by John Simpson
A midst the fading glory of the OED, there were gleams of hope. New staff members were only occasionally appointed these days, but each one was optimistically viewed—at least by the senior editors—as the first of a new generation rather than the last of the old one. A year or so after I joined the editorial staff, there was a new arrival, Ed Weiner, with whom I would find myself working very closely on the modernisation of the OED in years to come. Although I was a year Ed’s senior in length of service on the dictionary, I was several years younger than him in real life, as he had been busy for the previous few years on a doctorate on the so-called Wycliffite Psalter commentary, which had more or less passed me by while I was at university, to my shame. After a while we shared a room on the ground floor of the St Giles’ offices, a room which I had earlier shared with a Latinist, David Howlett, before he landed the top job on the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, also in slow progress elsewhere in Oxford.
It was an office I had also shared for a while with another classicist, Philip Hardie. It was a pity that Phil didn’t stick with the dictionary, as he was probably the most accomplished lexicographer I have ever encountered. He had a facility for knowing which entry in the OED was the exact counterpart to the entry you were struggling with, and which would therefore help in your attempt to dig yourself out of whatever lexicographical hole you were in. He also spoke very softly, as I do. When people came into our office it would take them a while to realise that we were in fact conducting a conversation below the level of their hearing. “Susurration” was what Philip called it. The more prosaic tended to refer to bats. It’s hardly surprising that Philip picked on “susurration,” as soon afterwards he left the dictionary to become a junior research fellow in classics at Corpus Christi College in Oxford, leading to a glittering subsequent career as a classics professor at Oxford and then Cambridge. Verb sap, etc.
Until Ed’s arrival I had been the youngest member of the dictionary staff, and I soon learned that I still was. In fact, because of the vagaries of our recruitment procedure, I remained the youngest member of the department for what seemed to me decades. Ed came with some background—he’d been teaching Old and Middle English at Christ Church—and the chief editor was clearly relieved to have found someone who might shape up as his successor. Ed and I had very different characters, but as time went on we found that we worked together very well on a complementary basis. Anything I didn’t know Ed would know, and I’d tell him the time of day when he needed it. Well, it was a bit more even than that, but that’s how I felt sometimes. And it was gratifying to see, at first hand, someone else going through the same gruelling editorial initiation that I had undergone over the previous year. Shakily, we forged a solid friendship as we contemplated the dictionary’s present and future.
By the late 1970s I had started to become interested in how the chief editor managed his editorial team. It was generally felt that, for all his editorial strengths, he didn’t get everything right. For instance, there are three things you should never say to historical lexicographers. The first is that directing a dictionary project is like commanding a regiment. There is nothing lexicographers like less than feeling that they are part of a unit being ordered to carry out impersonal routine tasks as part of someone else’s grand design. You can see why. Each entry they work on is personal, and all of the research and analysis they conduct is (in their own minds) of the most vital importance to the history of the language. If they are likened to foot soldiers marching to someone else’s beat, then their work is somehow diminished. The second metaphor you should steer well clear of is that of the production line. Historical dictionaries are massive, and involve an enormous amount of work, but the regular editor likes to think that he or she is one of a band of independent researchers who consent to work together for the greater good. There’s a third term I’ve heard more recently that you should never use in reference to the dictionary text that editors struggle to create, and that is content. Content is publisher’s jargon that reduces text to the level of filler, to be manipulated by a higher power. For lexicographers, the opposite of content is discontent. I’ve heard the editorial offices referred to as the “Content Area,” as if it were filled by comatose cats contentedly purring.
Now, our chief editor had seen active service in the Second World War with the New Zealand Army in Italy. He’d played rugby in the forces, and tended to regard projects as military undertakings. He liked to imagine the editorial staff as troops committed to the larger goal of servicing the dictionary. This isn’t unreasonable, and you need to take an overview to develop the vision necessary to manage a project such as the OED. But, as I learned, it’s best to keep the metaphors to yourself.
Project is a word that entered English in the late Middle Ages (around 1450). Lexicographers, it seems, don’t know everything: sometimes it is impossible to say whether a word like project entered English from French or from medieval Latin. Both were languages actively used at the time, and the medieval mind didn’t necessarily try to separate language sources to the same elaborate extent that we do today. Formally, the English word project derives from Latin proiectum, “a projecting structure,” “a projection,” but the Romans didn’t use the word in a business-management sense. Our meaning, “a plan,” seems more indebted—as the OED tells us—to the related medieval French word projet, which did carry the meaning “a plan.” The two sides of the prospective etymology don’t quite meet: Latin gives us the form/ spelling, and French gives us the meaning, but at present we can’t explain the cross-over point.
This meaning also seeped through Europe into Italian and Spanish in the sixteenth century. If we think that we borrow a word from one language, we should remember that other languages might find it convenient and borrow it too. Networks spread; language development isn’t linear.
But the modern association of the term with business and research (like much comparable management terminology) dates from the emergence of management studies and business planning in the early twentieth century. The first evidence that the OED has found for this meaning of the word dates from 1916, suggesting, aptly, that some of the terminology of business practice could have arisen out of new organisational theories pioneered by the military in the First World War. The OED cheekily cites W. H. Auden: “Thou shalt not worship projects nor / Shalt thou or thine bow down before / Administration” (Nones, 1952: 61).
There was one aspect of the chief editor’s management style which was far-sighted. Even though he cherished his ablest editors, and desperately wanted to make use of them to complete his pet project, the Supplement to the OED, he knew that the only way to help them develop was to offer them small projects of their own. Other colleagues in the department had been offered small dictionaries to edit themselves. A Junior Dictionary had been prepared, and an Oxford Dictionary for Scientific Writers and Editors had been edited by one of my scientific colleagues. People seemed to enjoy the chance to work independently that these dictionary projects brought. The thought of editing my own dictionary had not really occurred to me at this point. I was too engrossed in tracking the histories and definitions of all the words I had found in my latest batches of OED work.
But one day, while I was busy researching and writing up dictionary entries somewhere in the letter R, I received another of those occasional calls to the chief editor’s office. This time (mercifully) he didn’t need any help buying birthday presents, but wanted to float an idea about a future project that I might like to be involved in. “Float” suggests I had some choice, and “involved in” suggests there might be someone else involved too. As it happened, neither was the case. I like to think that my reticence over the previous few years had endeared me to him, since I appeared to possess a copybook as yet unblotted. As a result of this unusual circumstance I was seated in the second most comfortable chair in his large new office, which I had only glimpsed previously and which contrasted starkly with the functional seating arrangement I had in my office down
stairs.
As I continued to sit in comfort in the chief editor’s second-best chair, I realised that I had naively walked into some publishing politics. Oxford had an Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs. However, in those days you shouldn’t just have a full Oxford dictionary of any subject; it was also advantageous to have a Concise Oxford Dictionary on the same topic, and possibly even a Little one, too, if you thought the market wouldn’t object. There is an element of publishing-by-numbers here, but it made sense: you might not want to buy the full weighty and complex version, but you might want its little sidekick. “Little sidekick” was, as usual, where I came in. It had been suggested, in one of Oxford’s grand publishing meetings, or perhaps in one of the narrow but unending corridors of the main University Press site on Walton Street, that our chief editor might find an underling to run up a concise version of the late Professor F. P. Wilson’s magisterial Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs. This large volume had been all but completed when Professor Wilson died in 1960, and had been brought through to publication by his wife in 1970.
While working on the Supplement to the OED I had had little to do with proverbs, as we were predominantly dealing with the emergent vocabulary of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and most proverbs were well and truly set in stone by then. Modern proverbs tend to have a long gestation period, beginning as quotations from known authors, and only gradually assuming the status of universal proverbs or maxims many years later, when the identity of the original author has been largely or completely forgotten. It’s a moot point whether we should still call If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it (Bert Lance, US President Jimmy Carter’s director of the Office of Management and Budget: 1977), or Work expands to fill the time available (Parkinson’s Law—British naval historian C. Northcote Parkinson: 1955), quotations, or whether they have moved into the more abstract world of proverbs. Proverbs are pithy sayings that offer some general truth, by and large. Also, I had expressed no interest in proverbs over my time at the dictionary.
None of this mattered, of course, and so after a while I was allowed to leave the hallowed office to consider whether, for the next year, I would abandon my work on the Supplement to the OED and devote myself to the unknown realm of “old said saws” and proverbs.
I discussed the possibility with Hilary (now officially a Doctor of Philosophy, and therefore authorised to dispense literary advice). She, too, was surprised that I had been singled out for my knowledge of English proverbs. It came with no financial inducement, such things being considered as below regard in the leisurely world of Oxford scholarship.
Nevertheless, I could see how my cards were marked, and several days later I informed the chief editor that I would be delighted to take on this unusual project, and what should I do next?
Although I received no immediate reward for the shift of work towards proverbs, my colleague Ed Weiner and I were now informed that if things went to plan we would both be promoted to senior editor in 1980 or thereabouts, when our immediate bosses moved to new projects (the Concise Oxford Dictionary and the major revision of the Shorter OED). So I needed to make sure things went well on the proverb dictionary, or I would be sliding down a long snake rather than climbing up a short ladder. The prospect of working closely with Ed was good, though, as we had developed quite a friendship amongst the cobwebs and must of the dictionary’s files.
And so I spent the next year, which expanded to eighteen months, writing out by hand—as you did in those days—the entire text of a Concise Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs. By the end I could speak fluently in “old said saws” and offer trite truisms on demand to anyone who approached me with a problem. One man may steal a horse, while another may not look over a hedge; a stern chase is a long chase; near is my shirt, but nearer is my skin; the best thing for the inside of a man is the outside of a horse (i.e., take some exercise); little pitchers (i.e., children) have large ears; bairns and fools should not see half-done work; if you lie down with dogs, you will rise up with fleas (a saying translated from the Roman sage Seneca); the looker-on sees more of the game. Proverbs were universal truths (or what passed as these), normally presented in sentence form. Some were abstract (of the “Hope springs eternal” variety), but many evolved from the home and hearth of the medieval peasant, and so their subjects were often homely subjects—cats, dogs, friends, the weather, churchgoing, food and drink. They were extraordinary, colourful, reassuring adjuncts to everyday conversation.
I soon realised that one of the reasons I had been given this task was to familiarise myself with editing a whole dictionary. Work on the OED was episodic, and editors needed the experience of a full A-to-Z run to appreciate all the aspects of dictionary life. Ed was soon to be handed a similar project, which would familiarise him with this whole-world view, when he was invited to take time off from the Supplement to prepare an Oxford Miniguide to English Usage. Without realising it at the time, we were being slowly groomed to see how we’d manage on a larger stage.
Professor Wilson’s big Oxford dictionary of proverbs followed roughly the same format as the OED, illustrating each proverb with quotations of its use in texts from the earliest known occurrence to the present day. But he had had no collection mechanism, so his entries trailed off far too early in the twentieth century. Fortunately, the OED’s stalwart reader Marghanita Laski had taken a shine to me, and she came on board, redirecting her own word collection for a period to proverb collection. Together, she and I and a handful of other readers managed to plug the documentary gaps.
Like the Victorian OED, each quotation in Professor Wilson’s proverb dictionary had been provided with information about the work from which it was taken (the author’s name, the title of the work, the edition used, and the page reference on which it might be found). But, as with the old OED, much of this information had been presented in a very abbreviated and cryptic manner, and sometimes—in the light of modern scholarship—it was plain wrong. Not everyone nowadays would recognise the title L.L.L. as a shortening of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost, or P.R. as Milton’s Paradise Regain’d. It was necessary to bring the text of the dictionary closer to the modern reader, but to retain the historical principles. Also, quotations themselves were typically extracted from modern editions, and so—following the principles of modern historical lexicography—I had to recheck these in original editions. I had to convert historical quotations from, say, Sir Thomas More, collected from weaselly nineteenth-century editions (which modernised the spelling of words for the convenience of contemporary readers), back to the original forms of the words as presented in the first editions of the sixteenth century. It was a fascinating experience, seeing the text as it fragmented before my eyes from the cosmetic versions using modernised spellings back to what people would actually have seen and read when the texts were freshly published. Not everyone cares, but in order to recreate an image of what the language originally looked like, and to experience it as it was experienced back then, I became convinced that I had to ensure I was looking at the original historical text and not a later editorial refashioning. You could not analyse historical data if you were observing modified evidence.
Here, for the first time, I was immersed in the early history of the language, which my work on the big OED had not yet involved. The proverb dictionary was not such a complete challenge as the OED, but it took me through aspects of work at a much deeper level than I had previously had an inkling existed.
Inkling is too good a word to pass over in complete silence. It’s an example of a noun which we still use that is derived from a verb which has drifted deep into obsolescence. Not a lot of people know that inkling derives from the good old English verb to inkle. This was not in fact a good “Old English” word, as it wasn’t around in the Old English period (up to around AD 1150). But to inkle does at least date back—like project—to the late Middle Ages, when it meant “to utter or communicate in an undertone or whisper, to hint.” If you “inkled the truth,” you hinted at
it.
It should by now come as no surprise that there was also at the time a noun derived from the verb: inkling, or hinting through whisper. The evidence seems to show that the meaning of the verb and the noun developed in the sixteenth century towards our modern meaning of “having an inkling” about something. The word inkling was of course commandeered by the Oxford writers and scholars C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and others, who formed the literary discussion group called the “Inklings” in the 1930s, meeting just down the road from the OED’s St Giles’ offices at the Eagle and Child public house. In their case, the name was a pun on ink and -ling.
There is one question that is always asked of lexicographers: What is your favourite word? We are plagued by this seemingly innocent request. I always say I haven’t got one—the historical lexicographer needs to remain neutral, and not show any favouritism. Each word has its own type of significance. This response has proved a frustrating stance for journalists, who are keen to establish some humanising factor in their stereotypical lexicographer.