Words
I didn’t have to wait long, as it turned out, before I was invited to try my hand at defining words. Within a month of my arrival at the OED I was given my first batch of words to edit. It began with queen: a very British and rather formal word with which to start, and one which—you might think—hasn’t changed very much in recent years. Was there a roll of patriotic drums somewhere as the monarch’s personal word was revised by the OED? If so, I wasn’t aware of it. I had been looking forward to this momentous day with some trepidation for several weeks, and was excited when it had at last arrived and I could get down to some solid work.
The First Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary had been completed, after forty-four gruelling years of editing, and in ten dense volumes, in 1928. It was a dictionary, so—of course—it did already contain an entry for the word queen. My job now was to update this entry in the OED with new material, which might consist of entirely new meanings, new expressions involving the word queen, new historical information about the word, and anything else that was relevant to a comprehensive modern description of queen in the English language of 1976.
For reasons that had been decided long before my arrival, we were mainly dealing with linguistic changes that had happened in the present (and that meant mainly the twentieth) century: just the recent past. We were not to tinker with the hundreds of thousands of words and meanings which were already in the dictionary, and for which the old definitions could still be regarded as valid. Perhaps there would be time for that later. Much later. The University Press acutely remembered those forty-four years of editing from A to Z over the turn of the nineteenth century, and it had no wish to allocate funds to a lengthy and comprehensive overhaul of the text quite yet. The Supplement to the OED had already grown from its projected single volume to four large volumes, and I soon appreciated that the University Press was watching the chief editor very carefully to ensure he didn’t argue for additional time and even more resources to complete the task.
So one of the first things I learned was that editing an entry for the Supplement to the OED did not usually involve creating it from scratch. Although we had to do this for modern words that were completely new to the language (such as quadraphonic or rehab), when we addressed old stagers like queen, we left the old meanings as they were, and the etymology unchanged—even though they were becoming increasingly antique by then. Antique? Take quay, just nearby in the alphabet: the original OED’s definition for quay was “an artificial bank or landing-place, built of stone or other solid material, lying along or projecting into a navigable water for convenience of loading and unloading ships.” It’s not wrong, but it’s slightly antiquated, with a whiff of the nineteenth century. It could be left as it was. It wasn’t our job to update everything; we would never finish if we started along that route.
We wouldn’t spell the word queen Q-U-E-E-N if we hadn’t experienced the Norman Conquest. Before that, we were quite happy to use the old Anglo-Saxon spelling: cwen or thereabouts. We’d been doing that for hundreds of years, without knowing any better. But along came the Normans, and their newfangled ways of doing things. They brought their scribes with them to write down what happened in legal courts and anywhere else the language needed recording. These scribes heard the word cwen and couldn’t bring themselves to write the letter sequence
And so began my first years at the dictionary, learning its ethos, its style, what it was trying to say, and how it tried to say it. There was a routine to my days as a trainee lexicographer back in the 1970s. And the routine wasn’t just mine, as there were about ten of us, young and old, who were following this same editorial path. We’d meet up in the various dictionary offices as we worked our lonely way round the building checking facts in the shelves of reference works or along the cabinets of card files.
On my first day of real editing, my trainer handed me a batch of index cards containing queen words which she had selected as likely candidates for addition to the dictionary. She had chosen these by searching diligently through the OED’s main sequence of index cards that had accumulated in the dictionary file store since—in some cases—the mid-nineteenth century.
She had passed over all of those older meanings that were already in the dictionary: queen in the sense of “a female monarch”—perhaps the oldest one of all; then the rather similar meaning, “the wife of a king” (please note: this is not usually the same thing); instances of queen applied to fabulous or mythological beings—the queen of the fairies, and (as a title) Queen Diana the Huntress; queen meaning any woman of pre-eminence, or applied to the moon as the queen of heaven, or to the monarch of a bee-hive; verbs, nouns, adjectives, and adverbs using it (to queen it, queenship, queenly, etc.); well-worn compounds (queen cake, Queen Mother).
I did not need to do anything to these old meanings already in the OED, but instead she had found me female cats, sizes of bed, girlfriends, homosexuals, Cunard liners (all queens), and many more. As this was my first range of editing, I was not in any position to argue with her selection, and doubtless would not have needed to.
Once I had assessed the words I had been asked to work on, I had three stages to work through: collecting more index cards for my words from other, older card files (downstairs, in the basement), gathering more information from books in the department’s reference library (first floor), and then finally writing my definition and crafting the whole entry (in my office on the ground floor).
I always found the basement sweep through the card files full of magical possibility. At any moment I might make a small discovery that had eluded earlier linguists and lexicographers. There have been many accounts of the dictionary’s history, but very few (if any) have managed to capture the excitement of the job—the fact that each day you are uncovering small but significant facts that have been almost entirely forgotten, often for centuries, and you have the opportunity to bring them back to the surface. That thrill of discovery, like the elation of a well-rounded definition, is almost like creating a poem. But you had to ensure that you didn’t miss anything—that was considered, by
the department’s old hands, almost a court-martial offence.
Court martial: one of the few remaining terms from French—outside the areas of food and cookery (chicken chasseur, moules marinière)—where the noun precedes the adjective: we’d say military court if we were inventing it now instead of in around 1600—the era from which the OED dates it. As martial is the adjective, the plural, as you will recall, is courts martial. But if you inadvertently slip into the solecism of saying “court martials,” then you’re not the first. Records of this go back to 1750 and earlier.
Courts martial are not usually associated with lexicographers, but there is one exception. The rotund Francis Grose, best known to hardline lexicographers for his Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue of 1785, spent much of his time as a paymaster in the British Army. While he travelled around the country with his regiment, he made sketches for his Antiquities of England and Wales (1772–1787) and collected words for his dictionaries. It is a fact known to almost no one today that one of his duties as military paymaster was to sit on courts martial, deciding the fate of his fellow soldiers and (I like to think) using many of the same skills in balancing evidence and pronouncing his decision that he employed as a lexicographer.
Queen of puddings was in my first batch of words. I didn’t remember ever having eaten—let alone cooked—the queen of puddings, so this was my first encounter with the dessert (which everyone in Oxford but me seemed to know was a trifle-like concoction of breadcrumbs, jam, and meringue). My job was to hunt out more examples of this expression (and of my other words) in the historical card sequences. The first example already contained in my little bundle came from the year 1917, on a card transcribed hastily and slantingly from bottom left to top right. It came from May Byron’s Pudding Book, and had been written out in the characteristically diagonal script of Marghanita Laski. You could instantly identify many of these long-gone contributors from their handwriting on the slips. You could even tell, sometimes, if they were having a difficult day; if they didn’t really want to be writing out cards at that particular time; if they liked or disliked a word—just from their handwriting. Or at least I liked to think that you could. Later—with computers—we largely lost this intuitive association with the raw material, unless you could be bothered to decipher tiny sets of initials hidden away somewhere on the screen.
Marghanita Laski, the producer of my current queen of puddings slip, was by this time quite an elderly lady. She had been born into a prominent Jewish intellectual family in Manchester just after the outbreak of World War I, and she was the modern OED’s most prolific supplier of quotation material. Nowadays, she is regarded with the same hushed reverence accorded to one of the original OED’s most obsessive readers, Dr William Chester Minor. Minor was the co-hero (with James Murray) of Simon Winchester’s first book about the OED—The Professor and the Madman; quite unlike Marghanita, Minor had been busily and lucidly active for the dictionary in the nineteenth century from his rooms in a mental hospital, to which he had been confined for murder, fifty miles from the dictionary’s offices in Oxford.
Marghanita’s influence on the content of the OED in those days was significant. Her personal contribution amounted to a total of some 250,000 index cards. She had been involved with the OED since the 1960s, having been ensnared by one of the chief editor’s regular appeal lists of wanted words. She sent in her findings to us, and soon discovered that there was precious little else she liked doing more than contributing illustrative quotations to the dictionary.
The reading habits of a little, elderly lady would not normally be of interest to us today, but Marghanita’s idiosyncratic interests permeated the quotations she provided for the dictionary, and in that way had a minor effect on the representation of the English language offered by the OED. Any editor from those days will tell you that she had a preference for detective fiction, and particularly for lady writers of the 1920s to 1950s. As a result, our files were weighed down with the vocabulary of Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham, and Dorothy Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey. She read voraciously. She admired Rudyard Kipling and P. G. Wodehouse. In addition, she followed the chief editor’s instructions and dutifully read the once-famous First World War poet Edmund Blunden (Undertones of War) and several other writers who were even then heading pell-mell towards oblivion. She mixed socially in pleasantly refined and elegant circles, and this, too, affected her contributions, which inclined towards words from writers who spent most of their summers in the south of France sipping the local wines and sampling the regional delicacies (including the Trollopes, cookery writer and social historian Dorothy Hartley, journalists working on House and Garden and Country Life, and many others).
When I did eventually meet her, many years later when I was running the OED’s reading programme myself, she seemed to like the idea that I was English, which struck me as odd. The OED had been in the hands of a Lowland Scot and a New Zealander for most of its recorded history, and hadn’t done too badly. In fact, it seemed to have brought a vitality to the OED that might otherwise have been missing in the academic cloisters of Oxford. I think she thought of me as more “Oxford” than I was—or at least more “Oxford” than I thought of myself as being. Others invariably see you through Oxford-tinted glasses, however different you think you are yourself.
As far as her reading for the OED was concerned, I don’t remember having the nerve to suggest she change her reading habits; what she had provided us over the previous twenty and more years had served us very well. Her reading verged towards the popular, but still had an air of refinement and of high literature which I didn’t regard as mainstream, as far as collecting real-language information for the OED was concerned. As time went on, I wanted more and more to move away from what I regarded as this slightly elitist view of English. She belonged to a literary coterie but—like me—wanted to bring the dictionary up to date. For her, “contemporary” meant including the new vocabulary of the 1950s and early 1960s, before the new freedoms of the mid-1960s and later broke through. Her culture wasn’t mine—but it was equally valid. She collected mounds of evidence for terms such as cappuccino, Latino, Nabokovian, and tabbouleh: all expressions which the dictionary needed and which had informed her life. They were important, but to me they were indicative of her generation. I had my own cultural perspective, and it was more technology-driven, more based on popular culture, more emerging than emerged. That was what excited me at the time: Afrocentric, demo tape, ombudsperson, weaponising—not just street talk, but the new vocabulary of sexism, multiculturalism, exploratory music, and the environmental and military threats to the world. I felt it was our duty to be in at ground zero as this new vocabulary was arriving.
Stage two of my work on this batch of queen words involved further research in the departmental library. The library had been built up over many years to be of crucial importance to dictionary-makers, but of little consequence to anyone else. So it contained hundreds of dictionaries covering the major languages of the world, and a good share of the less major ones; it held concordances of particular writers, as finding aids and short-cuts into their vocabulary; it encompassed poetry and novels, in which editors could check the spelling and meaning of extracts others had previously copied out on to slips. Generally, it housed books that most people don’t need, but which are absolutely essential to the lexicographer. A stand-out title—and one of my all-time favourites—was the Dictionary of Occupational Terms: Based on the Classification of Occupations in the Census of Population, 1921, published by the Ministry of Labour, after six years of analysis and compilation, in 1927. If you wanted to know what sort of work the ordinary person did in Britain in 1921, this was the place to look. You’ll find batchers, beaders, beastman, beatsters, bevellers, and the big tenter (in a cotton mill)—with explanations of what they used to spend their time doing. I’d take it to a desert island with me.
It was absolutely necessary to be very quiet in the departmental library, as (a) it was a library, (b) other ed
itors were working, and (c) the chief editor was somewhere across the corridor, and the last thing I wanted to do was to encounter him, in case I’d be given some inconsequential secondary task, which would deflect me from the main purpose of my day. The following year he would send me to the nearby sweet shop to buy a chocolate orange as a birthday present for one of his daughters. So keeping a low profile on one’s trips to the departmental library was of the utmost importance.
Some of the library’s books were obviously more useful than others—you knew them because they had been well-thumbed by generations of dictionary editors. Many of the books dated back a hundred years to OED chief editor Sir James Murray’s time and the compilation of the First Edition of the dictionary. One or two still contained labels saying that they had been lent to Dr Murray. By some oversight they had never been sent back to their original owners, whose descendants had by now presumably given up the books as lost.
I wrote lots of notes at this stage, but also carried a mass of information around in my head. I would need all of this later when it came to writing up my definitions. For a few moments while working in the natural history section, I was the world expert on one of my terms: the queen excluder, “a metal screen with holes large enough for worker honeybees to pass through but too small to allow the passage of the queen.” Over on the nautical shelves I would investigate the queen staysail, “a triangular maintopmast staysail in a schooner yacht,” apparently first designed by Captain Nat Herreshoff (born 1848; died 1938) for his 1906 racing schooner Queen.