by John Simpson
I returned to Oxford in early spring 1986 filled with confidence about the computerisation project. I had learned during my months in Waterloo that what had seemed like a brash effort to force the old OED out of the comfort of the nineteenth century and into the twenty-first might actually work.
My return also marked a major change in my position on the project: I was appointed co-editor of the OED, alongside Ed Weiner. As before, this meant that I retained my responsibility for running the New Words team, but added a shared responsibility for the computerisation project. As someone who is naturally cautious, the magnitude of my new responsibilities should have alarmed me to the core. But my trepidation was outweighed by the thrill of having a major role in breathing new life into the Victorian dictionary.
Back in the Old Post Room at the University Press in Oxford, the project had moved on during my absence. Everything—the twelve volumes of the original OED and the four volumes of the Supplement—had now all been keyboarded. The next task was for our computer and its accompanying software to knit these two streams together for us into a seamless alphabetical whole (we fondly called this “integration”).
But the software for making seamless wholes was in fact making seamless holes. This wasn’t a surprise—we had known all along that we would at times need to storm in cavalry-like to save the situation, when the system was unable to achieve the appropriate level of microsurgery. If the Supplement wanted its new sense 4c to fit after the existing senses 4a and 4b, then the computer could usually cope with that. And suppose the old dictionary contained senses numbered 1, 2, and 3, and the Supplement wanted its new sense to be shoehorned in as a new sense 2, bumping the old 2 and 3 down to 3 and 4. The computer could normally handle that, too. But there were flourishes it didn’t seem to understand. Sometimes the instructions which the Supplement had provided for its human readers, notifying them where a new piece of the dictionary jigsaw was intended to go, were not logically consistent enough for a computer, or sometimes they were just wrong and the computer hit a brick wall. So we immediately introduced a new editorial stage—in other words, from time to time we would carefully unpick manually what the computer had done and redo it ourselves (we should have called this “disintegration”). And so, as each section of the text was processed through 1986 and beyond, we were on hand with an artist’s brush and a conductor’s baton to reintroduce the seamlessness.
Remarkably, there are two completely different terms brick wall in English. You wouldn’t think there was a need. They are a good example of word growth, word decline, and word death—with some healthy behind-the-scenes competition thrown in for good measure.
Brick wall in its original meaning—“a wall constructed of bricks”—dates from the end of the Middle English period, around 1440. Although compounds are much better attested in later centuries, that certainly doesn’t mean that they didn’t exist in Old and Middle English—it’s just that there are fewer of them. And they often relate to everyday things, like cupboard (think about it), love-drink (don’t think about it), and the aforementioned brick wall. Brick wall is such an obvious expression that the original OED editors hardly thought it was worth shelf space. They gave us the earliest known reference (around 1440: Osbern Bokenham’s translation of the monk Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon, a universal history down to his own time), added one quotation from the Bible and another from Shakespeare (and a third from Ephraim Chambers’s eighteenth-century Cyclopaedia, for the sake of solidarity), and then signed off the entry. They didn’t even bother to illustrate it later than that. It was as if the dictionary wanted to say, “If you need to be told more about this, then you’re reading the wrong sort of book.” To help stragglers, the editors even defined it in the simplest of terms: “a wall built of brick.”
Brick wall is compounded of brick and wall. Although wall is Old English, brick is later. The OED isn’t 100 percent sure about the etymology of brick, but it thinks very strongly that French is involved. So as brick isn’t known to the Old English, we wouldn’t expect to find brick wall in Old English. This is not the case with stone wall (yes, there is no end to the twists and turns that a lexicographer can take). Both stone and wall were well known to the Old English, and doubtless to many Germanic tribesmen and tribeswomen before Anglo-Saxon times. So it comes as no surprise that stone wall is also recorded in Old English.
There is another term in English, brickwall, written as one word, which is not composed of the word brick and the word wall. As it comes from a different origin, the OED logically makes it a completely different dictionary entry. This second brickwall tells us other things about language. It doesn’t date from the Middle Ages, but from the early years of the Early Modern period (1500–), when English speakers began to use a variety of English which is more recognisable as the language of today. This brickwall means “the rebound of a ball from the wall of a [real-]tennis court.” It dates from around 1570 in English and is actually a corruption of the Early Modern French word bricole, which originally meant “an ancient military engine or catapult for throwing stones or bolts,” but had moved on to mean a rebound off the wall in real tennis. Because the rebound involved bouncing off a wall, the English (in their comical wisdom) had decided that it was more fun to reuse their existing and similar-sounding open compound brick wall than to get used to saying the outlandish French word bricole. And so we did.
This was the heyday of real tennis (called just “tennis” in those days, as there was no need to distinguish it from lawn tennis, which cropped up—originally known rather hopelessly as sphairistike = “ball skill”—late in the nineteenth century). Gradually, real tennis waned in popularity, and we found as a nation that we had less need for the word bricole and for the new word brickwall, and so it was unsuccessful in the struggle for survival against the more established and considerably more useful brick wall; it fell out of common use in the middle of the seventeenth century—whereas the successful brick wall branched out into new metaphorical expressions, such as banging your head against a brick wall (known since 1697), and coming up against a brick wall (an impenetrable barrier), in the last half of the nineteenth century. With its workmanlike but elegant simplicity, brick wall shows no signs of wilting today, in either its literal or extended uses.
The business of keyboarding the dictionary from A to Z had taken eighteen months. Proofreading the text had taken us another six months (sentenced to run concurrently). Then Ed and I shared a big read-through of the final, integrated text at the end, checking the content and approving it for publication. That means that we read ten volumes each, which neither of us want to have to do again.
The year 1986 was also the year my old chief editor, Bob Burchfield, retired. He’d notched up just under thirty years on the dictionary, and had brought the OED from what was effectively a point of stagnation in the 1950s to the brink of the future, without wanting—or being in a position—to push it over into the digital era. In the end he seemed to us to leave quietly. He had already moved off to another building to work on his edition of Fowler’s Modern English Usage, and his final departure was quite a muted affair. He came along to one of those dictionary tea sessions shortly before he left his office in St Giles’, where he launched into an extended metaphor about Piccadilly Circus and Victoria Station in London. It seemed that it was intended to symbolise the difference between the hectic excitement of digitisation (Piccadilly Circus) compared with the quiet regularity of old-style lexicography (the railway station at Victoria). I think the metaphor needed more work. With his departure, one of the residual links with the everyday life of the Victorian editors finally snapped.
In the Old Post Room, we knew we were getting towards the end of the computerisation project in two ways. Firstly, the much-heralded publication date of 1989 was getting relentlessly closer and closer. And secondly, a cardboard progress chart that we had devised had almost reached the corner of the office by the window. This, you will appreciate, was our cosy alternative to professional
online management software, which even in those days gave you advance warning of when to put one foot in front of the other. Our progress chart evolved naturally from a piece of cardboard to a fully-fledged piece of cardboard with empty squares on it. Technically, Yvonne Warburton or her colleague Veronica Hurst would be in charge of filling in each empty square once a batch of work had been approved. So without even needing to turn on our computers we could tell exactly how far along we were with the project—and whether we were on schedule—just by staring at the wall. I have heard that some of our managerial colleagues within the University Press were less than impressed by this improvisation, but oddly enough, it had more motivational potential than the reams of continuous stationery that the real project-planning software disgorged in some of the better-appointed offices we occasionally entered.
By now, we were battling hell-for-leather to meet our regular and draconian deadlines for processing the text, and checking the proofs that were rolling off the old-style printing presses to form the pages of the Second Edition. The full dictionary text existed on computer at this point, but it was only accessible internally, to OED editors. The printing of the Second Edition was carried out in Britain—by Filmtype Services in Scarborough in Yorkshire—but the binding and final production of the twenty volumes were entrusted to Rand McNally in the States, a company that was quite familiar with the enormous print quantities and the marbling of end-papers and the speckled patterning of the edges apparently necessary for the American audience, which was still rumoured to be our largest potential market.
We knew from our calculations that the new edition would be twenty volumes long. What we didn’t know was which words would fall, by chance, at the beginning of each volume, and so would appear for all to see on the spines. Within minute limits we were able to influence this. The old edition of the Shorter OED had for many years sported a first volume which announced proudly that it ran from A to markworthy. Markworthy seemed a more important word because of this. (My former colleague John Sykes had apparently been tickled that many dictionaries said atom in the spine. It turned out that this was “A to M.” It doesn’t take much to make some lexicographers chuckle.)
We set out in a small way to see if we could engineer language-related words on the spines of our volumes. A was an obvious start. As the pages rolled on towards the end of the first volume, we realised that we could bring down the guillotine just before B.B.C. (as in B.B.C. English, etc.). And so B.B.C. became the lead word on the spine for Volume Two. For Volume Three, we had to be more cryptic and chose Cham, from a nickname applied to Samuel Johnson.
There are nowadays only a few people who will have any idea why the word Cham might be relevant to the OED. But sometimes words are plucked out of obscurity and associated with some new person or thing, and that is what happened with Cham. The OED defines it as follows: “An obsolete form of KHAN n.1 formerly commonly applied to the rulers of the Tartars and Mongols; and to the emperor of China,” from which you might surmise that it has little to do with the study of language.
The link with language comes through Tobias Smollett, author of numerous picaresque eighteenth-century novels, such as The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle and The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom. In 1759 Smollett wrote to the radical politician and journalist John Wilkes that Samuel Johnson’s black servant, Francis Barber, had decided to leave Johnson’s service for a life on the open wave. Johnson was desolate, and worried that Francis would not stand up to the rigours of life at sea. According to Boswell, Johnson pronounced that “no man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.” When he wrote to Wilkes, Smollett referred to Samuel Johnson, the great dictionary editor (amongst many other things), as “that great Cham of literature,” a phrase which Boswell dutifully republished.
I’m sorry to say that that Cham was where our ingenuity ended as regards appropriate catchwords for each volume. Volume Four of the Second Edition of the OED started with the word creel, which even we couldn’t invest with serious relevance to the study of vocabulary. When we had finally approved the contents and spine of the twentieth volume (Wave to Zyxt), we were ready to publish.
Just for a moment, we felt on top of the world. Over the previous five years we had commandeered the text of the dictionary from its old-style book form on to computer; we’d proofread it, added 5,000 new entries, and altered the pronunciation system (despite almost terminal worries that we would not be able to); and we’d got it all to the point at which it could be published. Curiously, it was going to be published again as a book, and not (straightaway) as an electronic resource. We still had some work to do.
EIGHT
The Tunnel and the Vision
Finally, the day arrived—Thursday, 30 March 1989, the launch date for the Second Edition of the OED. (Publication days were always Thursdays, since time immemorial. I think this was so that people had a couple of days to assemble their pocket money to be ready to go to the bookshops on Saturday.) A few weeks prior to this, our publicity colleagues had stormed into action. Ed Weiner and I found ourselves travelling up to London to have our picture taken by Lord Snowdon, formerly the husband of Princess Margaret and at that time a very successful commercial and society photographer. The photograph was to accompany The Times’s article on the publication of the dictionary. We were new to the world of modelling, and naively imagined ourselves progressing swiftly from Lord Snowdon’s celebrity studio to the front cover of Vogue, before having our image flashed across one of the illuminated billboards in Piccadilly. But to our surprise, Lord Snowdon was more interested in how we had managed to squeeze all the data in the First Edition of the OED on to a little compact disk (which we had been instructed to take along as a prop, to contrast with the row of twenty enormous Second Edition volumes) than in his unique opportunity to make the editors style icons. In his vision of the photograph, all that would be seen above the dictionary volumes would be Ed’s disembodied hand holding aloft and in triumph the tiny CD-ROM (“compact disk—read-only memory”: technically, a data CD rather than an audio one).
A quiet word about CD-ROMs: nowadays we tend to forget them, and we have certainly wiped from our memories almost everything about data storage on magnetic tape, which nowadays we associate with audio technology. But in the days before we had minute storage disks, we stored data on large magnetic-tape spools and hooked these up to mainframe computers. CD-ROMs and mag tape were the two new mediums by which the digital OED introduced itself to the public in the late 1980s and early 1990s, before the emergence of the Internet. We had produced a rather basic version of the First Edition of the OED on CD-ROM in 1989 (containing everything edited up to 1928)—almost just to prove that it could be done. You could buy it, but it was more of a beta test for the real thing. This was the one that Lord Snowdon wanted us to hold exultantly above a sea of books.
Despite Lord Snowdon’s preference that the compact disk should be centre-stage in his photograph, our publicity minders refused to be coshed by a genius more creative than themselves, and insisted that the image (which the publisher was, after all, paying for) should feature the real-world characters, Ed and myself. So the vision changed. The CD was relegated to its rightful place in a jewel-case off-set, and Ed and I regained the photographic high ground. But once the twenty volumes had been arrayed neatly in stacks on the table in Lord Snowdon’s studio, and we had been asked to drape ourselves elegantly behind them, you could only see the tops of our heads. In my case, that is not a feature. This gave Lord Snowdon another chance to suggest that Ed might hold the CD up in his outstretched hand, reaching towards the light above the books. Once again that plan was vetoed, though it did remain in shot. Eventually it was necessary to find two chairs for us to stand on, so that we could appear as if we were in complete control of the mass of volumes arranged car-boot-style beneath us, with the two of us proudly surveying them like nineteenth-century European
princelings.
This was one of the best publicity shots we managed. Numerous other journalists and their photographers thought it would be comical for us to hold half of the volumes each and for their photographer to snap us just as a stack started to topple and we were about to drop them. After one or two experiences of that order, we toughened up and refused to act as construction workers, as bookends, or as mannequins holding open books of condolence.
The launch itself, many years in the planning, was at Claridge’s Hotel in London. It was rather a damp squib for the editors. All the exciting work had already been done and we were unused to sticking our heads out of our offices to talk about it in public. But the University Press was delighted with how things went. Literary critic Christopher Ricks, author Malcolm Bradbury, and former Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin were amongst the guest speakers, and they praised the University, and the University Press, and the editors generously for their endeavour and their commitment to scholarship. They had not at that point had an opportunity to read all twenty of our volumes, so what they said must have been based on first impressions. The first impression, in fact, of the Second Edition sold out within months—mainly to university libraries around the world.