The Word Detective

by John Simpson

  New technology was not a new concept in the 1970s. Every generation considers its defining technology to be new, whether it is the printing machine, the railway, or the computer. On the streets of France in the early nineteenth century, the omnibus (or the bus) was part of a new wave of technology which helped to manage the shift in society from horses to horsepower towards the end of the Industrial Revolution. It nicely illustrates how the vocabulary of the horse-drawn carriage was “repurposed” for the new technology of the motor engine. And the analogy extends into our modern vocabulary: if the invention of the horse-drawn bus hadn’t occurred in the early nineteenth century, then we wouldn’t have data buses, or busboys and busgirls to clear tables in American restaurants (the original busboys collected fares on buses).

  Back in the 1820s, the French, exhausted by the Napoleonic Wars, turned their attention to mechanics and the machine that became the bus. The older word is omnibus, and at the relevant entry, the OED reports carefully that “the earliest use [of the word omnibus] in French was in 1825, reportedly to denote vehicles run by a M. Baudry for the purpose of transporting passengers between Nantes and a nearby bathing place.” In Britain we heard about this alarming French invention around 1828, and by 1829 Mr George Shillibeer had introduced omnibuses to the streets of London “upon the Parisian mode” (The British Traveller: 4 July). We reshaped omnibus to the shortened bus rapidly, by 1832. Although the name omnibus derives formally from the dative plural of Latin omnes, “all”—and so means, literally, a public-transport vehicle “for everyone”—there is a sneaking suspicion that there may be more to it than this. The OED neutrally observes: “The idea for the name is said further to have come from a tradesman with the surname Omnès who had the legend Omnès omnibus written on the nameplate of his firm.”

  From a lexicographical point of view, there was one aspect of the dictionary’s move to St Giles’ that dominated all others. For some reason, our chief editor was determined to discover whether the street name “St Giles” should end in an apostrophe or not. The English are temperamentally obsessed with the presence or absence of apostrophes. It remains for many people a divide between civilisation and chaos. If the OED was found, on its grand letterhead, to have added an apostrophe where no apostrophe was necessary, or to have omitted that most crucial of English punctuation marks when its presence was regarded as de rigueur, then the bedrock of our society would be in jeopardy.

  If the OED could do anything, it could research just such an issue, and one of our most experienced editors, Alan Hughes, was charged with discovering the truth about “the apostrophe of St Giles.” Local records were read, newspapers were consulted, etymologists dug up for opinions, and the actual evidence of the living language (one of the OED’s specialities) was quietly analysed. After weeks of debate and drama, the gavel came down on the side of the apostrophe. St Giles’ was adjudged the one true form in which our address could be written. It appeared that no one else was particularly bothered, including (a) the Post Office, which had long ago abandoned apostrophes as a bad idea except in street names involving the names of kings and queens, and (b) any of our neighbours further along in the street, who continued to display a variety of options in their shop windows and nameplates.

  Once all lexicographical objections to the move were resolved, we settled down to work, observing—by our traditional methods—where the language was heading in the late 1970s. I was still the youngest member of the department, and so naturally I regarded myself as the OED’s eyes and ears on the street, as far as language was concerned. In order to promote this image I occasionally came to work in a pink kaftan-style tunic, in what I regarded as the manner of the day, even though suit and tie was said to be the order of the day elsewhere in the University Press. Of course, the OED didn’t need a streetwise editor, as we already had numerous perfectly adequate, tried-and-tested systems to ensure that we captured for our files both the language of the street and any other form of language emerging or surviving out in the wild. But it suited me to consider myself the standard-bearer of the new, and it reinforced a growing feeling I had that the dictionary had been looking for so long towards the past that it now needed to spend a little more time responding to the present and the future.

  If my pink tunic signalled that I was searching for a way to mark myself out as a harbinger of the new, so, too, did the lively interest that I took at the time in two cultural tides that were washing through the language in the late 1970s: punk and Rastafarianism. I don’t think I’d regard myself as a devotee of punk music (and I’m almost certain I wasn’t a Rastafarian), but I imagined that punk was a cultural phenomenon that needed to be covered in its entirety by the OED. To this end, I amassed as many underground, cyclostyled, and badly reproduced punk magazines as I could lay my hands on. As soon as I’d begun to assemble this library of lowbrow musical ephemera, I started reading it, panning for lexical gold. I extended my reading to Rolling Stone, to catch an early glimpse of modern American vocabulary which, I suspected, would be making its way over to Britain in a few years’ time.

  My efforts had little effect on how the powerful OED captured and recorded this transient cult, but they were successful in showing the senior members of the department that I had the sort of interest and stamina which might be relevant to the dictionary in the future, if my efforts could be redirected to more productive ends.

  At the same time, I bought an old set of eighteenth-century novels from a secondhand bookshop that I visited that year while on holiday, and I “read” them painstakingly against the OED—and with more enjoyment than I had experienced reading Metz’s Film Language. I found countless references for words and meanings earlier than those already included in the dictionary, which I then showed to the chief editor before directing them off to the card files. Without realising it, I was bringing myself into the spotlight, and starting to etch out a future for myself.

  While I was beginning to make a faint appearance on the chief editor’s radar as a prospect for the future, changes within the University Press meant that the dictionary offices in St Giles’ were witnessing the end of an era. These were the final years of the flowering of hand-drawn Oxford lexicography, with its profusion of pens, index cards, books, and brains. The OED was the last major reference work to employ hot-metal typesetting (superseded by phototypesetting and more recently by digital typesetting), whereby the individual metal letters or types were cast—literally from hot, molten metal—and then built up in metallic rows of words in the typesetting machine, ready for the next stage of the process, when the relevant page would be printed. When one of the last remaining firms finally closed down its hot-metal department, we even supervised the transfer of heavy printing plates of the Supplement by train halfway round the country to another printer.

  The new technology of printing was matched by new technology elsewhere, but the OED Supplement remained intent on reaching Z by way of its old-fashioned, index-card-based methods. If they were good enough for the Victorians, then they were apparently good enough for us. We employed our traditional techniques to explore the new language of the times; readers all around the world, and the general public, too, provided us with their linguistic findings on slips, and we hurried to include as much as we could in the OED. This was the crowdsourcing that the OED had always done, before the term was invented. We found Reaganomics, but we missed Thatcher’s Britain, and had to leave that for a later editorial phase. We tried to second-guess where the language was going, but we weren’t right about every trend. After a visit to the United States in the mid-1970s, our chief editor became captivated by the idea that the vocabulary of American truckers’ Citizens’ Band radio was going to dominate the world of slang: the ten-code (the code of signals, all starting with the number ten, used first by America’s police and then by CB radio truckers), breaker (a trucker who breaks in on the conversation of other truckers), handle (a trucker’s identifying nickname). There were some eyebrows raised in the dictionary office (Ox
ford’s own code for utter disbelief, and right up there with the imperceptibly flaring nostrils), and although we were instructed to file evidence of this glittering new-word hoard, many of us correctly expected that its traces would be swept away by the next tide.

  In the end, a handful of the better-known CB slang expressions did find their way into the OED. That validates the dictionary’s selection process rather well. The files were filled with countless “amusing” and forgotten terms, but they didn’t generally stand the test of time. The ruthless selection criteria by which we worked—looking for a good spread of evidence over a range of years—saw most of these parvenus fall at the first fence, though they still languish in the card files in the unlikely event that they should experience a revival. The system also makes it impossible (we strenuously maintain) for word pirates to smuggle invented words into the dictionary. It surprises some visitors to the department that the files contain so much that didn’t make it into the dictionary. The OED doesn’t just include the tip of the iceberg of language, but there are levels beneath the water that will be hard-pressed ever to make their way into the editing process.

  Crowdsourcing is a word that later on broke the dictionary’s inclusion rules. When we came to add it to the OED, we accepted it even though we had only collected evidence of its existence over seven years. The rule was that we didn’t add a word to the dictionary until we had records for it spanning over ten years, to give it a chance to settle down in the language (this was in the days before the Internet). Our first notice of crowdsourcing was in Wired magazine as recently as 2006, and it crept into the dictionary in June 2013. Actually we had a second rule, deeply hidden most of the time, which said that if a new term came to extraordinary prominence, then we bent the first rule. We did that in the old days for perestroika and glasnost. I’m not sure crowdsourcing is quite as significant socially or politically as those terms, but we do make the rules. Crowdsourcing developed from the older word outsourcing (source materials or products), so it’s not a new-word-out-of-nowhere, but a welding together of crowd (a sixteenth-century noun from an Old English verb) and sourcing (source comes from Old French, but outsourcing is 1980s business jargon). It’s worth following the sequence of linguistic changes, as it shows that they happen in a logical order.

  As the Supplement to the OED was tracking doggedly towards its conclusion, we became more and more aware of the chilling public perception that the dictionary overall (not the newer sections which we were adding) was slipping further and further, and irretrievably, out of date. We could gauge this perception by a number of criteria. Firstly, fewer and fewer people were sending information to us about old words. They knew, from observing the dictionary over previous decades, that those older meanings of the central vocabulary of English were not receiving an editorial overhaul. That wasn’t our remit, and even we didn’t know if there would ever be resources to accomplish it. Secondly, references to OED definitions cited in newspapers and journals in those days were kindly, but resigned to the fact that the very text they were citing was obsolescent. It was as if the journalists knew they were handling a dinosaur’s bones.

  But most of all, we could judge our own antiquatedness against the changes we saw elsewhere: the Encyclopaedia Britannica, for instance, had apparently reinvented itself and continued to publish new editions in which the content was, to all intents and purposes, up to date. We fared badly against that.

  Worse, there were innovations in linguistics that appeared to make the OED’s handling of language old-fashioned. In the 1960s, linguistics had undergone a revolution under the supervision of Noam Chomsky and transformational grammar. Transformational grammar described the rules for transforming or converting the deep, unseen, fundamental grammar of an utterance into the “surface” grammar that we recognise—and vice versa. If we had decided to incorporate this, then all of our grammatical terminology and descriptions would have taken on a new, mathematical flavour. How did the OED respond to this new, structural, grammatical perspective? It didn’t. We didn’t change anything. Gradually linguistics developed new ideologies, and still the OED plugged on with its old, Victorian grammatical framework. Sociolinguistics? The study of language in relation to its social factors (such as gender, dialect, class). We watched the discipline develop from a distance, but we continued to address these social issues in our own way. These were aspects we would need to address, it seemed, if we ever wanted to bring the OED back into the scholarly limelight.

  Worse still, other dictionaries were trying out new ways of working. Larry Urdang and Patrick Hanks had invented the all-new Collins English Dictionary: not a historical dictionary, but a modern dictionary of contemporary English, which defined words in ways which the ordinary person could easily understand.

  Worst of all, the Collins COBUILD project (short for the Collins Birmingham University International Language Database) was reinventing the theory of how definitions should be written: in coherent sentences rather than lexicographical fragments.

  Worse than worst of all, the new science of computational linguistics was starting to offer computational analysis of regular language, automatically identifying the most significant language patterns in huge corpora or databases of text. This was one area where new technology could really help the OED, it seemed, and yet assimilating it had not fitted into the Supplement’s timetable.

  How could the OED ever keep up with these changes? Well, at the time we couldn’t. We just had to press on to the end of the Supplement, and see how the land lay after that.

  But the strange and very dangerous thing was that hardly anybody appeared to mind. It was as if there was an acceptance that the dictionary was and would remain a leftover folly from the Victorian Age of Empire. Commentators made excuses for its decrepitude without ever expecting the situation to get better. There was a counterbalancing sense of urgency about the dictionary offices: the editors knew that the dictionary was falling out of date, and wanted to fix it before too many people noticed. Everyone was trying to drag the dictionary slowly into the twentieth century just as the twentieth century was starting to turn into the twenty-first. And this faint shadow over our work gradually darkened as we approached nearer and nearer to the end of the alphabet.

  A curious adjunct to the fading glory of the dictionary took place most days in the dictionary offices, and had done since I had first arrived on the OED staff. It took place in the twilight realm of the dictionary’s large grey metal filing cabinets in which index cards by the million, contributed by our readers, were stored. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, these cabinets played host to a strange piece of Japanese theatre—the dictionary tea-time. The dictionary tea was symptomatic of the sedate environment in which the dictionary had grown up in the nineteenth century. It illustrated an old university common-room attitude to scholarship, and this was capped by the appearance here from time to time of the chief editor and his deputy. To some of us, the dictionary tea resonated with the sense of genteel editorial refinement and cocktails on the Titanic that a modern dictionary should have shunned.

  By a quirk of fortune, building structure, and architectural common sense, the dictionary’s quotation cabinets had been located in the basement of our previous offices in Walton Crescent, with a convenient and yet dismal tea room adjoining. Now in St Giles’, with its stronger floors, the quotation cabinets were on the ground floor, and the room in which they were contained was itself deemed suitable for the imbibing of afternoon tea.

  Every afternoon, the dictionary editors (or those of them who still wanted to meet regularly with their colleagues) descended to the tea room. At every other office where I’d worked (on summer jobs, etc., before university), the stock topic of conversation when any two members of staff happened to meet was either (a) football, (b) what was on television the previous evening, or possibly (c) work colleagues. I never heard any of those topics raised at the dictionary tea.

  There were sometimes days of great excitement, when the chief editor
condescended to attend the dictionary tea and draw conversation from his many acolytes. On particularly good days, he would launch into a (largely one-sided) conversation with our great and silent deputy chief editor, John Sykes—whom I had hardly met since the days of my interview. As the two of them did not really share any interests, and came at language from different angles, it was hard to see where these conversations would go, but they made for good listening. Their exchanges resembled casual chats between Captain Kirk and Mr Spock. In the absence of John Sykes, Captain Kirk would sometimes reminisce about the early days of the dictionary in the 1950s—which none of the staff by then could remember, for a number of reasons, but mainly because they weren’t there. He might be encouraged to relate how he had arrived at work on his first day, back in 1957, sat in his office, and wondered how he should go about editing a dictionary. After much deliberation and doubtless many lonely cups of tea, he decided (to the alarm of modern editors) that the best way to establish how the language was moving was to read the copy of The Times—at the time a bastion of conservatism—that he had brought to work that day, in order to discover evidence for new words and other barbaric additions to the language.

  One of the dangers of the dictionary tea was that an editor might be induced to take some expression too literally and then start publicly deconstructing it. This is a trap into which it is too easy for the lexicographical mind to fall. The subject of the plural of referendum came up once. Was it referendums (as any self-respecting English speaker under the age of twenty at the time would have said), or was it referenda, as Cicero and his circle (and any English speaker over twenty) would have preferred? Lexicographers have to present linguistic or lexical reasons for their choices, and a voice of authority, in the form of my colleague Bob Allen, raised the excellent point that, in Latin, referenda would mean “things to be referred to a vote of the people,” whereas in English two referendums might each be about individual points on which popular opinion was sought—so referenda would be “wrong.” By the time arguments had been exhausted and the white smoke had risen from the smoke-stack chimneys on the dictionary’s roof, you can be assured that almost all arguments had been exhausted in the most literal sense possible.