The Information (11 page)

Neither Bullokar nor Blount so much as mentioned Cawdrey. He was already forgotten. But in 1933, upon the publication of the greatest word book of all, the first editors of the
Oxford English Dictionary
did pay their respects to his “slim, small volume.” They called it “the original acorn” from which their oak had grown. (Cawdrey: “
akecorne
,
k
fruit.”)

Four hundred and two years after the
Table Alphabeticall
, the International Astronomical Union voted to declare Pluto a nonplanet, and John Simpson had to make a quick decision. He and his band of lexicographers in Oxford were working on the
P
’s.
Pletzel, plish, pod person, point-and-shoot
, and
polyamorous
were among the new words entering the
OED
. The entry for Pluto was itself relatively new. The planet had been discovered only in 1930, too late for the
OED
’s first edition. The name Minerva was first proposed and then rejected because there was already an asteroid Minerva. In terms of names, the heavens were beginning to fill up. Then “Pluto” was suggested by Venetia Burney, an eleven-year-old resident of Oxford. The
OED
caught up by adding an entry for Pluto in its second edition: “1. A small planet of the solar system lying beyond the orbit of Neptune … 2. The name of a cartoon dog that made its first appearance in Walt Disney’s
Moose Hunt
, released in April 1931.”

“We really don’t like being pushed into megachanges,”
^♦
Simpson said, but he had little choice. The Disney meaning of
Pluto
had proved more stable than the astronomical sense, which was downgraded to “small planetary body.” Consequences rippled through the
OED
.
Pluto
was removed from the list under
planet n
. 3a.
Plutonian
was revised (not to be confused with
pluton
,
plutey
, or
plutonyl
).

Simpson was the sixth in a distinguished line, the editors of the
Oxford English Dictionary
, whose names rolled fluently off his tongue—“Murray, Bradley, Craigie, Onions, Burchfield, so however many fingers that is”—and saw himself as a steward of their traditions, as well as traditions of English lexicography extending back to Cawdrey by way of Samuel Johnson. James Murray in the nineteenth century established a working method based on index cards, slips of paper 6 inches by 4 inches. At any given moment a thousand such slips sat on Simpson’s desk, and within a stone’s throw were millions more, filling metal files and wooden boxes with the ink of two centuries. But the word-slips had gone obsolete. They had become treeware.
Treeware
had just entered the
OED
as “computing slang, freq. humorous”;
blog
was recognized in 2003,
dot-commer
in 2004,
cyberpet
in 2005, and the verb
to Google
in 2006. Simpson himself Googled often. Beside the word-slips his desk held conduits into the nervous system of the language: instantaneous connection to a worldwide network of proxy amateur lexicographers and access to a vast, interlocking set of databases growing asymptotically toward the ideal of All Previous Text. The dictionary had met cyberspace, and neither would be the same thereafter. However much Simpson loved the
OED
’s roots and legacy, he was leading a revolution, willy-nilly—in what it was, what it knew, what it saw. Where Cawdrey had been isolated, Simpson was connected.

The English language, spoken now by more than a billion people globally, has entered a period of ferment, and the perspective available in these venerable Oxford offices is both intimate and sweeping. The language upon which the lexicographers eavesdrop has become wild and amorphous: a great, swirling, expanding cloud of messaging and speech; newspapers, magazines, pamphlets; menus and business memos; Internet news groups and chat-room conversations; television and radio broadcasts and phonograph records. By contrast, the dictionary itself has acquired the status of a monument, definitive and towering. It exerts an influence on the language it tries to observe. It wears its authoritative role reluctantly. The lexicographers may recall Ambrose Bierce’s sardonic century-old definition: “
dictionary
, a malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic.”
^♦
Nowadays they stress that they do not presume (or deign) to disapprove any particular usage or spelling. But they cannot disavow a strong ambition: the goal of completeness. They want every word, all the lingo: idioms and euphemisms, sacred or profane, dead or alive, the King’s English or the street’s. It is an ideal only: the constraints of space and time are ever present and, at the margins, the question of what qualifies as a word can become impossible to answer. Still, to the extent possible, the
OED
is meant to be a perfect record, perfect mirror of the language.

The dictionary ratifies the persistence of the word. It declares that the meanings of words come from other words. It implies that all words, taken together, form an interlocking structure: interlocking, because all words are defined in terms of other words. This could never have been an issue in an oral culture, where language was barely visible. Only when printing—and the dictionary—put the language into separate relief, as an object to be scrutinized, could anyone develop a sense of word meaning as interdependent and even circular. Words had to be considered as words, representing other words, apart from things. In the twentieth century, when the technologies of logic advanced to high levels, the potential for circularity became a problem. “In giving explanations I
already have to use language full blown,”
^♦
complained Ludwig Wittgenstein. He echoed Newton’s frustration three centuries earlier, but with an extra twist, because where Newton wanted words for nature’s laws, Wittgenstein wanted words for words: “When I talk about language (words, sentences, etc.) I must speak the language of every day. Is this language somehow too coarse and material for what we want to say?” Yes. And the language was always in flux.

James Murray was speaking of the language as well as the book when he said, in 1900, “The English Dictionary, like the English Constitution, is the creation of no one man, and of no one age; it is a growth that has slowly developed itself adown the ages.”
^♦
The first edition of what became the
OED
was one of the largest books that had ever been made:
A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles
, 414,825 words in ten weighty volumes, presented to King George V and President Calvin Coolidge in 1928. The work had taken decades; Murray himself was dead; and the dictionary was understood to be out of date even as the volumes were bound and sewn. Several supplements followed, but not till 1989 did the second edition appear: twenty volumes, totaling 22,000 pages. It weighed 138 pounds. The third edition is different. It is weightless, taking its shape in the digital realm. It may never again involve paper and ink. Beginning in the year 2000, a revision of the entire contents began to appear online in quarterly installments, each comprising several thousand revised entries and hundreds of new words.

Cawdrey had begun work naturally enough with the letter
A
, and so had James Murray in 1879, but Simpson chose to begin with
M
. He was wary of the
A
’s. To insiders it had long been clear that the
OED
as printed was not a seamless masterpiece. The early letters still bore scars of the immaturity of the uncertain work in Murray’s first days. “Basically he got here, sorted his suitcases out and started setting up text,” Simpson said. “It just took them a long time to sort out their policy and things, so if we started at A, then we’d be making our job doubly difficult. I think they’d sorted themselves out by … well, I was going to say D, but Murray always said that
E was the worst letter, because his assistant, Henry Bradley, started E, and Murray always said that he did that rather badly. So then we thought, maybe it’s safe to start with G, H. But you get to G and H and there’s I, J, K, and you know, you think, well, start after that.”

The first thousand entries from
M
to
mahurat
went online in the spring of 2000. A year later, the lexicographers reached words starting with
me: me-ism
(a creed for modern times),
meds
(colloq. for drugs),
medspeak
(doctors’ jargon),
meet-and-greet
(a N. Amer. type of social occasion), and an assortment of combined forms under
media
(baron, circus, darling, hype, savvy) and
mega-
(pixel, bitch, dose, hit, trend). This was no longer a language spoken by 5 million mostly illiterate inhabitants of a small island. As the
OED
revised the entries letter by letter, it also began adding neologisms wherever they arose; waiting for the alphabetical sequence became impractical. Thus one installment in 2001 saw the arrival of
acid jazz, Bollywood, channel surfing, double-click, emoticon, feel-good, gangsta, hyperlink
, and many more.
Kool-Aid
was recognized as a new word, not because the
OED
feels obliged to list proprietary names (the original Kool-Ade powdered drink had been patented in the United States in 1927) but because a special usage could no longer be ignored: “to drink the Kool-Aid: to demonstrate unquestioning obedience or loyalty.” The growth of this peculiar expression since the use of a powdered beverage in a mass poisoning in Guyana in 1978 bespoke a certain density of global communication.

But they were no slaves to fashion, these Oxford lexicographers. As a rule a neologism needs five years of solid evidence for admission to the canon. Every proposed word undergoes intense scrutiny. The approval of a new word is a solemn matter. It must be in general use, beyond any particular place of origin; the
OED
is global, recognizing words from everywhere English is spoken, but it does not want to capture local quirks. Once added, a word cannot come out. A word can go obsolete or rare, but the most ancient and forgotten words have a way of reappearing—rediscovered or spontaneously reinvented—and in any case they are part of the language’s history. All 2,500 of Cawdrey’s words are in the
OED
, perforce. For thirty-one of them Cawdrey’s little book was the first known usage. For a few
Cawdrey is all alone. This is troublesome. The
OED
is irrevocably committed. Cawdrey, for example, has “
onust
, loaden, overcharged”; so the
OED
has “loaded, burdened,” but it is an outlier, a one-off. Did Cawdrey make it up? “I’m tending towards the view that he was attempting to reproduce vocabulary he had heard or seen,” Simpson said. “But I can’t be absolutely sure.” Cawdrey has “
hallucinate
, to deceive, or blind”; the
OED
duly gave “to deceive” as the first sense of the word, though it never found anyone else who used it that way. In cases like these, the editors can add their double caveat “
Obs. rare
.” But there it is.

For the twenty-first-century
OED
a single source is never enough. Strangely, considering the vastness of the enterprise and its constituency, individual men and women strive to have their own nonce-words ratified by the
OED
.
Nonce-word
, in fact, was coined by James Murray himself. He got it in. An American psychologist, Sondra Smalley, coined the word
codependency
in 1979 and began lobbying for it in the eighties; the editors finally drafted an entry in the nineties, when they judged the word to have become established. W. H. Auden declared that he wanted to be recognized as an
OED
word coiner—and he was, at long last, for
motted
,
metalogue
,
spitzy
, and others.
^♦
The dictionary had thus become engaged in a feedback loop. It inspired a twisty self-consciousness in the language’s users and creators. Anthony Burgess whinged in print about his inability to break through: “I invented some years ago the word
amation
, for the art or act of making love, and still think it useful. But I have to persuade others to use it
in print
before it is eligible for lexicographicizing (if that word exists)”
^♦
—he knew it did not. “T. S. Eliot’s large authority got the shameful (in my view)
juvescence
into the previous volume of the Supplement.” Burgess was quite sure that Eliot simply misspelled
juvenescence
. If so, the misspelling was either copied or reprised twenty-eight years later by Stephen Spender, so
juvescence
has two citations, not one. The
OED
admits that it is rare.

As hard as the
OED
tries to embody the language’s fluidity, it cannot help but serve as an agent of its crystallization. The problem of spelling poses characteristic difficulties. “
Every
form in which a word has occurred throughout its history”
^♦
is meant to be included. So for
mackerel
(“a well-known sea-fish,
Scomber scombrus
, much used for food”) the second edition in 1989 listed nineteen alternative spellings. The unearthing of sources never ends, though, so the third edition revised entry in 2002 listed no fewer than thirty:
maccarel, mackaral, mackarel, mackarell, mackerell, mackeril, mackreel, mackrel, mackrell, mackril, macquerel, macquerell, macrel, macrell, macrelle, macril, macrill, makarell, makcaral, makerel, makerell, makerelle, makral, makrall, makreill, makrel, makrell, makyrelle, maquerel
, and
maycril
. As lexicographers, the editors would never declare these alternatives to be wrong: misspellings. They do not wish to declare their choice of spelling for the headword,
mackerel
, to be “correct.” They emphasize that they examine the evidence and choose “the most common current spelling.” Even so, arbitrary considerations come into play: “Oxford’s house style occasionally takes precedence, as with verbs which can end -ize or -ise, where the -ize spelling is always used.” They know that no matter how often and how firmly they disclaim a prescriptive authority, a reader will turn to the dictionary to find out how a word should be spelled. They cannot escape inconsistencies. They feel obliged to include words that make purists wince. A new entry as of December 2003 memorialized
nucular
: “= nuclear
a
. (in various senses).” Yet they refuse to count evident misprints found by way of Internet searches. They do not recognize
straight-laced
, even though statistical evidence finds that bastardized form outnumbering
strait-laced
. For the crystallization of spelling, the
OED
offers a conventional explanation: “Since the invention of the printing press, spelling has become much less variable, partly because printers wanted uniformity and partly because of a growing interest in language study during the Renaissance.” This is true. But it omits the role of the dictionary itself, arbitrator and exemplar.