The Word Detective

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The Word Detective Page 12

by John Simpson


  I commented on Bill’s entries right through to the end of editing work, in the mid-1980s, and the dictionary was eventually published right on schedule for the 1788 bicentenary. Much of the new research Bill and his team had conducted on Australian words was very relevant to the OED. Pom was one of the best examples. It is an affectionate term of abuse used by Australians to describe a Briton. I say “affectionate term of abuse” as a sort of shorthand for what it actually is: we naive Britons think it’s affectionate (even when concealed in the friendly expression Pommie bastard), and for every Australian it is knowingly ambiguous—on the one hand it can be interpreted as an out-and-out term of abuse, and on the other as a creative, humorous example of the new informal Australian language. It intentionally puzzles us.

  Australia has a tradition of playful word creation. Take yourself back to the year 1845. Britain had been transporting convicts to Australia for decades, in a desperate policy which continued into the 1870s. But well before it ended, the British government and the state authorities themselves were keen to encourage civilian emigration to Canada and Australia—to accommodate the perceived “surplus” population in mainland Britain, caused not least by the famines in Ireland. By 1845 immigration was a major cultural reality in Australia and New Zealand. So much so, in fact, that people started playing with the word immigrant (as well as emigrant). They invented the name for a typical incoming settler, playing on the word immigrant, and called him Jimmy Grant. Soon enough, the jokey name Jimmy Grant (or just jimmy) was common enough as a slang alternative for immigrant.

  By the early twentieth century, with immigration still a hot topic, Australians started tinkering with their word again. The closest word they could find in English to jimmygrant (except for the words it was derived from) was pomegranate. Now a pomegranate isn’t a typical English fruit, but it amused the Australian wordsters of the day and they decided to make use of it. So the jimmygrant became the pomegranate (1912), both meaning an “immigrant.” In the same year the cumbersome pomegranate morphed to the ubiquitous Pom, and by 1913 it had become the “affectionate” Pommy or Pommie.

  Each time I thought I’d finally learnt how to be a lexicographer, I found that there was more to learn and new problems to solve. But I had found that I enjoyed working at the forefront of a discipline, and on an international stage—even though to date I had only watched other departmental members play their parts on that stage. All of the editors, researchers, and “readers” felt a sense of the significance of what they were doing in producing the “official” record of the English language. Even though the full dictionary was becoming antiquated, it was still our dictionary of record, and adding new material to it was a privilege.

  When I had turned up for my first day at work, I had been uncertain whether I’d be competent to do the work, and whether I would fit into the rather rarefied atmosphere of the OED. The work, I discovered, was fascinating, and presented problems of the sort I liked solving (finding the right word for a definition; researching historical usage so that the evidence made sense; collaborating with fellow editors and specialists way beyond the dictionary’s borders in Oxford). But this excitement came at a price. I had to experience the rites of passage: to eradicate the sense of hopeful imprecision that had dogged me until then, and gradually replace it with hard-edged analysis. Not everyone could make this change. Sometimes editors were appointed who had the right academic background, but rebelled against the rigour: they didn’t last long. I was accommodating to it, and I was proud of the new weapons in my editorial armoury.

  There was a fly in the ointment. Despite the complexity of our work on the Supplement to the OED, I and others found ourselves becoming dissatisfied with the concept of supplementing—of adding lights and tinsel to the dictionary, rather than addressing the whole of the language all the way from the Anglo-Saxon period to the present day. You couldn’t form a whole-world picture of the language in the way we were working, and we knew that much of the language had been neglected by the Supplement. When the Supplement was complete, would there ever be scope for a full, proper revision of the big dictionary? Would Oxford (the University and the Press), not always known for forward thinking, ever be prepared to countenance this adventure? Was such an undertaking even feasible?

  By now, I had been a member of the OED department for almost ten years. From those first tentative footsteps into editing, I’d become involved in training and planning, running my own dictionary projects, and generally obtaining an overview of the language. I’d come to appreciate that studying and describing the history of the English language involved looking at it across the world, across time, and in the full spectrum of registers from formal to slang. And I’d been doing this in the traditional way, with index cards and pens. It was only as the curtain fell on the final years of our work on the Supplement that we began to wonder more seriously about the future and how that future could include the Oxford English Dictionary.

  FIVE

  Uneasy Skanking

  When the fourth and final volume of the Supplement to the OED was eventually published in 1986, almost thirty years after the start of a project marked by the appointment of the chief editor, Bob Burchfield, in 1957, it was justly seen as a stupendous achievement. The Supplement had successfully registered the changing language of the twentieth century from the sun-filled summers before the First World War through to the technological inventions and global uncertainties of the mid-1980s.

  But in the final years of any large dictionary project, after the basic editorial work has all been completed, there is no room left for the full complement of editorial staff, and as the early 1980s progressed, some editors had left and others had gradually been transferred to other dictionary projects, eventually leaving the chief editor as the lonely general seeing his dictionary through to publication. Ed Weiner was one of those who had agreed to help out on the revision of the New Shorter OED (which, like the OED, had not been revised since its original publication—in this case in 1933). The Shorter was a big project: a two-volume historical dictionary scaled down from the full OED, containing half a million definitions (about two-thirds of the big dictionary’s definition count), but only a trifling 80,000 quotations (against the OED’s 1.8 million). It restricted itself largely to English after 1700.

  But the prospect of working on the revised Shorter just didn’t appeal to me. I was much more interested in what I selfishly regarded as the real thing, not the cut-down version. And then, remarkably, there arose at much the same time the dim prospect of an olive branch offered for the eventual revival of the full OED, if the cards fell in the right way. This, it goes without saying, became a matter of great interest to Ed and myself. Everything overlapped in the early 1980s as we navigated ourselves through this period of uncertain transition, and so for the moment I will concentrate on traditional editorial matters, so as not to overcomplicate things. But we will return soon to pick up the possible future for the OED in the next chapter.

  Fortunately, chief editor was looking out for me at this moment of transition. In the turmoil of restructuring in the last years of the Supplement, I found myself handed my own project to work on. The University Press knew that new words kept arriving in the language, and it was decided that the most appropriate option for the dictionary department was that it should maintain a rapid-response force of editors who would mould them into dictionary entries whenever the opportunity arose. And I was put in charge of the “New Words” group, comprising a handful of editors no longer needed to produce text for the Supplement, but charged with continuing its mission of preparing entries for new words and meanings for whichever Oxford dictionary might require them (which was all of them, of course), and in the longer term, for the OED itself, should the old warhorse ever survive. Notice that the end of the Supplement had immediately heralded a new community spirit in the halls of the OED.

  Running the New Words group didn’t represent the future, but it gave us a breathing-space while we, and the
University Press generally, thought about how we might work in the years to come. The group gave me my first opportunity to organise an area of the OED’s work from the ground up, and over the next few years my New Words colleagues and I lived very close at hand with the lexical changes to which the language was subject in the early to mid-1980s. I don’t think I’d heard of a steep learning curve in those days, but I would have appreciated its meaning.

  Leading the New Words group also gave us the opportunity to test out how we might go about demystifying the dictionary for the ordinary user. One of my key roles as head of the group was to set the tone for the areas of vocabulary on which we might particularly concentrate. My preference was for less “literary” and more “popular” vocabulary—more “world” English. Whatever I’d managed to achieve in this area in the past had been introduced almost by stealth: now I had the authority to develop my own policy.

  At first I attacked the type of data that entered the dictionary’s files. By adjusting the texts read, I could begin to influence the scope of the dictionary’s coverage. I developed a plan that involved ensuring that more fields of popular interest were addressed by our loyal “readers.” We read “serious” books on most subjects (Metz’s Film Language yet again being—as so often—a case in point), but we had often missed the more populist edge. So for every serious book on a subject that we read (in education theory, politics, fashion—even do-it-yourself and car mechanics, etc.), I’d now have the readers go to their local bookshop and find high-street magazines covering roughly the same topic. When they read these for the dictionary, I hoped that we would find different levels of formality in the material entering our card files. And it worked. Reading popular motorcycling magazines, for instance, helped to draw the expression dirt bike to our attention, and to secure its inclusion. So as not to miss a trick, we engaged in a correspondence with a dirt-bike magazine about the finer points of the term. There were dirtbikers out there who wanted to help. Reassuringly, there are always people who want to help the OED.

  Along the same lines, if you bought food in a supermarket in Britain in the 1970s, you’d see—each week—that new and strange foodstuffs with unfamiliar names were regularly making their appearance on the shelves: aloo gobi, arrabbiata, carpaccio, etc. If you stood still and thought for a moment, you could see that there was a parallel here with the way new words were brought to Britain from far-flung places by traders in the sixteenth century.

  The normal person confronting these delicacies in a modern-day supermarket would just buy them to try them out. But that is not necessarily the lexicographical way. I decided it would be beneficial to the dictionary to card for our files selected items from the entire stock list of the supermarket, so I wrote to one of the directors asking politely if he would be happy to post me a full printout of all the foodstuffs that his supermarkets carried. Sometimes you have to do foolish things—as a detective lexicographer—for the greater good. I hoped that he would take the same view. There was silence for a few weeks. My in-tray did not bulge with reams of continuous stationery containing lists of exotic fruits for the dictionary. I had almost given up hope, when finally a package arrived with a tentative note from the director, begging me not to divulge the secrets of his company’s success, but offering his wordlist for the good of society. We ransacked that list for months looking for new material to draft for the dictionary—and words like semifreddo and halloumi and teppan-yaki found their way into the editorial stream and eventual publication.

  As well as updating the scope of words entering the dictionary, I started to adjust the style of these new entries, trying to edge them away from the academic complexity sometimes sought by my forebears. This was a slow process, and it’s still going on even now. We would tend to introduce slightly longer illustrative examples, so that the reader could appreciate more easily the context of the word they were investigating; we updated subject labels, for example changing Cinematography to Film; and we tried to make definitions more flowing. Intro, for example, was defined in the Supplement to the OED as “colloq. abbrev. of INTRODUCTION n.”—using crabbed abbreviations and diversionary cross-references which might confuse some readers. When we confronted the more informal outro (recorded since 1971), we preferred a less cryptic model, with “a concluding section, esp. one which closes a broadcast programme or musical work.” We didn’t get everything right, because we were inching towards a new style, but it felt good that change was possible.

  The New Words group quickly developed a plan for hunting down the significant words we should be working on. We knew that the early parts of the dictionary were the most out of date, as those were the areas that had languished the longest. So we decided to concentrate our initial efforts on the letters A to G. In those days we still had no computer files to take the place of our primary resource, the card file. So for several months I worked with colleagues through words in the card file from A to G, looking out for batches of evidence for high-profile new words and meanings that we ought to define. It had been about twenty years since anyone had properly sifted through this material, so it wasn’t hard to find them.

  Aerobics was one of our first finds. The original OED had not included the term, nor had it included aerobe, aerobian, aerobic, or any of the other related terms (some of which were in existence in the late nineteenth century but had not been deemed sufficiently common for inclusion in the original dictionary). We rushed in at aerobics, but it was important to portray the full picture, and for this we needed to research and include the related words. Everything is a network. You can’t edit terms in isolation. At the time, the passion for jogging was entering the mainstream, and its associated vocabulary knocked on dictionary editors’ doors for attention.

  Our investigations of aerobics immediately took us into the chamber of nineteenth-century science, where we have previously met the German creation epicentrum and English epicentre. This time we were in debt to Louis Pasteur (1822–1895), French chemist and microbiologist extraordinaire. In 1863 Pasteur published an article in a French scientific journal in which he coined the term aerobie, as an adjective and noun. You might correctly guess that aero- relates to “air.” You might be harder pressed to uncover the origin of the final -bie. And yet the steady hand of the OED tells us that Pasteur took these letters from the end of the word amphibie (as in amphibian, a creature able to live both in water and on land: the -bie derives ultimately from Greek bios, “life”). Aerobie meant “(of an organism) able to live in the presence of oxygen”; the opposite, anaerobie, meant “able to live in the absence of oxygen.”

  As English doesn’t as a rule use words like aerobie as adjectives, when English scientists reported Pasteur’s work in the Lancet in 1865 they generously gave it an English colouring, as aerobian. But even that didn’t sound scientific enough as the word settled down in the language. After the scientists had tried to get used to aerobian for several years, they decided that they would prefer aerobic (and anaerobic), both of which are found in English from 1878, again in the context of Pasteur’s work.

  The terms were largely the preserve of microbiologists for a century, until the late 1960s, when scientists began to investigate how the body efficiently processes oxygen in physical exercise. As aerobic entered a more popular theatre of action, in the mouths of trainers and exercisers, we observed that they found it convenient to develop a new noun, aerobics—at first in America (1968), and later in Britain and elsewhere. New joggers found that aerobics—in keeping with its lexical origins—referred to physical exercise that “increases the body’s oxygen consumption in a sustainable manner” and “is aimed at improving cardiovascular fitness.” It is noteworthy, given the centrality of British and American English on the world stage at the time, that these linguistic developments—begun when French science was perhaps the prestige language of scientific investigation in Europe—were concluded (to date) in the melting pot of English. I doubt if there are any early photographs of Louis Pasteur demonstrating hi
s discoveries, but it is Pasteur whom we have to thank for our word today.

  Not unconnected with aerobics, we noted a new, vociferous, popular interest in environmental concerns and the caring society—again reflected in the vocabulary we encountered. We found animal rights in the card files and tracked it back to 1875: and again this arrived as part of a package (animal rightist came attached to it: 1979). Computer technology was moving mainstream, too, as microcomputers found their way into homes rather than offices for the first time (home computers, as struggling neologists named them at the time). People were beginning to realise that computers booted up (1980), and so that brought a new set of terms (its origin in bootstrap—1953, in computing, and then bootable—1982, and so on). We discovered disinformation (1955), and followed up Russian leads to find that it may have derived from a Soviet term in the early Cold War. Soviet Russian words were always a possible source of words from the realm of espionage, and we had previously followed the same route with John le Carré’s word mole (an agent deeply infiltrated in an enemy organisation).

  The mole is a small, burrowing animal of the family Talpinae. And yet features of the word have consistently caused it to be used in the context of espionage. Mole apparently first entered English around 1400, and all of its word-relations are Germanic (Old Frisian moll, Middle Dutch mol, etc.). The animal’s attributes do not seem to fit it for spying. The dictionary notes that the mole has very poor (or no) vision, and has short, strong forearms adapted for digging. It fetchingly describes its velvety fur “that can be brushed in any direction.”

  English availed itself of the mole’s burrowing propensities when, around 1600, it employed the word to mean anyone who works underground (such as a miner). Hamlet says to the Ghost: “Well said old Mole; can’st worke in the earth? so fast, a worthy Pioner” (a pioneer was a soldier who specialised in digging mines during a siege). Working underground could involve working in the darkness, in secret, surreptitiously. Francis Bacon was perhaps the first to employ mole in the context of espionage, saying that King Henry VII needed to have spies working for him, because in return “Hee had such Moles perpetually working and casting to undermine him” (1622).

 

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