by John Simpson
The nature of Ellie’s disability emerged over time. At first the doctors noted that her weight gain was not keeping up with what was considered normal. After a few visits, we found ourselves directed towards a neurology consultant. Ellie’s new consultant was supportive and puzzled. (Hilary used to note that whenever we met him, he and I were always wearing identical clothes. We used to register that sort of thing, no doubt as a kind of counterweight to the tragedy that had overtaken our lives.) The consultant had batteries of tests run, and we became familiar with a stream of vocabulary that I’d never encountered before. He decided that Ellie wasn’t autistic, but that she had some genetic abnormality—at the mitochondrial level—perhaps Angelman or Rett syndrome. She was tested for these, but the tests came back negative.
Against the backdrop of this bewildering medical uncertainty, I wondered about putting these expressions into the OED, since the dictionary generally didn’t seek to cover the enormous range of syndromes and diseases that can afflict us. But I felt that had I included them, I would have been skewing the traditional word-selection process and letting details of my own life interfere with the neutrality of the dictionary. Nevertheless, both later found their way into the dictionary. Angelman syndrome cropped up as we worked through the files for A, and it made its way through the editorial procedure into full OED publication. It’s a short entry, giving brief background information about Harry Angelman (1915–1996), the British paediatrician who first described the condition in 1965. Angelman syndrome is a rare genetic disorder causing severe mental disability and characterised by ataxia, creating a person who is affectionate and cheerful but blissfully unaware of many things, most especially the need for speech. The first quotation from the OED reminds me even now of the dreadful habit people had of giving conditions extremely unkind informal names: the American Journal of Diseases of Children (1972) speaks of “Angelman’s (‘Happy puppet’) syndrome.”
The searchlight beams of the OED also fell on Rett, when we next waded through the waters of the letter R. Nowadays the dictionary tells us that Rett syndrome is first recorded as an expression in 1983 (in the Annals of Neurology)—and is named after Dr Andreas Rett, an Austrian physician who first described the condition in 1966. Predominantly affecting girls and starting at between six and eighteen months, it is sometimes called a “locked-in” syndrome, in that whilst the patient’s understanding is not occluded, she is unable to convey messages from her brain to her body. It is disturbing to find the neutral procedures of the OED sweeping into its maw the uncertainties of your own life.
Ellie’s disability didn’t hit us suddenly, at that breakthrough moment when my Mum noticed that something was wrong. Things are never as simple as that. Over the next few months—even years—we experienced more and more indications that something was amiss, and we would attend increasingly frequent appointments with her consultant. Her mental development had stopped, as far as we could see, at around six months of age. She wasn’t learning. No words; no sense of recognition or understanding except the very barest. She wouldn’t play; she didn’t pick things up, except to throw them gently away (“casting,” as the specialists liked to say), so she can never be given a cup to drink from without support. She smiled and laughed, but didn’t speak (she never has). We couldn’t easily tell if she was unwell, or had a headache, or had accidentally cut herself. Her natural recourse, if even slightly injured, was silence. But she was very precise in her movements, as if she recognised dangers but could do little to prevent them.
So there wasn’t one moment that we can turn back to and say, “That was the moment we knew.” And there wasn’t a particular day when the future seemed to fall apart. What we did experience, Hilary and myself, and our daughter Kate, was a growing sadness and helplessness about Ellie’s condition. Many parents must experience this. There is absolutely nothing you can do. Kate remembers reading a book about a baby who only talked when no one else was around, and she apparently convinced herself (without telling us) that this was what Ellie was doing. As it was a gradual process, we had time to come to terms with it, as much as you can. But there’s a void which won’t be filled.
We have never discovered a cause for Ellie’s condition. She is a beautiful child. Other people—including myself—are better people because of how she is, but that’s no help to her.
As time went by, we discovered that it wasn’t that she was hard to look after, but that you had to watch her every waking hour of the day, and then make sure she wasn’t a danger to herself at night. That’s the same with any young child: it’s only later that the strain starts to show.
She’s in her mid-twenties now, but still has the developmental age of a preverbal toddler. Opposable thumbs, fine motor control—those were the first milestones she failed to make, or any after that. She’s happy in her own wordless world. I always thought I would be able to break in. I’m still trying to, because you can’t give up.
As far as the dictionary was concerned, once the Second Edition of the OED was out and published we took down our cardboard progress chart from the wall and contemplated the future. We’d expected that once that progress chart was removed, we’d replace it with another one—which would allow us to plot how we were comprehensively updating what was in essentials still a Victorian dictionary. That had been the understanding throughout our work on the Second Edition: it was just the precursor to the real job of updating the big dictionary, to which everyone seemed committed and which we assumed we would move on to the moment the Second Edition was published. But now we realised that that was not the case. There could be no tangible commitment by the University Press to the immediate revision of the dictionary, because there was no approved plan. We had been naive, but someone could have told us how these things worked. Other projects needed to be completed, and the OED needed to wait its turn. Realistically, that was sensible strategic planning, but I didn’t like it at all. So, with the progress chart and all that went with it removed, I moved back to the main dictionary offices in St Giles’ to work on new words more or less full-time, while others remained in the Old Post Room preparing data for their next big thing—OED2 on CD-ROM.
This was a very active period for the New Words group. Rather than selecting our own words for OED2, we became a central post office located in an editorial no man’s land in St Giles’, receiving requests for work on new words by the editors of other, smaller Oxford dictionaries—which seemed (in contrast to the stately OED) to rush through the alphabet at a remarkable rate, and continuously to want more new words. There was a race towards informality: achy-breaky, anoraky, badassery, fusion (of music), happy-clappy (in religion), janky (of poor quality), and kikay (a flirtatious woman). Health, fitness, and extreme sports were becoming top of everyone’s agenda: hoverboard, rollerblade, snowblading, Tae-bo, three-peats (the third of three successive victories), and oversupination (running on the outside of your feet). Well, at least to me these seemed extreme sports.
I was trying to think which word I most remembered from this period. The sorry state of affairs is that it is the term burpee. This was, somewhat remarkably, a word with which I was quite familiar, from my athletic, hockey-playing days, but of which—under close examination—almost everyone else in the world refused to admit they had ever heard. In case you are rolling the word around on the tip of your tongue, the stress normally falls on the final syllable: bur-PEE. If anything, that only makes it worse.
Those of you who do or have done circuit training or any physical warm-ups prior to a sports match will be quite familiar with press-ups, star jumps, running on the spot, and all of the other muscle-stretching activities that are supposed to make you more able to race into and around your opponents during a game. You’ll also (I presume) have heard of the burpee, but will not know where on earth the term comes from. Burpee—despite its unusual form—is an example of a word derived from a personal name, and in this case we know the person.
First of all we need to understand what it is.
So stand up straight, looking forward at your instructor. Bend down and place both hands on the ground in front of your feet. Once your hands are planted on the ground, jump your legs backwards so that you’re almost in the press-up position. As if that isn’t enough, then jump forwards again so that your feet are back where they were before you bounced backwards (athletic training is reductive like that), and then return to the normal standing position. At some point in the procedure you need to ensure that you don’t bump your knees against your nose. Repeat this in a continuous easy motion ad infinitum. To the advanced-level linguist, that’s a squat thrust performed from and returning to a standing position.
How did this exercise receive such an irregular name? Here, we find ourselves in the realm of Major General Henry Shrapnel (1761–1842), the British army officer who invented an explosive shell which scattered its contents (bullets) all over the shop when it went off. So we get the word shrapnel from him. I’d like to be able to say that shrapnel is Old High German for a knight armed with a fearsome multi-pointed lance, or that it derives from the metallic sound of the projectile when it detonates, but neither would be true. Shrapnel—unlikely as it may seem—comes from a person’s name.
You can see where I’m leading. Burpee also comes from a person’s name, not from Major General Shrapnel, but from Dr Royal H. Burpee (1897–1987), an American psychologist. He devised a test, which came to be called the Burpee test, to measure a person’s agility and muscular coordination. Although the OED dates burpee test to 1939, we had to wait until 1957 to encounter the worn-down simplex burpee. And we had to wait until the 1990s before the OED took any notice of it, because—I suspect—previous editors gave little weight to the notion of sport.
The success of the Second Edition of the dictionary did give us one opportunity to expand. Our base had always been in Oxford, and yet more English was spoken outside than inside Britain. But if we really wanted to capture the changing face of English more widely, then we needed a stronger presence in America.
It would of course be wrong to claim that I noticed all of this single-handedly. We had decided several years earlier, in the mid-1980s, that it would be a good idea for the OED to have a North American crash pad. There were innumerable reasons for this, and here are three. Firstly, it seemed to us and to other language commentators that most language change was taking place in American English (and, indeed, that American English was exporting its vocabulary, even sometimes its syntax and morphology, in ever-increasing amounts, to Britain and other varieties of English). Secondly, North America was still light-years ahead of Britain technologically. And thirdly, America had been traditionally the OED’s largest market and greatest supporter.
It’s not hard to see why the United States was the focus of so much change. The more people there are using a language, the more the language changes. That’s a basic rule. Furthermore, if several language communities interact within a single linguistic space, then even more change happens. The number and mix of people in the States means that words are constantly interacting, and bending American English into new shapes (semantically and syntactically). Added to this, people generally like change: it’s symptomatic of growth and success, and so they proudly embrace new modes of expression.
Beyond the boundaries of the United States, American English had started to push change across the English-speaking world generally (and even beyond that). America was an economic success story that others wanted to share and emulate. Its culture had a high prestige; its language—a major symbol of its culture—was attractive as the purveyor of a lifestyle. American economic success, American music, American literature and films, and American cars were admired internationally and gave American English a sense of glamour abroad. If there is a weakness in American English (unlike British English), it’s that it has a tendency only slowly to accept external influences—words from other varieties of English—which is something that has always made British English strong.
We elected to take a softly-softly approach as far as the OED’s takeover of America was concerned, and so rather than filling sheds in the Midwest with unpractised lexicographers, we decided to appoint someone to run a reading programme of North American sources for us, so that we could begin to fill our files with vocabulary of a type we simply could not amass from our incident rooms in Oxford. I initially assumed that we would be espoused by one of the big American universities, and given office space, help, funds, staff, probably our own baseball caps—but offers never came. There was sometimes a feeling that for an American university to offer historical Oxford academic shelter on an American campus would only be at the expense of the homegrown American dictionary houses. For me it wasn’t a competition, but something we needed to do on our own.
To find the right person to head our American operations, we advertised throughout the American university circuit. We caught the attention of several likely candidates, who were not particularly dissimilar to the interview applicants we knew from Oxford (though sometimes perhaps slightly more advanced in years and experience). We wanted someone to manage the reading programme and, more importantly, to run it as a computer-based operation. We didn’t want more index cards choking our card-quotation cabinets.
In the end the task of appointing a director for the reading programme was easy. Jeffery Triggs was a poet and an enthusiast. He seemed to me to have the manners and style of a perfect southern gentleman along with the digital acumen of an advanced software analyst. As it happens, he was neither of the two (southern or software analyst; the manners and style can stand), and I soon learnt that whilst you were talking to him he was usually busy trying to work out how to write a program to solve whatever you were talking about. So if you asked him the time, it was sometimes quicker to look at your watch.
Yet again, Oxford and the OED were way ahead of the game in the data-collection business. It was 1989, and with Jeffery’s appointment as our North American Reading Programme director, we effectively shut down the card-file system that had served us so faithfully for 130 years. The files were (and still are) technically left open, but the vast majority of new data from then on arrived electronically. In almost all ways this method was an advantage, so we were all looking forward to working in the new computerised environment. But there was one thing that was never the same: you can’t sort online “index cards” for a word into their separate senses in the same way that you can physical cards. People tried to develop the relevant software for us. But you never have the flexibility to make adjustments to the content of the various “piles” you create. It’s hard to explain. In the old days, you could fan out the index cards in your hand, and tinker with sequences—as if you were playing poker—or you could build up piles on the office floor. You always remained in control of the data. They were present all the time. On computer, they sank or swam depending on what was observable on your screen.
From the start, Jeffery insisted that all of his “readers” key their findings directly to computer. The files were processed and then regularly sent to Oxford for incorporation in a growing database of raw language data for the editors to use when working on their words. There were numerous advantages of the new data-collection method over the old card-based one. By now, editors had desk computers for aspects of their work—though not yet for editing entries. They had purpose-built software (originally from the University of Waterloo) that let them search these reading-programme files. Having the files on computer meant that at last every word in the file was searchable: you’ll remember that the card-files were only searchable in their heavy card cabinets by catchword.
There were other advantages too. We started to write software to look automatically, by algorithm, for words (especially compound words, such as computer-assisted, or doomwatcher) which the program judged possible entrants to the dictionary—based on frequency in text. We could total, average, list, order, reorder; we could introduce thematic source tagging to help in our search for evidence; find all instances of the word nar
rative in literary theory (rather than in other contexts), or quotations for post in football (rather than horse-racing), and this saved editors’ time quite dramatically. We were starting to move into a new world of language study. Jeffery’s reading programme served the OED admirably for many years to come.
Despite this expansionist optimism, Ed and I recognised in the very late 1980s and early 1990s that we would not be handed the future on a plate. Instead, we would need to argue convincingly for the sort of OED we had begun to envisage, and for where we wanted to take the dictionary, now that it had at last become a digital resource. The publication of the Second Edition in 1989 had long been just a staging post for us. We’d computerised the data, but it still consisted mainly of a book (though now spanning twenty closely printed volumes) which had been planned in the late nineteenth century, completed in the early twentieth, and added to incrementally and in piecemeal fashion since then.
In fact, the outline of our vision for the OED was encapsulated in a little time bomb we left in the introductory text of its Second Edition. At least we thought it was a time bomb, committing the University Press to the further enhancement of the dictionary, but looking back, I realise they could easily have disregarded it. Right up there on page 55 of the printed introduction, we inserted a tiny sub-subsection entitled “The Future of the OED.” This was where we stated that not even we thought that the Second Edition was the end of the road, but that it was really only a new beginning. The dictionary had been dreamt up in the 1850s, and compiled from the 1870s onwards, but had never been comprehensively revised. This had, sensibly, been considered far too big a job by the masters of the University Press, who had continued to issue supplements without attempting a root-and-branch revision. So in “The Future of the OED,” we systematically listed many of the things that we thought needed to be done to the text of the massive dictionary to drag it out of the nineteenth century and then into the twentieth and subsequently even into the twenty-first.