You Could Look It Up (37 page)

Despite their priority and their importance, bilingual dictionaries get much less attention than the familiar monolingual ones. To many people, “dictionary” means works such as Johnson’s, Webster’s, and the Grimms’. Bilingual (and other multilingual) dictionaries, however, open up views on history that are hard to find elsewhere and that allow us to see something about interactions between peoples that is hard to see elsewhere. Whether it is the only point of contact between two cultures, as with the Dutch in Japan, or merely a “lexical snapshot of a truly strange and fascinating moment in world history,”
12
the bilingual dictionary is an indispensable reference genre.

CHAPTER
14 ½

A SMALL ARMY

Collaborative Endeavors

“The tone of American encyclopedias,” the famous cultural commentator Charles Van Doren complained in
1962
, “is often fiercely inhuman. It appears to be the wish of some contributors to write about living institutions as if they were pickled frogs, outstretched upon a dissecting board.”
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For many modern books, this is precisely the point: “humanity” in an encyclopedia or a dictionary is a quirk, and a quirk is a failing. Most works strive to exclude personality. Even Wikipedia famously aspires to “objectivity”—a “neutral point of view” is the one inflexible rule governing that vast collaborative endeavor.

Individuality, though, has not always been a fault. Once upon a time, reference books had not compilers but authors. Samuel Johnson's uniquely powerful mind, for instance, is visible on every page of his
Dictionary
, and you can almost smell the revolutionary air blowing through the pages of the
Encyclopédie
. Pierre Bayle's
Dictionnaire historique et critique
could only have been written by that skeptical genius. Most early reference books, at least in Europe and America, were the work of a single person working more or less alone, with little more than clerical assistance. All the major English dictionaries through the middle of the nineteenth century, for instance, are known by the name of their author: Cawdrey, Bullokar, Phillips, Kersey, Johnson, Webster, Richardson … In books like these we get a hint of what the lexicologist John Considine calls “the lexicographer as hero.”

These personal books gave us some amusing eccentricities. Johnson's swipes at some of his enemies—tax collectors (
excise
, “A hateful tax levied upon commodities, and adjudged not by the common judges of property, but wretches hired by those to whom excise is paid”), Lord Chesterfield (
patron
, “Commonly a wretch who supports with
insolence, and is paid with flattery”), and the Scottish (
oats
, “A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people”)—are so familiar that some people assume the whole
Dictionary
is nothing but put-downs. (The actual number of such disparaging entries is tiny.) The personal qualities make eponymous books not merely works of reference but also works of literature, worth reading long after all their research has been rendered obsolete.

But already in the seventeenth century, European dictionaries were identified not with individuals but with organizations: the Accademia della Crusca, the Académie Française. This was the age of the first big collaborative projects. By the end of the eighteenth century, the name of the lone genius was being traded for that of an impersonal committee. The
Encyclopædia Britannica
, almost entirely the work of William Smellie (except when he was plagiarizing others' work), omitted his name from the title page; it was by “A Society of Gentlemen,” and there are mentions throughout to the “Editors and Compilers” as if there were more than one.
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The
Deutsches Wörterbuch
by the Brothers Grimm, begun in 1838, and Peter Mark Roget's
Thesaurus
, published in 1852, may be the last great reference works to go by the names of authors rather than teams.

We now live in an age when dictionaries, encyclopedias, atlases, and so on are almost always the work of impersonal committees. The six-page masthead of the fifth edition of the
American Heritage Dictionary
, to consider one very fine modern example, advertises the contributions of a publisher, an executive editor, a supervising editor, a managing editor, a senior lexicographer, two senior editors, an editor, two associate editors, nine consulting editors, four proofreaders, two production supervisors, an editorial and production coordinator, three designers, three administrative coordinators, five editorial and production assistants, a prepress developer, thirty-four special contributors, forty-five previous consultants, and a usage panel made up of 178 experts still drawing breath and another 21 who did not live to see the work's publication. The total is well into the three digits, all working on one single-volume dictionary.

The
Oxford English Dictionary
is an even grander project, with a chief editor, a deputy chief editor, an editorial project director, an
editorial director, a team of eighteen in charge of general revision, thirteen science editors, nine new-word editors, eleven etymologists, seventeen bibliographers, twenty-three library researchers, and so on. In addition to the current staff, the
OED
website lists everyone who has worked on the project since 1989, when
OED2
was completed: the list of current and former employees runs to 560 people, and that does not include the thousands upon thousands who have served as volunteer readers or answered the editors' queries. The
New International Encyclopedia
makes the case that collaboration is now the only choice: “No good general encyclopædia, at least, is now possible which does not include in its editorial staff a small army of men of science, historians, theologians, lawyers, and so on.”
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The encyclopedic army has included some impressive recruits. The
Encyclopædia Britannica
has since the early days made a policy of recruiting experts—historians, scientists, politicians, philosophers—to write its entries. The entries have not always been signed, and many publishing house records have been destroyed, so we will never know who all the contributors were. But we can say for certain that editions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries included articles by the likes of Isaac Asimov, J. B. Bury, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Marie Curie, Thomas De Quincey, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Edmund Gosse, the skateboarder Tony Hawk, William Hazlitt, Harry Houdini, Thomas Henry Huxley, Lee Iacocca, Pyotr Alekseevich Kropotkin, H. L. Mencken, Bertrand Russell, Ernest Rutherford, George Bernard Shaw, Algernon Charles Swinburne, John Addington Symonds, Leon Trotsky, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and James Watt.

CHAPTER
15

KILLING TIME

Games and Sports

Not every reference book is strictly utilitarian—not every reference, in other words, tells us things we
need
to know. Many tell us what we simply
want
to know, and how we might amuse ourselves.

Games and sports go back at least as far as the archaeological record will take us—Senet was played in predynastic Egypt around 3000
B.C.E.
, Ur in first-millennium-
B.C.E.
Babylon, and Go in fourth-century-
B.C.E.
China—and the more complicated the game, the more necessary are written rules. Isidore described board games, dice games, and ball games in his
Etymologies
, but some games required more extensive treatment. Simple games like catch and tag require little strategy, but chess—sixty-four squares, thirty-two pieces falling into six classes, each with different rules for moving—cries out for codification. One estimate says there are about 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000 possible positions in a chess game. An early aid to those zillions of games appeared in 1512, when the Portuguese pharmacist Pedro Damião of Odemira wrote
Questo libro e da imparare giocare a scachi et de li partiti
in Italian. The book was translated from Italian to French, and then from French to English in 1562, when it was called
The Pleasaunt and Wittie Playe of the Cheasts Renewed
, and the long subtitle to the English edition promises
Instructions Both to Learne It Easely, and to Play It Well
.

No age took gaming more seriously than the eighteenth century. It was the great age of gaming, with card games, board games, and parlor games at the height of their popularity. Not coincidentally, the English idiom
to kill time
dates from exactly this period. And the king of the gaming table was Edmond Hoyle, who has held his position as the authoritative lawgiver for games since he wrote the first in a series of books on card games. He took it on himself to issue the rules, and nearly three centuries later, his name is a byword for authority.

Frustratingly little is known about him. He was probably born in 1671 or 1672, and he died in 1769. The best biographical source notes only that he “is said to have been a barrister by profession.” In the early 1740s he lived in Queen Square, London—an upscale address—and he gave lessons on one of the most fashionable card games of the day, whist, similar to bridge. He “thought it would be doing no inconsiderable Service to many of my Countrymen,” he wrote, “if I contributed a little to put them upon their Guard and preserve their Purses, while they are indulging themselves in what is elegantly called
Killing Time
.”
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Hoyle began circulating handwritten copies of a short book on how to excel at the game, and eventually the private manual went public: he published his
Short Treatise on the Game of Whist
in 1742. Some sources say he received the astronomical sum of £1,000 for a published version. That is hard to believe—at the time, a working-class family could live on £30 a year—but he did sell copies for the outrageous price of a guinea, or twenty-one shillings, at a time when day laborers earned a shilling a day. Hoyle obviously had high-stakes players in mind when he priced his eighty-six-page pamphlet so extravagantly.

Most of what appeared in this first book was not really rules but suggestions or strategies. But one two-page section, “
The Laws of the Game at
WHIST
,” made fourteen rules explicit. A typical one: “1. If any Person plays out of his Turn, it is in the Option of the adverse Parties, either to call the Card then played at any Time in that Deal (in case he does not make him revoke) or the Person who is to lead, may demand his Partner to name the Suit, which he would have him play from.” After spelling out the “laws,” he offered “Some general Rules to be observed
by Beginners,” not actually the fundamental rules but tips for those who already knew the basics: “I. If you have Ace, King, and four small Trumps, with a good Suit,” for instance, “you must play three Rounds of Trumps, or otherwise you may have your strong Suit Trumped.” From there he worked his way up to discussions of strategy: chapter 5 spelled out “Particular Games to endeavour to deceive and distress your Adversaries, and to demonstrate your Game to your Partner.”
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