You Could Look It Up (27 page)

There may be no more exemplary pair of reference books than the
Dictionnaire
and the
Dictionary
: they represent opposite poles on the dictionary continuum. On the one side is the authority imposed by academic prestige and government sanction, promoting clear notions of right and wrong—the French say
normatif
, the English
prescriptive
. On the other, Johnson’s approach to language was almost laissez-faire, believing that the job of the lexicographer was merely to note what actual people said, and recognizing that trying to regulate a human institution as messy and as complicated as a language was impossible. The only hope was to let the language evolve on its own. These two notions of the language have been at war ever since. Lexicographers and grammarians have to declare an allegiance to one side or the other, and in doing so they are certain to disappoint much of their potential audience.

CHAPTER
10 ½

OF GHOSTS AND MOUNTWEAZELS

Look up the word
foupe
in Samuel Johnson's
Dictionary
, and you'll discover that it means “To drive with a sudden impetuosity. A word out of use.” But it was more “out of use” than even Johnson realized—in fact it is not a word at all. Johnson misread the long
s
of the rare word
soupe
‘to swoop' and inadvertently coined a new word. He also summoned the word
adventine
into existence, even though his source, Francis Bacon, had written
adventive
and a printer had accidentally set it as
adventine
. Another misprint in an early edition of Bacon led James Murray to enter the word
dentize
in the
OED
, meaning “to cut new teeth.” But the word was
dentire
, misprinted in the
1626
edition of Bacon's
Sylvia
.

Instances like this abound in dictionaries, and W. W. Skeat, the great Victorian philologist, coined the term
ghost word
for these not-quite-existent words: “Like ghosts, we may seem to see them, or may fancy that they exist; but they have no real entity. We cannot grasp them; when we would do so, they disappear.”
1
A typo in the
Edinburgh Review
—
kime
instead of
knife
—led to the appearance of
kime
in several dictionaries; since the original sentence referred to Hindus stabbing their hands with
kimes
, people assumed a kime must be some ghastly torture device.
2
And a printer's inability to read the verb
nurse
in Sir Walter Scott's novel
The Monastery
created a verb
to morse
appearing in collections of Scottish lowland dialect.

The most famous ghost of the twentieth century appeared in
Webster's Second New International
, published in 1934.
Webster's
included many abbreviations in its wordlist, and the compilers planned to include the abbreviation for
density
, usually
D
, though sometimes a lowercase
d
is used. In July 1931, one lexicographer—Austin M. Patterson, special
editor for chemistry—typed a 3 × 5 card explaining the abbreviation: he headed it “D or d” and provided the explanation “density.” But when it came time to transcribe the card, someone misread it and ran the letters together without spaces, producing “Dord, density.” And then, because
Webster's
had a policy of beginning all words with a lowercase letter, the entry made it into the dictionary as “
dord
, density.” It took five years for a Merriam editor to notice the strange entry, supported by neither etymology nor pronunciation. After investigating—no one could find any evidence for a word
dord
—he realized it was a mistake. He made an annotation: “plate change / imperative / urgent,” and the printer removed
dord
from the next reprint, filling the otherwise empty line by adding a few letters to the entry for
doré furnace
.
3

Some incorrect entries, though, are intentional, part of a long tradition of clever frauds in reference books. The German
Brockhaus Enzykopädie
has a tradition of including one prank entry in every edition—when a new edition is published, the old joke is removed and a new one inserted.
4
One of the best such larks is the last entry in Robert Hughes's
Music Lovers' Encyclopedia
of 1903,
zzxjoanw
, supposedly a Maori word, miraculously polysemous, that means “drum,” “fife,” and “conclusion.” (Never mind that the Maori language does not have the letters
z
,
x
, or
j
.) The first edition of the
Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary
(1987) sports an entry for
hink
: “If you hink, you think hopefully and unrealistically about something.” And the
Neue Pauly Enzyklpädie
includes a learned entry on
apopudobalia
, an ancient game similar to football, which prompted a retort in a learned journal, pointing out six serious mistakes in the entry. The reviewer missed the fact that the entry was just a jeu d'esprit, with no basis in fact.
5
Other fakes are less jovial: in 1986 a laid-off editor from
Britannica
retaliated by vandalizing the encyclopedia's database, changing every occurrence of “Jesus” to “Allah.” (His own boss became “Rambo.”)
6

An even more elaborate fake appeared in 1975, when the
New Columbia Encyclopedia
included a long entry on the distinguished American fountain designer Lillian Virginia Mountweazel, who had achieved some fame with
Flags Up!
, a collection of photographs of rural American mailboxes. Ms. Mountweazel, alas, met a premature end, dying in an explosion while she was researching an article for
Combustibles
magazine.
Although Mountweazel was nothing more than an inside joke among the encyclopedia's authors, she is said to have appeared in other encyclopedias and biographical dictionaries—proof that other editors have pilfered from the
New Columbia
. The term
mountweazel
is now used to refer to these mischievous entries inserted in reference books.

Mountweazels also seem to feature in some struggles over intellectual property. In 2001 the
New Oxford American Dictionary
included a made-up word,
esquivalience
(“the willful avoidance of one's official responsibilities”), designed to catch rivals who simply copied the
New Oxford American
in their electronic editions. When the word materialized in Dictionary.com, they knew something untoward had happened.
7
Cartographers are said to do the same thing—the
trap street
is a nonexistent road that appears on a map.

There are problems, though, with using fake entries to catch copyright violations. The first is that the number of unintentional errors will always be far greater than the number of intentional errors, whatever the reference work. All dictionaries, encyclopedias, chronologies, and atlases, even the best, have many errors. There is no legal benefit, moreover, to loading a dictionary, encyclopedia, or atlas with errors—copyright law gives no incentive. While reproducing someone else's entries verbatim is a violation of copyright law, it is a violation of copyright whether those entries are true or false. Lifting facts from another reference work, though, is not illegal, even if it may be shifty or lazy. A dictionary that contains
esquivalience
may deserve scorn for being a shoddy dictionary, content to let filching take the place of serious research. Unless it reproduces the wording of the
New Oxford American Dictionary
, though, it's not illegal. A legal ruling in the United States in 1992 confirmed this view: a federal court declared, “To treat ‘false' facts interspersed among actual facts and represented as actual facts as fiction would mean that no one could ever reproduce or copy actual facts without risk of reproducing a false fact and thereby violating a copyright… . If such were the law, information could never be reproduced or widely disseminated.”
8

CHAPTER
11

THE WAY OF FAITH

Guidelines for Believers

Religions are rarely improvised. They represent a collective body of knowledge transmitted from one generation to another. And because most religions presume to address a tremendously wide range of subjects—the origin of the universe, the history of humanity, the underpinnings of morality, the nature of the afterlife—they tend to produce overwhelming amounts of text.

Every literate religious community accumulates a collection of scripture, narratives, laws, genealogies, wisdom literature, prophecies, and interpretations; before long, the sheer volume of text threatens to overwhelm even the most devoted believer. Reference works have therefore stepped in to distill the wisdom of the ages, to illuminate the path, and to justify righteous beliefs and behaviors. But these books do more than simply reflect already-existing beliefs. In compiling far-flung facts, the authors of reference books actively shape the religious practices and doctrine of the communities they chronicle. Though Marcus Terentius Varro’s
Antiquitates rerum humanarum et divinarum
, completed in 47
B.C.E.
, survives only in fragments today, its summary of previous religious practices influenced the religious practice of his contemporaries, helping to constitute religion as a coherent field of inquiry. In a sense, Rome had no religion until it had an encyclopedia of religion.

Judaism is prominent among the religions of the book; it has a tradition
of scholarly commentary going back as far as our records allow us to look. Already by 500
B.C.E.
, exegetes had extracted from the Hebrew Bible a set of 613
mitzvot
, ethical principles that should direct the virtuous life. Later commentators added glosses, observations, and interpretations to these summaries of biblical wisdom, known collectively as the Mishnah and the Talmud. The result is the Halakhah, which means something like “the way.” The collection has served Orthodox communities as a collection of essential principles for twenty-five centuries. The Halakhah is not so much a book as a library, and a growing one at that: every year there are dozens, if not hundreds, of new books interpreting the interpretations. It has even spun off mighty reference books in its own right, such as Jacob Neusner’s
Halakhah: An Encyclopaedia of the Law of Judaism
, published in five volumes in 2000.

Antoine Augustin Calmet of Lorraine, France, was educated by Benedictines at their abbey in Breuil. At the age of sixteen he joined the abbey of Saint-Mansuy in Toul, northeastern France, and he was ordained in 1696. His first post after his ordination was teaching philosophy and theology at Moyenmoutier Abbey in Lorraine. With his brother monks he began collecting material for an interpretation of the Bible. Earlier commentaries focused on the “allegorical” (mystical) and “tropological” (moral) meanings of the Bible, but Calmet wanted to emphasize the literal meanings: readers should master the basic facts of biblical history before moving on to the symbolic significance. He published the first part of his
Commentaire littéral sur tous les livres de l’Ancien et du Nouveau Testament
in 1707, a work that reached twenty-three quarto volumes in 1716. Even before the first edition was finished he was at work on a second, which appeared in twenty-six volumes between 1714 and 1720, and then a third, further enlarged edition from 1724 to 1726. A series of Latin translations of his commentaries appeared across Europe over the next seven decades.

Calmet’s next major work continued this interest in the literal meaning of the scriptures. In fact it is also a kind of commentary, but instead of being structured by the biblical text, it arranges all the factual information alphabetically. The
Dictionnaire historique, critique,
chronologique, géographique, et littéral de la Bible
appeared in four folio volumes in 1720–21, with an expanded edition appearing between 1722 and 1728. The dictionary opens with more than a hundred pages of front matter: a dedication to the prince royal, a preface explaining his purpose, a royal privilege, and a very long and detailed annotated bibliography of suitable works for learning about the Bible (including not only Latin and French, but also Syriac, Arabic, Persian, Armenian, Coptic, and Greek Bibles). The erudition is formidable, even daunting. Then comes a map of the ancient world, and a pair of “Carte[s] du Paradis Terrestre” (“Maps of the Earthly Paradise”), one following a map by Daniel-Pierre Huet, with Eden placed where modern Basrah in Iraq stands, the other Calmet’s own, with Eden near Mount Ararat in Turkey. Another map shows the wandering of the Israelites in the desert, and yet another where the Apostles traveled. All of this front matter is complemented by lengthy back matter: a chronology of biblical events, guides to the weights and measures used in the Bible, a survey of ancient money, and so on.