The Word Detective

by John Simpson

  But with proverbs, I did not feel that I had to subject myself to such a rule. And I discovered that my favourite, the old and now almost-forgotten saw “The longest way round is the shortest way home,” dated from the early sixteenth century, to “The road to resolution lies by Doubt; The next way home’s the farther way about” (where next is used in its etymological meaning of “nearest”). It is a thought that applies to historical lexicography in spades, where you need constantly to remind people that the shortest way of doing something isn’t necessarily the best way, and that there are advantages in being a little more considered.

  There was one final thing about proverbs that served me in good stead in later OED revision. I knew, from the full proverb dictionary I was abridging, that many proverbs had their origin in expressions from the classics, both Latin and Greek. The big dictionary was very keen to point out, in an Oxford sort of way, if a particular thought had been previously expressed by Pliny, Horace, or Herodotus. Well and good. But if a saying was originally Latin, the chances were good that it took a path into English that was similar to the path that other words from Latin took. I gradually recognised that I should be looking not just for classical prototypes for English proverbs, but for the trail of development from Latin, say, into French or Italian, and then into English. As with words, the situation was much more complex than first meets the eye, but the final resolution is far more satisfying. The longest way round is the shortest way home.

  A good example of an expression that illustrates the mixed international heritage of proverbs would be When the cat’s away, the mice will play. It’s a typical old proverb, with imagery from the domestic environment, which is a hallmark of many old sayings. We know it in English from the early seventeenth century (Thomas Heywood’s Woman Killed with Kindness). Even here it is offered as an “old proverb.” In the absence of earlier English evidence, we can see, however, that the proverb existed in French from the early fourteenth century: Ou chat na rat regne (“Where there is no cat the rat is king”). Maybe we are more squeamish than the French, and prefer mice to rats.

  Before the proverb dictionary could be published, it had to survive an internal review. This turned out to be crucial to me and my prospects of promotion on the main OED. I was nervous about how my draft dictionary would be received. Oxford likes to criticise—on the principle that it is the making of good scholarship—but a bad review would be catastrophic. After a few months of anxious waiting, the review came in. The review was read first, naturally, by my chief editor, who called me in again for a debrief. The internal reviewer was Peter Opie (who with his wife, Iona, had edited the excellent Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes). After some character-building introductory remarks by the chief editor, I was fortunately informed that I had got the thumbs-up, and the next thing I knew I was joining Ed in a more senior role on the OED. As a footnote, it’s curious that the first major printed notice of the proverb dictionary appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, in the same issue as its (equally positive) review of Hilary’s book D. H. Lawrence and Feminism. Things were looking up.

  In the same year in which the proverb dictionary was published (1982), things took an altogether different track at home: we had our first baby, Katharine Jane (“Kate”). Despite my rather curious job, we did all the usual, ordinary things: bringing the baby home very cautiously the first time, photographing her in her carry-cot, etc. Over time Kate hit all the right percentiles, fitted the right-sized clothes, and developed her eating habits just the way the books said she would. Later, Kate would come to argue with me about words, not appreciating that I was in fact the ultimate arbiter. Sometimes kids just don’t realise.

  True to his word, in 1982 the chief editor moved Ed and me into the grandiose roles of senior editor on the OED. Ed and I had until then been proceeding on parallel tracks, each editing our own ranges of words, or our own dictionaries, and discussing knotty issues when we encountered them.

  Our new jobs as senior editors on the Supplement to the OED meant that we were reporting directly to the chief editor, and had overall supervision of the ten or so assistant editors preparing first drafts of entries for the dictionary. Although I no longer had to do the basic research and defining work on dictionary entries, I had to review and improve the drafts produced by junior editors, for final approval by the chief editor; I had to appoint and train new staff, send completed ranges of work to the printers, and handle all the stages of proof prior to publication.

  There was an inherent problem with deadlines on the dictionary. Earlier, my colleague Phil and I had established that there were always more words begging for inclusion in the final phases of the OED than we had room for. We had decided that Zeno’s paradox applied to the OED: however fast the editors worked, in the end the words always moved a little bit further ahead, so there was—philosophically—a danger that the Supplement would never be completed. So, Ed’s and my first job was to refocus the scope of the dictionary project, with only the chief editor in the know. We had to restrain the Supplement to its four volumes, and we had around four or five years to complete the task for publication before the 1980s ran out of steam. Dispensing with slide rules and measuring tape (the traditional lexicographers’ planning tools), we upscaled to pen and paper, and calculated how many words and meanings we could realistically ask the editors to complete before our deadline arrived and the University Press’s exasperation boiled over. Anything else would have to catch the next bus.

  We soon concluded that we couldn’t afford to let our progress be determined by the vast quantity of data in our word files. We calculated that each editor should be able to complete around twenty-five entries each week. We would then have to revise that material, both of us dealing with some 125 draft entries a week, and leave them in such a state that the chief editor would be able to review them all rapidly, so that they could be dispatched on time for printing. It was simply a case of training, encouraging, and cajoling the junior editors to get through the requisite amount of work each week, and the Supplement’s final trajectory would be more or less in the bag.

  I was always confident that Ed and I would be able to keep up with our own targets—you just made time. Almost all of the work was problem-solving: the easy parts of the job took no time, and you were always wrestling with the problems, the hard parts, the bits for which there were no obvious rules. You had to resolve each issue, however, in line with the dictionary’s own rules, or as near to them as you could. I think that helps to explain why many lexicographers have a strong logical and mathematical background, even though they spend much of their time writing elegant definitions for everyday words. The issues didn’t simply concern definitions. Editors needed to be able to analyse data fast, finding patterns that might appear hidden to the readers (what were the typical types of nouns to which the adjective rustic attached itself? did this change over the centuries? could you identify any semantic progression here?). It helped, too, that Ed and I both seemed to have the knack of making the right decisions, rapidly.

  What Ed and I now found was that the main part of the job, the “real” part of being a senior editor on the OED, was that you had to work extremely rapidly and accurately, reviewing all of the work of your junior colleagues—rewriting definitions, initiating further research work from our group of dedicated researchers in all of the main research libraries around the world, and deciding quickly how to handle each of the lexical problems that inevitably arose.

  The secret was to acknowledge that there are always at least two ways of doing something, and that if the junior editors had already written good definitions, then you shouldn’t change them just because they weren’t written in precisely the way you’d write them. The job required understanding that someone else could be equally right (not a very “Oxford” attitude back then). The junior editor wasn’t always right, so there were often times when we’d need to cut off the tail of a rambling definition, refocus it by introducing new words, or (occasionally) rewrite it
from scratch. And that applied to all of the other elements of the dictionary entry. We had to review all of the selected quotations to see if they’d been chosen according to our (largely unwritten) guidelines—covering as broad a range of sources, years, spellings, contexts, and so on as one reasonably could. We had to check that the etymology presented the most likely explanation of the term’s emergence. And there was a fair amount of correcting of punctuation and style. Sadly, I quite liked doing that, but it’s not something all editors appreciate at first.

  The other part of the job was dealing with proofs as they came back from the printer for checking and correction. These were so-called galley proofs, single-column strips of text maybe twice as long as the printed page, produced before the columns were formatted into pages. These galleys gave us scope to make even quite significant alterations without having to find concomitant savings within a single page.

  Galley-work was close work—difficult but extremely satisfying, though galleys themselves are now long gone from the publishing process. We’d cut up one set, and send specialist sections off to academic experts for review. Other sets we’d send out to pairs of “critical readers.” These critical readers were typically senior academics or experienced non-Oxford lexicographers who knew the OED inside-out, who would take an educated view of a whole stream of entries, and whose critical comments were likely to represent the most searching level of critique to which the entries might ever be subject. Their comments, written in the margins of the galleys, were sometimes characteristically explosive (“WHAT???” “Surely Tennyson was referring to love???,” “NO!! Recheck”), but often they were more reflective than that. After a few weeks, when all of these comments had been returned, Ed and I would revise the entries in the light of these learned critical (and, to be fair, often complimentary) responses. At the time, I couldn’t imagine anything that was as much fun as doing this: working fast, assimilating insightful but sometimes mistimed comments, taking a good entry and making it as perfect as possible.

  Experience came, it would seem, in large doses. I was by now reasonably familiar with the inside of the chief editor’s office, as he insisted on meeting with Ed and myself every morning at nine o’clock to review our previous day’s work, and to make sure the editors were all on track. So this time, when I received yet another summons to the chief editor’s office upstairs, I was almost expecting the outcome. But again I was surprised. It turned out that the chief editor had further plans to expand my vocabulary. Unknown to me—as I found was often the case—the previous few months had been a time of turmoil in the Australian dictionary market. Plans were afoot to create and publish a national dictionary of Australian English in 1988, two hundred years after the First Fleet arrived in Australia from England to found a colony. The excitement in Oxford was that, somewhat against the odds, OUP had won the right to publish the historical Australian National Dictionary—a sort of OED of Australian words—against homegrown opposition. A group of Australian editors, led by New Zealander Bill Ramson, was beavering away at the Australian National University in Canberra and had produced their first range of edited text.

  This had been kept a secret from me until then. Our chief editor in Oxford was a New Zealander by birth and inclination, and so might be expected to take enormous interest in the lexicographical pickings of his Australasian fellows. Whilst I’m sure he did, he also considered that he was too busy at the time with his work on the OED Supplement to worry about something new, and had decided that it was a project I would be able to manage between my other activities.

  The proposal put to me was the normal one: that I should continue doing more or less everything I was already doing—i.e., a full-time editing job in Oxford—and that I should also do more. This “more” meant reading the stream of proofs that was about to descend upon us from Canberra, as well as advising the project in Australia generally on lexicographical practice and procedure, on the basis of my detailed knowledge of Oxford lexicography.

  It wasn’t a dream job, as far as I could see. That was also as far as the chief editor had got in his thinking, but the difference was that he had the power to delegate the work to an underling. So I crept out of his office and back downstairs to consider my “choice.” A day or so later I was, predictably, climbing the stairs again about to announce how delighted I would be to take on this extra work.

  In no time at all I was handed the first instalment of yet another book with no plot. It began at A and seemed to continue over many pages a little further into A. So I settled down to read and annotate the Australian dictionary. The format was very familiar to me, as the new text was based in all essentials upon the tried-and-tested structure of the OED.

  I was well aware of the old misconceptions about Australian vocabulary—which had enjoyed around a one-hundred-year history even then. I knew about the early settlers who had asked the locals the name of that strange animal bounding along in the distant bush, only to be told “kangaroo,” or “I don’t know,” in the native language. Sadly, the story is nonsense: kangaroo was just the name for the animal in one of the native Aboriginal languages.

  I didn’t know the editor, Bill Ramson. Lexicographers from that side of the world didn’t normally make their way over to European lexicographical conferences back then. I was worried about how he’d take my comments. People have a habit of thinking Oxford is trying to belittle them even if you just say hello, and I was keen not to do that. We pussyfooted along, exchanging courteous comments and responses, for a few instalments into the letter B before I started to understand the code. Bill, it turned out, was delighted that my chief editor wasn’t the person he had to deal with on a day-to-day basis over his dictionary, and he found a few of my comments helpful. As intended, I ought to add.

  There was plenty for me to learn, too, from the experience. In particular, I learnt how Australian English came to be formed, from the time the continent was opened up to Europeans by Captain Cook in the 1770s right up to the present day. At first there was no Australian English, obviously. The first distinctively Australian words the Australian National Dictionary recorded were either regular English words reinvented in a new context, or words borrowed from Aboriginal languages. The new English expressions were typically for the flora and fauna encountered by the sailors and scientists on the first ships to explore around the coast. New words are needed for things that are unfamiliar, but a new thing is often similar to something already known: Captain Cook knew the fantail pigeon from back home, so when—in 1773—he encountered a type of Australian flycatcher that habitually spread its tail-feathers, he naturally called it a fantail. When the early settlers wanted a term to describe their action in allowing a transported convict to become a free man, they re-employed the word emancipation, which they knew from British legal usage. Language doesn’t usually invent, but it recycles and welds together what it needs from existing materials.

  When the new visitors came across Aboriginal weapons for the first time, they could create their own word from words they already knew (the boomerang was called the throwing-stick in the 1790s), but they might also use the Aboriginal word for the same thing: boomerang. Boomerang is a Dharuk (or Darug) word, from an Aboriginal language spoken near Sydney in New South Wales—a region colonised by the new settlers (notice that the borrowing implies verbal communication between the white settlers and Aboriginals). Bill and his editors were fortunately able to make use of new research by Aboriginal language experts, who had been active for many years identifying the specific languages in which Aboriginal words are used: another word for a boomerang, a kylie, derives from Nyungar and other western Australian languages; the Aboriginal weapon the wirri derives from Gaurna, around Adelaide in South Australia.

  New geographical features were named after what the first visitors and settlers already knew, as were the new institutions they developed: a piece of Crown land granted to a settler was called an allotment. New Australian uses sprang up for many old words: house (the principal res
idence on a rural property, distinguished from a hut, and probably maintaining an old penal-colony distinction), public (provided by the government for the benefit of a penal colony), settlement (a small town, inhabited by non-Aboriginal settlers). The prevalence of sheep-farming and mining as characteristically Australian occupations brought more creative twists of language into Australian English: a gun was a fast shearer; an out-station was a secondary station on a sheep farm; a cradle, for prospectors, was a box-like structure used to separate particles of gold from sand. Language wasn’t led by literary gods in those early years, but by ordinary people striving to gain a living in a hostile environment.

  But there was fun and creativity in their coinages too. Although we might think of rhyming slang as the Cockney’s preserve, it became a common, and humorous, pattern of word-formation in Australia, especially in the twentieth century: Aristotle was a bottle (of drink); a Jack Shay (a characteristic Irish name) was a large vessel for brewing tay (= tea); steak and kidney was rhyming slang for the city of Sydney.

  You could even find words which were not well known in Britain except in regional dialect, but which enjoyed a new lease of life on a national scale in Australia. To fossick (to search or rummage for something—originally for gold) is perhaps one of the best known of these. It has been detected in Australia from around 1850, but it derives from the English dialect fossick, “to obtain by asking, or to ferret out,” recorded by the English Dialect Dictionary only from Cornwall. It would be fascinating to see a computer model of this process of language birth.

  By the late twentieth century, the Australian variety of English had grown to appreciate itself as an independent language, and not just as a derivative outcrop of British English. Nowadays it revels in its own creativity; it has gained its self-confidence—following a cycle similar to that which British English had followed five hundred years earlier.