The Word Detective

by John Simpson

  My favourite reference text amongst the many I had to investigate systematically at this stage of the research was Eric Partridge’s Dictionary of the Underworld (PDU). The PDU was a knuckle-bruising, rapid-fire, brief-citation-after-brief-citation tour through the terrifying vocabulary of the thieves and murderers of London, Sydney, and New York. Eric Partridge had compiled this dark book some years after his more popular Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (1937), but this time round he was writing from aggravated and heartfelt and macabre interest. It was a lexicographical triumph.

  Partridge, as I soon discovered, was an expert on the lesser-known aspects of queens. He had read books about the ghettoes of London and the underworld of New York that the average reader would happily bypass, and so his references to early uses of queen and quean (especially in homosexual contexts) were vital. The Dictionary of the Underworld is a dictionary that lexicographers knowingly discuss amongst themselves, in the certain knowledge that hardly anyone else has ever heard of it. Several years later the chief editor was asked to write the life story of his fellow New Zealander Eric Partridge for the Dictionary of National Biography. I was walking past his office one day, minding my own and the dictionary’s business, and the next day found myself on a train to London commissioned to hunt out Partridge’s birth and death certificates at Somerset House. Still, it was for a better cause than the chocolate orange.

  Once I’d exhausted the departmental library, by which time my clutch of index cards had normally doubled in size, I reverted (stage three) to my office to set about the final task of marshalling the facts and defining the words.

  The word marshal is something of an oddity, because English found it in French, but it started off life on the other side of the great Romance/Germanic divide. I’ve always liked the word marshal, even though, as a neutral lexicographer, I have absolutely no right to take sides with words. Perhaps I just like it because, like Chinese boxes, it contains inside it a sequence of other words: the letter M; and then incrementally ma, the shortening of mama; then mar, to spoil or ruin; Mars, the red planet; marsh, the swampy ground; Marsha, the personal name; marshal (itself); and even marshall, its spelling variant, and another personal name.

  Marshal is an important word in the OED department, because it’s the word my chief editor was soon to use, in the preface to one of the volumes of the Supplement to the OED, to describe his role. He was a “marshaller” of the language, documenting the twists and turns of its progression. In some ways this was a good word for him to use, because it avoided the sense of “guardianship” that people too easily associate with lexicography. Historical lexicographers don’t “guard” the language from change or decay, but they observe, monitor, and report back on change (or lack of change) as it occurs.

  Marshal is another of those words that entered English because of the Normans. (The Normans, as you will have worked out, have been heavily involved in providing work for lexicographers.) Marshal entered English from Norman French quite soon after the Norman Conquest, in what was effectively still the “late Old English” period, before the French influence really took hold of the language. It’s one of those words you can look at and look at and still fail to appreciate its derivation. Well, that’s where dictionaries help. Marshal is made up of two older words that started life in the Germanic languages, but were assimilated into French and Late Latin, and so looked French by the time marshal came to be handed over to the English. That’s not too unusual. Although the story runs that French is purely a Romance language, it contains numerous examples of Germanic words integrated at an early date.

  The French word maréchal ultimately comes from the Germanic root that gives us mare (a horse) and from another Germanic root, shalk, which existed in English from the Old English period until just into the sixteenth century, when it was swept away for good by numerous alternative terms. Word death happens all along the way. Shalk meant a servant, or (in early poetry) just “a man.” (Did the related word seneschal just float into your head? That must be worth a few marks: a seneschal is the chief steward of an aristocratic household, though sadly chief stewards are not so common these days as they used to be.) So a marshal was a farrier, someone who shoed, or shod, or more generally looked after, horses. But even in the days before the word entered English, the horse was such an important animal in medieval warfare that the job of the chief farrier became invested with strategic importance, and the word shifted imperceptibly into other areas of army life. The French—and other Europeans who had the word—started to call a military or even a royal officer a marshal.

  Its use spread in English from the royal court to the legal circuits, and even to the names of specific officers at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and then, by the early twentieth century, to car-racing meets, where the marshals are responsible for supervising the arrangements of competitors. In fact, in the seventeenth century, the word rather overshot itself, and people sometimes referred (incorrectly) to a court martial as a marshal’s court. So, when the chief editor of the dictionary regarded himself as the “marshaller” of the language, he was making use of a meaning applied to anyone (not necessarily military or royal) who put things in good order. John Dryden, the OED tells us (at marshaller), was “the great Refiner of our English Poetry, and the best Marshaller of words.” So our chief editor had competition.

  All the time that I had been collecting information about my words, I had been building up in my head little phrases which might help me towards the definitions I now had to write, once the background research was done. I rarely attempted to leap straight into an authoritative definition, but amassed a list of the important attributes of a term as a sort of mood board from which to select the key ingredients. Some of these verbal hints and clues might work later in the more formal context of the definitions. The Queen of the Gypsies, I mused, was clearly a “high-status Roma woman,” and Queen City of the West turned out to be “Cincinnati, Ohio,” a place which had previously possessed no cultural references for me—but I had yet to puzzle out why it might be called the “Queen City.” I played with phrases to describe my compounds: queen-pin (a crime boss king-pin, but one who was relentlessly female), queen substance (a pheromone or sex attractant produced by a queen bee), queen’s head (the image of a queen’s head on a postage stamp), Queen’s Scout (not a loyal personal retainer of the Queen, but a Boy Scout who had reached the top of the tree in the movement), queen’s ware (porcelain), etc., etc. As I worked through this world of queen phrases—many of which I had never heard of before, and most of which I had at first little idea how to describe—I would be looking for signposts, little expressions that gave me a sense of their meaning, which I might pass on to readers as I composed the definitions.

  That’s—for me—one of the charms of lexicography. You have to be the sort of person who can turn your hand to most subjects—know a little about everything, but not enough to dig yourself in too deep. And with these queen words I was often in virgin territory: I wasn’t a great one for sailing; I hadn’t thrown a pot in my life, or lived with the gypsies; I’d never progressed beyond the kindergarten of a Boy Scout pack and had had no hope of becoming a Queen’s Scout; and I’m fairly certain that a degree in English literature had not prepared me to know what a pheromone was or why it would bother a queen bee.

  Perhaps the most arresting cluster of examples I found for queen was in the sense of “a homosexual person.” We had what amounted at the time to a reasonable amount of documentary evidence for the usage—say, around thirty index cards. In modern terms that is absolutely nothing, but it was a gold-mine back then. The earliest reference we possessed came from a glossary of slang published in the Australian newspaper Truth, from 1924. Slang terms often surfaced in glossaries, so this was a good sign that we might already be back in the early period of the term’s history. But how significant was it that the first reference came from Australia?

  From 1924 onwards my little collection of evidence contained
a mixture of literary references. Exhibit A was Evelyn Waugh in Vile Bodies (published in 1930): “‘Now what may you want, my Italian queen?’ said Lottie as the waiter came in with a tray”; then New Zealand writer Ngaio Marsh in Artists in Crime: “We met the chap that runs the place. One of those die-away queens” (1938). After that there were later quotations from newspapers and novels, which brought the picture up to the present day. On my scout around the department library there had not been a substantial amount of new evidence to find. Eric Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang thought the word was a corruption of the older quean, meaning “a harlot.” Really? In 1920s Australia? We had a 1929 reference from the New York writer Max Lief. What did that say about the possibility of Australian origin only five years earlier? Anyway, if it was Australian, wouldn’t the New Zealander Eric Partridge have picked up on that?

  After collecting as much information from as broad a range of sources as I could, and after reading all the evidence through several times, and after thinking about how the term queen fitted generally into the language—jostling with parallel terms—I (or in this case probably my trainer) came up with the definition, assembled from the evidence: “A male homosexual, esp. the effeminate partner in a homosexual relationship. slang.” We weren’t prepared to hazard a guess as to whether it was originally Australian English, despite the first reference, as it was followed too closely by that American and then English evidence. We gave a general definition, and then narrowed it down to a particular observable nuance.

  When we came, in due course, to revise queen = “homosexual” for the Third Edition of the OED in December 2007, we did find new, earlier evidence which helped to set the term in better context. A secondary text from 1988 (Perverts by Official Order: The Campaign Against Homosexuals by the United States Navy) pointed to a reference dated from 1919 which contained our term. It seems we were right not to leap in and label the term “Australian.” But even today we don’t feel confident enough to ascribe its origin to any particular variety of English. If you are not certain, it’s better to say nothing.

  That 1988 title is an indication that the OED of the future would feel able to cite from a wider range of non-literary texts. A groundswell of change had been working through society since the First Edition of the dictionary was published around the turn of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth. The original dictionary exemplified words from many types of sources, but particularly from those read by the educated gentleman or the refined spinster of the English capital and shires. It was curious, it seemed to me, that the collection of information about the language was conducted by “readers” who belonged to the old world of literary, educated English. Language was an extension of empire for many of them. This is an oversimplification, but it flags up the general tenor of the texts cited (classic literature, formal newspapers, accessible—but not too esoteric—technical manuals and periodicals). Even when I started working on the Supplement to the dictionary in the 1970s, the chief editor was most proud of those words from modern literary texts that he and his staff were adding to the dictionary (D. H. Lawrence: dool-owl, “dull person,” and momentaneity; James Joyce: codology, “hoaxing,” and dishybilly, “state of undress”). But the groundswell was too powerful. Society had changed; the dictionary’s readers and staff had changed; and a broader—and in my view more enlightened—selection of sources was even then providing us with a new stream of vocabulary: more global English, more slang, more popular or regional magazines, more everyday, informal jargon.

  There was plenty of opportunity, as we approached the end of the twentieth century, to expand the scope of sources plundered for words by the dictionary’s readers. As time went on, I came to feel that I should become more and more involved in seeking out the sort of language the ordinary person might use in Britain, America, Australia, and so on, and to let a breath of fresh air into the new OED in this way. The chief editor had made a considered decision before my arrival to avoid contact with computers in the collection of data, reasoning that becoming familiar with new technology so close to the completion of his big project would only slow things down. There was a lot in that. But there would come a time when we would need to reverse this decision if we wanted to keep up.

  Just a few weeks into my dictionary career, and even before my first pay cheque came through, Hilary and I decided to get married. We gave our parents about a month’s notice and told them we would plan everything ourselves, in a quiet way, without fuss, but that we would be very happy if they were to come along to celebrate with us.

  The wedding day itself had a couple of hiccups. We were marrying in the Oxford register office, which, in those days, was marooned above a supermarket in the middle of the city’s one-way traffic system, which made parking difficult. Despite my father’s supposed prowess at unlocking secret codes, the business of finding somewhere to park the car in Oxford that day proved too much for him, and he missed the wedding ceremony. He dropped the family outside the register office and found himself swept up into the traffic. We saw him later for lunch.

  After the ceremony, we ate at a hotel restaurant in Oxford: parents on both sides, my brother and sister (Hilary is an only child), my remaining aged grandmother, and my father’s elderly archaeological cousin, “Aunt” Grace, who was invited because she lived in Oxford and therefore couldn’t be avoided. The lunch was fine. No speeches: I was far too self-conscious in those days to want to break up the quiet of the dessert course with a few poorly chosen words. The main problem, as I found out in later years, came at the end. Instead of running off on honeymoon, which we couldn’t afford to do on the first month of a lexicographer’s salary and a PhD student’s grant, I had agreed to turn out for the local hockey team in a crunch league match. Hilary had given her okay in advance, but it seems that sometimes people agree to things in advance that they are going to hold against you for years to come. On my side, I had absolutely no excuse and can only offer in mitigation that my team, the City of Oxford Hockey Club 2nd XI, won that afternoon. (In years to come, I played regularly for the first team, but this was only my third week at the club, so they were taking the opportunity to observe me. I realise that this isn’t making things any better . . .)

  Like language, attitudes to marriage have changed, even since those days of the 1970s. Nowadays, leaving before the wedding lunch was over would probably put me beyond the pale. In those days it was perhaps unusual, but just within the bounds of acceptability. The wedding itself was low-key: Hilary wore a long purple Indian print dress, and I had a prickly pullover made from goat’s hair (or so it felt) over my cheesecloth shirt. No friends, no newspaper notice: we just got on with things in those days.

  In 1976, marriage was not a controversial word, but nowadays it is just the sort of word that can get a lexicographer into deep trouble. Traditionally, marriage has concerned the union of a man and a woman. We’ve used the word in English since around 1300, from French, and for almost all of that time this has been the major meaning. More recently, dictionaries have noted same-sex marriage—a lexical pulse that started flickering several years ago, as we took note that various American states were reviewing how they understood the boundaries of the word marriage.

  The definition of marriage remains a hotly contested issue, and the lexicographer needs to remain absolutely neutral when crafting a definition: weighing up the evidence and deciding on the factors of the term that are significant. The definition should not include every single attribute of marriage that can be found in the observable documentation. It’s not significant, for example, at what time of the year the marriage takes place, or whether one spouse is older or of a higher social standing than the other (we might refer to a morganatic marriage, in the latter case). It doesn’t matter, nowadays, whether the person who marries a couple is male or female, or whether it takes place in a church or other approved location. The lexicographer normally has to select only the universal aspects or attributes of the term. In lexicographical theory, that a
pplies to every word, of course, not just to marriage.

  The issue of how to handle same-sex marriage introduced a new attribute, which gradually gained in social importance, and gradually demanded to be noted. But the means of dealing with this change is different for smaller, desk-sized dictionaries and for their large-scale historical counterparts. If a dictionary alters the basic definition of marriage to accommodate this new feature, then it falsely creates the impression that this broader meaning has coexisted since the early days: this is the technique that smaller dictionaries are often forced to follow, through lack of space. The historical dictionary can be more expansive (and at the same time, more accurate), and it can add a clause or a note saying that this nuance was introduced into the language at a particular time, say in the later years of the twentieth century. Both sorts of dictionaries can also take the bold option (and this would be a significant change) of deciding that the same-sex sense of marriage is established enough to have its very own subsense. At present we’ve elected the second option—the historical lexicographer’s natural choice.

  As it happens, this isn’t the first time that marriage has been hotly contested in lexicographical circles. In 1791, the Monthly Review took a look at Charles Coote’s Elements of the Grammar of the English Language (published in 1788). The reviewer was unhappy with Coote’s observations on the way marriage was being pronounced in some quarters: