by John Simpson
Sir James Murray had tried to move along this track, and had found himself heavily criticised in Oxford for citing newspapers (which he continued to do unabashedly all the same). We told the Advisory Committee how we proposed to broaden the catchment area of our sources, and fortunately there was no dissent. It was the OED that was behind the times, not the scholars—this time. We didn’t tell them how far we would move in future, because the issue—for example—of citing web pages didn’t exist. In due course we did open up the floodgates even further, accepting evidence of the language from the Internet—from personal web pages, for example (retaining a copy in our files in case it disappeared from our screens over time). The first reference today for LOL = “laugh out loud” comes from a source (as you might expect) that was only distributed electronically (a glossary in the FIDONews—an early computer bulletin board—of 8 May 1989: “LOL—Laughing Out Loud”). We didn’t want to miss factual information like that just because we insisted on citing only printed sources. I’m glad we didn’t have to argue that one to the Advisory Committee back then—in the mid-1990s it might have been a step too far.
This was a small decision made one rainy afternoon in our meeting room overlooking the OUP’s green quadrangle, but it validated our plans; although it would be a long time before the legacy effect of the canonical authors might be significantly eroded, we now had approval from Oxford to make this momentous change. Oddly enough, we felt that we were not so much veering from the unwritten policy of Sir James Murray as we were turning back to Murray’s ways from the more recent literary-lion policy of our former chief editor, Bob Burchfield.
By the early 1990s, I had been working at the OED for over fifteen years, rather pleased that I had no particular links with the University of Oxford except through my employment at the University Press. The University Press was a department of the University, but it was the “publishing department,” rather than one of the academic teaching and research departments. It operated regular office terms for its staff—we didn’t receive long university holidays or research sabbaticals, even though we sometimes thought that a research break would benefit us and also benefit the dictionary in the long run. I was happy enough to be an onlooker squinting askance at the strange activities I saw outside my various office windows, as students wandered off to examinations in their dark gowns (subfusc). University politics and arguments were for others. About half of the dictionary’s editorial staff had taken degrees at Oxford or Cambridge, so that left a reasonable proportion of disinterested observers such as my good self.
I think I did resent the pressure that an effectively closed academic community could exert both on the city of Oxford (by owning so much property it had tended to hold back urban development over the centuries) and on learning (by appearing to restrict rather than disseminate knowledge outside its ranks). But worse was the obscurantism of the University administration. This seemed to be where the oldest and most inscrutable customs were preserved: they felt exclusive simply through their terminology—“Hebdomadal Council,” which met (after the Greek, you understand) every seven days; they advertised strange posts, such as the “six-hour stipendiary lecturer in English” (with stipendiary from the Latin, naturally); the sets of professors charged with overseeing the publishing activities of the University Press were called “the Delegates,” and the Press’s CEO was known as “the Secretary” (to the Delegates). This wasn’t a big issue for me, but I had been happy to remain on the other side of the fence, and I was also happy to steer the dictionary whenever I could away from this apparent exclusivity. I’m afraid I even vetoed the use of Scriptorium (Murray’s term) for our editorial offices.
There are numerous words which derive from the universities and colleges (and the private schools) around the English-speaking world. Sometimes they remain within their circumscribed and rarefied ambit, and sometimes they break out into the real world: bed-sitter (British universities: single-room accommodation combining bedroom and sitting-room), beer pong (North America: a drinking game in which table-tennis balls end up in beer cups), funk (Oxford: state of cowering fear), moby (American colleges: large), skiver (Notre Dame University: student who leaves campus without permission), noughth week (Oxford: the week before the first week of term), and viva (British and other university traditions: an oral examination following on from written papers)—to name a handful. Slang is often a way to exclude others and to reinforce your herd mentality (sorry—shared subculture).
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries you might have used the adjective fusk or fuscous to mean “dark (in colour), sombre,” especially if you were of a poetical persuasion or were engaged in natural history research. In their search for something mysteriously Latin and known only to the initiated, the University authorities in Oxford and Cambridge of the early nineteenth century let it be understood that the formal attire worn by undergraduates for examinations and other official occasions would be referred to by the adjective subfusc (“somewhat dark in colour”—not jet black). By around 1850, the adjective had developed into a noun as well, so you might don your subfusc for your Moderations (first examination). It’s still the standard word in that context today, though poets and natural historians have largely moved on.
Although I had worked alongside the University for many years without attempting to integrate with it, the time came when some rapprochement seemed in order. Needless to say, it made absolutely no difference to the University, but I thought it would be beneficial to the dictionary. One option would have been for me to offer classes in lexicography within the University. But it was generally agreed on the project that lexicographers should edit, and not break up their day with academic teaching commitments, as these would deflect them from the most important part of their lives. This seemed to be a rule when I joined the dictionary in 1976 and had worked well. If you wanted to, you could teach outside office hours, but that never appealed to me. There were enough other odd souls drifting around Oxford to pick up any additional teaching that the college or University authorities offered, without upsetting the dictionary’s apple cart. But as I had never regarded myself as a natural teacher, I chose not to take this route.
As time went by, however, I did develop closer connections with several components of the University: the English faculty (naturally enough), the Department for External Studies, and the new Kellogg College. The Department for External Studies was the department of the University that dealt with real people—mostly part-time mature students who only occasionally had to dress up as penguins in their gowns. From time to time my colleagues or I would hold day schools for the department on the history, or the practice, or perhaps the future, of dictionary-making. External Studies was an old and characteristically not “inclusive” term. The University is changing—now, it refers to External Studies in the acceptable idiom of the day as “Continuing Education” and “lifelong learning.” In Oxford, teaching departments (such as Continuing Education, which run the faculty staff and most teaching administration) are quite distinct from colleges (to which students are attached as their base).
After the first one of these day schools in which the OED had become involved, Ed and I heard the phone buzzing in our office. Ed answered it and, unusually, adopted something of an obsequious tone. It sounded like University business, as indeed it was. The upshot of it was that the president and Governing Body of the recently founded Kellogg College (the student base most closely associated with Continuing Education) had met together in conclave the previous afternoon and had (in our ignorance) elected Ed and myself as Fellows. Fellows are the senior members of a college, whether they hold teaching posts in the university or are associated with the college in an honorary capacity; a college in Oxford is based around the concept of its “fellowship” of academics. Ed and I came from different traditions. He was delighted with this honour and I was, in keeping with my traditional misgivings, both suspicious and dismissive. Why did I need to involve myself with University politics wh
en I was quite happy as I was?
It turned out (again) that there wasn’t much room for discussion, and it seemed I was wrong to be churlish. Soon we were being measured up for our caps and gowns and whatever else was required. We clocked on as “Supernumerary Fellows” and started to involve ourselves in the life of the college as far as we were able. Supernumerary really does means “surplus to requirements,” so we knew our place.
The president of Kellogg, Geoffrey Thomas, told us that he wanted us as Fellows because the college catered mainly to part-time, postgraduate, mature students—typically students who were returning to learning after a period at work. His thinking in appointing us was, as he explained, that both the college and the dictionary provided access to knowledge for the ordinary person: they were trying to unwrap what might be regarded as the arcane and privileged world of scholarship and to empower the interested student. He was a cunning president who had created a college for part-time students in the face of stiff opposition within the broader University. He was being cunning again now. But what he said made sense, and we were glad to be there.
For myself, the Fellowship meant an important shift of emphasis, as it gave me a perch close enough to the University but not too close, and it brought the dictionary into direct contact with real people who were interested in acquiring knowledge. Many of the students had missed out on the chance to pursue higher-level studies during their first time round the educational system. The connection brought new specialist consultants for the dictionary within easy reach and, without intending to, also gave the dictionary a boost from within the University at a time when external support and acclaim could do the dictionary no harm at all.
At the same time, Ed and I were trying to edge our Advisory Committee towards approving the initial, pilot, and experimental work we were doing. We wanted to steer the committee to the stage where they stopped talking about things, and required us to produce a stretch of revised and updated text—taking the original nineteenth-century entries and subjecting them to whatever policies we had hit upon for the comprehensive revision. If the committee liked what it saw, then it would give us the thumbs-up and would recommend to the full body of Delegates of the University Press that it back us with some serious money.
It would be nice to be able to say that we really steered the committee to this stage, but of course it got there by itself. After two years of meetings, we had to produce something definitive. There was a certain amount of nervousness in the editorial corridors as we dutifully—but also with great excitement—applied the policies we had developed to a range of dictionary data. We reviewed the documentation and predated and updated each entry in our subset; we rewrote etymologies, trying to drag as much standardisation into the procedure as we could (as we had a feeling that this would make the finished product more tractable to computation); we added new meanings and new expressions; we rejudged whether words were formal or informal English (and we found quite a bit of movement towards informality in the language as we worked along). Definitions needed rewriting to drag them out of their nineteenth-century idiom. And at last we were done.
We submitted our efforts to the next meeting of the committee. They went away to consult amongst themselves. A few weeks later we reformed and heard the good news that the pilot study was acceptable. They would recommend to the Delegates and to the University Press that the project for the full-scale updating and revision of the dictionary should be funded. If we could have held a street party in celebration, we would have done. After many years, we were ready to start.
Even at their most trivial, the discussions we had with the Advisory Committee were vitally important, and the decisions we made there would have tremendous consequences for the future of the OED. This was the job we had all been waiting for. At last we saw ourselves embarking on a history of the whole language—not just supplementing the dictionary this time, but taking it by the scruff of the neck and forcing it into the twentieth (or, soon enough, the twenty-first) century. But we were well aware, even then, that we couldn’t solve everything in committee. We wouldn’t be able to make all the decisions at the start. Some you make as you go along. Solvitur ambulando, the Romans said: solving problems by practical experience. (The OED provides chapter and verse on the expression: “originally an allusion,” it says, “to the reported proof by Diogenes the Cynic of the possibility of motion.”) So we laid the foundations, but expected to make modifications as we actually worked with the language data.
One of the best ways to see how the emerging editorial policies and procedures we were hammering out worked in practice is to look at the results for a specific word. We can see how they held up several years later when we came to update the entry for fuck.
This was one of the words that the original OED deliberately omitted back in the late nineteenth century, when the instalment for the letter F of the First Edition was published. If the editors had worked on fuck, then it would have been published in 1898, which was when the entry immediately preceding it alphabetically was published (fucivorous: “eating, or subsisting on, seaweed”—a mid-nineteenth century Latinate word introduced temporarily into medicine). The closing years of Queen Victoria’s reign in Britain were not known for their liberal and enlightened attitude towards sex, and the inclusion of fuck would probably have involved the editors and the publishers in a short walk to a long stretch in prison. So they were probably right to skip jauntily from fucivorous to fuco’d (“beautified with fucus, painted,” mid-seventeenth-century mock Latin, fucus being—as well as a type of rock lichen—a rouge or dye for painting the face and generally titivating yourself in a way deemed suitable and attractive in the seventeenth century). With neighbouring entries like that, who would have missed one or two taboo words?
And so it wasn’t until the Supplement to the OED in 1972, in Volume One (A to G), that an entry for fuck first found a legitimate place in the dictionary. In fact, the original OED had slipped in the word windfucker—“the kestrel,” a bird of prey frequently seen hovering in the air for prey, often against a steady wind, but also a general term of abuse for a person—at the very, very end of the First Edition. This is likely to contain our word fuck: windfucker was first published towards the end of the Roaring Twenties—maybe they thought they could get away with it then, citing truth, and evidence, and responsibility to the scholarly community. Most likely, they thought no one would notice.
You might think it surprising that the cautious editors had waited until 1972 to include the word, but, other than for a brief moment in 1933 (the first supplement to the dictionary), they didn’t have any other chance. In Britain, they and their publisher would have been arrested for gross indecency anytime before 1960, when the publishers of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Penguin Books) successfully resisted a legal action brought by the powers of darkness to prevent publication of their edition of D. H. Lawrence’s novel as an “obscene publication.” Once this prosecution had failed, the parameters of what constituted an un-publishable obscenity—in Britain at least—became less austere.
Six years later, Penguin followed up its Lady Chatterley success in the sort of minute way that matters to lexicographers—but that also acts as a touchstone for the direction society in general is heading—by including the verb fuck boldly in its Penguin English Dictionary of 1965. The editor of this dictionary was the celebrated Anglo-Saxonist Norman Garmonsway, a fit figure to lend his academic weight to the inclusion of such a taboo term. (The co-editor of the second edition of the Penguin dictionary was a J. Simpson. I’ve often wondered whether this was me, but it seems it was not.)
With the principle of publication established, Oxford was right there on the second bus. But that OED entry for fuck back in the days of the OED Supplement, Volume One (1972), was short and tentative: just three numbered senses. The dictionary dated the first use in English to the early sixteenth century and defined its meaning daintily in terms of the scientific “copulation” (generally applied to animals and humans a
like) rather than the more familiar “sexual intercourse” (itself something of a euphemism). Once it had nailed the lid down on that sense, it passed on to various “profane imprecations” and exclamations (again tiptoeing rather gingerly round the issue, but providing several colourful examples: “tell whoever it is to go fuck themselves,” “fuck the bloody thing”), before venturing off to numerous unrefined phrases in which the word is used with adverbs such as about, off, and up. The Supplement could have done better, if it had had a mind to, but fuck fell in the first volume of the dictionary to have been published for almost forty years, and the editors were still operating in a very cautious marketplace.
When we came to review the entry for the OED3, we did at least have a small shell of an entry to use as a basis for our own reassessment. But at last we had the opportunity to do the entry proper justice, by investigating in detail and with modern resources its pathways into English, and the mass of—often scatological—twists and turns it took once it had arrived here. We were producing a technicolour version of the entry, when our predecessors had omitted it entirely or only managed a black-and-white, two-dimensional simulacrum. And at the same time our new policies would open up the entry and make it less cryptic.
As with most OED entries, the real story begins with the quotations we had been able to obtain—as these underpin the dictionary entry itself. Remarkably, what appears to be the earliest occurrence of fuck in English occurs in a religious context. In fact, a number of the first references have religious links. Here’s the first attestation we uncovered, from around the year 1500: “Non sunt in coeli, quia gxddbov xxkxzt pg ifmk.” The quotation was supplied for the dictionary’s files, in the time-honoured way, by a scholar reading a book published in 1848 which contained this text, and then sending it to be filed in the dictionary’s word store. The original OED knew this 1848 anthology of early English well enough—and cited it regularly—but had not been able to use this crucial evidence.