The Word Detective

by John Simpson

  I mention the change of title to chief editor because you’ll only ask if I don’t. It didn’t make any difference to my relationship with Ed. We were still both firmly behind the dictionary, and its editors, and looking forward to ploughing through the text as rapidly as we could. What it meant on a day-to-day level for me was that I was the editor everyone in the University Press, the University, and the outside world turned to for anything to do with the dictionary. We had to convert a series of policy proposals into a project plan, and I was responsible for establishing all of the editorial milestones, objectives, and work rates. Most of this would be guesswork until we had actually done a substantial amount of work, but I soon discovered I was best advised not to broadcast this. The Admiral fed all the figures into his spreadsheet, and we scratched our heads whenever the output seemed problematic (i.e., we’d need to request a big budget for a longer time, etc.). Being chief editor also meant, at least to my mind, that I should fight for the highest practical editorial standard, whatever the implications for resources. So I did. I wasn’t always popular upstairs at the University Press. The University itself was much easier to deal with—academics knew that the OED was extraordinary, though they didn’t quite know how. But as they didn’t have to pay for it, they didn’t really care.

  I most liked dealing with the public, who were usually amazed if we so much as replied courteously and rapidly to their letters. Since 1983, we’d coordinated the way the OED replied to letters about language from the general public under the umbrella of the Oxford Word and Language Service (OWLS, as the witty acronym continually reminded us). People liked the friendly face of the dictionary that OWLS presented. When it was launched, I had to appear on the BBC1 early-evening TV show Nationwide to answer questions about language rung in by viewers. Later, we shared the task of answering readers’ questions around the dictionary department, and then a couple of my colleagues wrote a book containing many of the most common Q&As (Questions of English, written by Jeremy Marshall and Fred McDonald, and published in 1994). We weren’t swamped by correspondence, but word got around that OWLS was an approachable service which came up with reliable answers.

  The questions were often straightforward, if you were a lexicographer—questions about spelling in -ize or -ise (realise/realize), about the name for a cat-lover (ailurophile), the name for the part of its back that an animal can’t scratch (acnestis), the word for the channel under your nose (philtrum), the history of sorry, the etymology of O.K. (old Boston slang for “orl/all correct,” as the evidence so far indicates), whether someone’s daughter’s new word can go straight into the dictionary (not unless it catches on), and so forth. Once people realised that there were real people answering their letters, they would send back thank-you notes. Someone once said he was so pleased and proud to receive a letter from the chief editor of the OED that he had had it framed and then pinned it up in his shed. That was going well until we reached the “shed” bit. Being there when the public thought they were probably writing to a brick wall in Oxford was worth the time spent responding.

  The one thing that people couldn’t seem to fathom, I discovered, as time went on, was how I (well, anyone) could handle the responsibility of being the chief editor of the OED. “I wouldn’t be able to get out of bed in the morning,” they’d say, or “I just wouldn’t be able to decide which words to include and which to leave out,” or “I would just panic.” It’s difficult to answer that one, but I had to fairly often. I’d calmly explain that we had rules and regulations, and guidelines and advisory reports, and had an excellent text to work with in the first place, and so decisions such as these usually made themselves. But still, this was usually too much for people to comprehend. One senior lady librarian in America even curtsied when we first met.

  We were still learning how to edit the big dictionary. We had our policies, but policies cannot answer every eventuality. At home, we were also developing strategies, but this time for looking after Ellie. Strategies were good, but they didn’t necessarily help you break new ground. Although teachers’ reports on Kate were always positive, with Ellie it was a different matter. She was fast approaching three, and she definitely wasn’t following the expected plan. She was slipping behind her peers developmentally: I think we secretly hoped for years that she would “catch up,” but all the time she was losing ground. Hilary and I just took one day at a time, relied on our instincts, tried to do our best for Ellie, and defaulted to the rules unless we thought they were wrong. We recognised by now that she had some form of serious developmental delay, and we had to accustom ourselves to a whole new side of bringing up a child and navigating the education system. We had more questions than answers. What was her condition, and how quickly would she develop? Would she have a drastically reduced lifespan? How could we accelerate her development? Were we the best people to do it anyway? What we both badly needed as parents of a disabled daughter was information and hope. Reliable information was in very short supply, and hope was something you invented for yourself.

  One major worry we had was that she would never walk. She crawled a little—late, slowly, without much sense of purpose. Eventually we did see her trying to lift herself off the floor on to the edge of furniture, and even more slowly to propel herself towards whatever her objectives were. But it was late before she could walk—and even now she is a very careful walker, as if she knows she might easily trip up. It was all part of her long struggle, which little in our own backgrounds helped us to alleviate.

  We took the view that we would be more use to Ellie if we remained as far as possible in full-time work, and employed people who were more able than us to provide the educational stimulation that she needed, either at home or in a nursery setting. At one point my parents offered to pay for any medical treatment she needed. They will have softly added “within reason” under their breath or in their heads. They had some idea that there were clinics in America and Poland that had done wonders with profoundly disabled children. But as we didn’t have a firm diagnosis, there wasn’t any cure.

  Ellie’s day-to-day objectives were basic: food, the door (for a buggy-ride outside or a drive in the car), a person (probably an indeterminate person—but not always) for warmth, sound, texture. She was big on texture, and on action. Not that she initiated any, but she liked things happening to her. The main one was being driven in a car and watching things go past the window. That made her happy, and still does.

  I desperately wanted to hear her speak, and to speak to her. There was a period of about eighteen months when we used to return home from work every day hoping to hear that Ellie had spoken her first word. It never happened. We’d look for signs of comprehension, and try to transmit ideas to her by action, tone, if not by speech. But it was no use. There was communication and comprehension happening, but it was at a very low level: she seemed to understand about five words. But was it even that? Was she just picking up on situations in which they might be used (“car,” “food,” “drink”—not much else). Then at times she’d burst out laughing: it’s always been clear that she has a quiet sense of humour. And she liked the colour yellow for some reason.

  I think our friends didn’t quite understand the depth of her problems. They would have understood “blind,” or “deaf,” but not “wordless.” Somehow they thought we were exaggerating the issue, and that she was just holding back until she was comfortable with speech. Her wordlessness stood in such dramatic distinction to the rest of my life. My family was so intensely literate. Hilary’s PhD and interests lay in the modern novel, and in the interplay of male and female fiction; Kate (by now ten years old) would spend most of her spare time hammering the keyboard of our personal computer, creating stories of queens and princesses and witches communicating freely in a world of faery enchantment. At work I was surrounded by people who couldn’t stop talking about words, analysing them, making clever linguistic connections, and we encountered fresh waves of brains every time we advertised for new editorial staff for t
he dictionary.

  But at home, our evenings were spent worrying and trying to think how we could get through to Ellie. She’d look at you directly, eye to eye (she still does), and you’d think that there must be something preverbal passing between you. Maybe she thought the same. Maybe she thought I had the problem if I couldn’t work out whatever cognitive system she was employing—but I couldn’t. You learn to cope, but you always hope that the next day there will be a change—in you or in her. There never was. She changes very, very slowly, and sometimes so slowly that you miss it.

  Where I failed, professionals tried. They encouraged her to do useless activities that were supposed to develop a link between actions and words. Sometimes little things sank into her memory, and we’d be surprised how she could remember a face, say, after months. But nothing coordinated remained, nothing that could be a cognitive platform from which easy communication might develop. In the end, we found that gestures and tone—leading, guiding, directing, assisting—were all we could use, and we hoped that she was happy with our efforts. We were an excessively “wordy” family with a wordless newcomer in our midst: at times she dragged us into her silence, and we couldn’t think how to help her.

  ELEVEN

  Shenanigans Online

  Most lexicographers, if you ask them, will tell you that the letters of the alphabet have their own individual characters. They will say—and I’m guessing here, because I’ve never asked any of them—that the vowels are the problem letters. Vowels can go off anywhere at a tangent—they are volatile elements in the periodic table of the alphabet. You can track this volatility through pronunciation. The consonants are generally pronounced as you might expect, but this is not the case with vowels. The letter a is pronounced differently (depending on your variety of English) in man, name, father, bath, village, comma, wan, war, and many, and that doesn’t take account of vowel pairs such as ay, au, etc. Historically, a long a (as in Old English stan)—when written—can be the predecessor of our long o (as in stone); some varieties of English use aesthetic and others esthetic; an ambassador could be an embassador (as in embassy). I never feel that an A word gives you a hint of what it means until you are some way into it—it doesn’t explode, or insinuate, or stutter from the very start.

  When you pass beyond A you hit the simple battering aggression of B—break, bunch, bewail, beleaguered, bite, bump. It’s a rough ride, but B doesn’t throw anything unexpected at you. C is calmer: cat, cylinder, cool, cold, crystal—you can’t generate too much energy with a gentle c-sound (ch- is different; cl- can be noisy). D is explosive, like B—danger, death, dredge, dungeon. And then you are back with another difficult vowel: E. The letter E is the commonest (that is, the most frequently used) letter in the English language, which does make it something of a handful. Rather like A, it is not always pronounced the same way—though varieties of English differ: be, here, there, acme, bed, alert, eh, and even clerk. Since the early Middle Ages we haven’t even pronounced it in—for example—love and name (the non-philological “magic E”). It introduces major prefixes, which add to the lexicographer’s workload: em-, en-, endo-, epi-, eso-, ex-, extra-. In general, it’s always there.

  The alphabet, therefore, is inconsiderate enough to start with a problem letter—A. As we prepared to revise the entire OED in 1994, we needed to decide quick sharp whether to begin our revision here, or somewhere in the alphabet where the editing would be less alphabetically turbulent.

  I’ve read something about the characters of the letters of the alphabet before, in my favourite book about the OED: Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages—Ammon Shea’s blog-like account of reading through the dictionary from A to Z, published in 2008. What is important for me about this book is that it actually responds to the content, not to how the text was stitched together. So we hear someone else’s view about what it feels like to read the letter A, and how the letter A differs in its character, for example, from the letter G. At the same time we are introduced to the engaging parallel narrative of Ammon’s life whilst he was reading each letter: where he lived, what he was doing, why he struggled with some parts of the text. It actually starts to bring the dictionary to life in a way that almost all other books about dictionaries fail to do.

  These were very early days for the revised OED project. We moved into new, open-plan offices at the University Press, taking possession of the ground once held by the Press’s great printing machines. It heralded for us the beginning of a new era in publishing. Our general plan for this comprehensive revision of the dictionary was simple: work through the entire text of the OED, updating all aspects of each entry (many of which were unchanged since the Victorian period) according to the best information available to modern scholarship. While we were charged initially with completing and publishing in the year 2000, it soon became plain to everyone that the target date would have to be reset to 2005. Later, it was reset again, to 2010. One of the original OED editors, Sir William Craigie, used to tell anyone who asked, at whatever stage the project had reached, that it would be completed in about five years. As 2010 approached, and the end was not in sight, our arguments changed: we were online, the OED was in future going to be in a continual, dynamic state of change, and any completion date was less meaningful now than it would have been in past eras. That was my argument, at least. Rather like William Craigie, I’d say fifteen or twenty years whenever asked. It was the quality that mattered; quicker publication would impair the dictionary. As time passed, so much newly accessible information about the history of the language became available through the Internet that it made sense to reassess our scope and time constantly.

  As well as thinking about the scope of the work, we also had to buckle down to do some of it. And the first question to arise in this department was where we should begin. After due consideration, we decided not to start the revision at the letter A, as any normal person would have done, but to kick the whole shenanigans off halfway through the alphabet, at the letter M. In the following years I was continually asked—by journalists, managers, editorial staff, and by myself—why we had started at M. The easy answer was so that we could get to the end more quickly, but only a few people swallowed that. The real reason was that Ed and I both thought the early part of the original dictionary was somewhat unkempt editorially. The first editors—back in the 1880s—had been struggling to find a style when they started off in A, and even to find enough data to fill their pages. It was going to be particularly hard to update that material. So why would we want to make life difficult for ourselves?

  Shenanigans is another of those nonsense words of unknown or debated origin (like bloviate and absquatulate) which contains enough implicit suggestions to make you think it might have arisen amongst the self-confident braggadocio of mid-nineteenth-century Irish America, when the Wild West was being won. And most of that turns out to be true. We have already seen a number of strange and fanciful formations arise in early nineteenth-century America (to which we might add discombobulate). We don’t know the origin of shenanigans with any certainty, but we know it hit our screens around 1855—in California. Most of the early references for the term come from the San Francisco area, so that might be a hint. That’s like the fact that most of the early references for O.K. come from Boston, in the late 1830s and early 1840s. Again, it gives the detectives amongst us a geographical clue to its origins. Words can grow like cultures: the first records cluster in a particular place for several years, before people—via the media, or just the transport system—take them elsewhere.

  An odd thing about shenanigans is that when it first appeared it was shenanigan. Not in the plural. That would sound very odd today, and you might be given an old-fashioned stare if you used it in the singular—and be corrected. Here’s Mark Twain using the word rather uncertainly in a letter he wrote in 1862: “Consider them all guilty (of ‘shenanigan’) until they are proved innocent.” The OED carries references to this singular form until around 1960. Maybe it still exists
: most things do, even if you think they are well and truly obsolete. The dictionary presents 1926 (yes, as late as 1926) as the first time someone thought the word should be plural shenanigans (trickery, intrigue; a plot, a carry-on), and that was the American writer Edna Ferber in her novel Show Boat.

  There were plenty of other good reasons for beginning the editorial work later in the alphabet. The order of the letters in the English alphabet isn’t significant, so it doesn’t matter in what order you edit them. M was a friendly letter. That is one of its characteristic properties. Mmmmmm. Umm. Yum yum. When the letter M was originally edited, in the early twentieth century, the dictionary was on a stable course and the results made for impressive reading. It was not going to be excessively difficult—we thought fondly—for us to test our mettle on it before heading back to the choppier waters of A, B, and C. Also, it contains a nice mix of words from the Germanic and Romance streams, which form the bedrock of English today. Generally, it gave us a good variety of editorial issues without presenting us with anything problematic. Obviously we hadn’t noticed that after a few pages of text we would hit the verb make and all of the problems involved in updating a deceptively short and ancient word with viciously sharp teeth. The verb make slowed us down somewhat. It dates right back to the earliest tiers of Anglo-Saxon English: our revised entry gave it over 300 separate senses, illustrated by almost 3,000 quotations; we had found 200 ways it could be spelt over the ages in all of its tenses and persons, and our new etymology took up more than one and a half standard computer screens, rather than the previous ten lines or so. Still, it provided a stern but beneficial test for us as we applied our new editorial policies.

  We had also decided that although we would start at M, we would only proceed alphabetically until the end of the letter R, before turning tail and closing the gap between A and L, and then heading off into the sunset from S to Z. The reasons for this modus operandi were esoteric, and involved the unlikely named Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue (DOST). This is a thoroughgoing, card-carrying dictionary of early Scots from the twelfth to the seventeenth centuries, initiated by that former OED editor, Sir William Craigie, in the 1920s. A sample of entries includes words like schalange, “a variant of challenge”; schald, “a sand-bank or shallow”; and schalk, “a man, a fellow”—two of which are also in the OED, and the other one probably should be. After years of slow progress, work on it had reached the letter R, and because of the significance of this dictionary to the OED’s etymologies and documentation for early Scots vocabulary, we didn’t want to edit on ahead of it. (In the end, the DOST editors put on a major spurt and had their material ready for us to look at just when we needed it.)