DICTIONARIES HONOUR ALPHABETS. American dictionaries, like Webster’s Collegiate, honor alphabets. As a child I thought that the big dictionaries on my parents’ shelves were language. They had captured language. All of it. They sorted it into the right order and anything you wanted to know about language was there. I would say now that if words were bricks, dictionaries put them into neat piles but they don’t design houses.
The dictionaries I knew best – two huge books, The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, A–M and N–Z – had a joke. If these were shorter, what were the longer ones like? Written inside was ‘H. Rosen 1950’. My mother was C. Rosen and her absence implies that while the dictionary housed the words, housing a dictionary was a man’s job. By the time I came to study these things, the big names in dictionaryland seemed to be men too. To bring full weight to the words in The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles, they are adorned with a bevy of credits:
William Little, M.A., late Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, H.W. Fowler, M.A. Oxon., J. Coulson, B.A. Leeds, C.T. Onions, C.B.E., F.B.A., M.A. Lond., Hon. D.Litt.,Oxon., Hon. F.R.S.L., Fellow of Magdalen College; Reader in English Philology in the University of Oxford, Joint Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary.
It all adds up to telling us that words are safe here. And they were. We loved the two volumes of these blue dictionaries, each entry a tiny essay in the history of the word, jam-packed full of abbreviations: a special scholarly code that only people like my father could unpack.
†Bawdstrot. ME. [OF. baudetrot, suggesting earlier OF. baldestrot, baudestrot, f. bald, baud ‘bold, gay’ (see BAUDE) + ? Teut. strut/STRUT.] A BAWD, male or female – 1483.
Inspired by the mock erudition of the BBC Home Service’s wits, Denis Norden and Frank Muir, my brother and I would take the dictionary down and challenge our father to come up with the right meaning for words that we had never heard or seen. More often than we could believe, he was right. How could he possibly know the meaning of ‘heterostrophic’? At other times, he went in for convoluted bullshitting, inventing etymologies based on such things as ‘little-known Celtic deities’, claiming that the dictionary was wrong and that it had missed out the older, ‘original’ meaning. My friends couldn’t believe that such heavy, scholarly books could include:
Fart [phonetic pronunciation], v. not in decent use. ME. [Com. Teut. and Indo-Germ. : OE f*feortan: – OTeut. *fertan: – OAryan *perd – (Skr. pard, prd, Gr. [greek word] etc.).] 1. intr. To break wind. 2. trans. To send forth as wind from the anus 1632.
Recently, I was curious about that list of names with their awards on the opening page of the Shorter Oxford. When the Shorter was reviewed in 1934 by Henry Wyld, Wyld explained that this dictionary was an abridgement of The Oxford English Dictionary: ‘Mr H.W. Fowler – so well known for his various dictionaries’ did the abridging of the letters ‘U’, ‘X’, ‘Y’ and ‘Z’, and Henry Wyld explained that it was ‘Mrs. Coulson who tackled W’. Why did Mrs Coulson get ‘W’? Did she bid for it or was she given it?
The full dictionary that Mrs Coulson et al. abridged is one of the most extraordinary books that has ever been written. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) took from 1857 to 1928 to get from concept to public consumption, involving scholars, intellectuals, Joe and Jo Public and, famously, an American from ‘Ceylon’, William Chester Minor. A ‘criminal lunatic’, he had served as a surgeon-captain during the American Civil War but had a history of mental illness and was committed to Broadmoor following an incident in which he shot and killed a man in 1872.
People were invited to send in significant examples of words in use, with a full reference of where this usage came from. The number of contributors reached four figures and their suggestions the tens of thousands, each of which was kept in a pigeon-hole. Here’s one of Minor’s which was accepted for the verb ‘set’:
set, v., sense 17 a
‘a1548 Hall Chron., Hen. IV. (1550) 32b, Duryng whiche sickenes as Auctors write he caused his crowne to be set on the pillowe at his beddes heade.’
The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were Minor’s speciality.
The dictionary took over seventy years to compile because the OED was like no other dictionary had ever been. It claimed to include every word that had ever been used in English since the earliest records around AD 740 – which embraced literature of every kind: standard; obsolete, archaic, technical, dialect and slang, together with information about each word’s form, sense, history, pronunciation and etymology.
To do this, each word is shown in the context of a piece of writing taken from its earliest usage. For ‘excellence’ we get: ‘“Sir, are you not ignorant of what excellence Laertes is at his weapon.” from “Hamlet v ii 143.”’
So, this is a dictionary ‘based on historical principles’, a towering anthology of etymologies and usages. Thousands of neat piles of bricks, ruled over by the alphabet. Because it gives usages of a word over time, it’s a dictionary which charts changes in meaning. On its pages, you can follow the shifts in culture, politics, religion, leisure and thinking across hundreds of years. Historians do this through their narratives as they struggle to turn the great mass of information and detail into comprehensible chunks. Dictionaries don’t really do narrative. They codify language into words and then shuffle these into alphabetical order, so the matrix for classifying and ordering the detail is already in place before they get down to work. This matrix had been in place since the sixteenth century and was given real shape and form with Samuel Johnson’s dictionary.
With the arrival of computers, though, it’s possible to impose categories other than the alphabet, like, say, the year of a word’s first appearance. We might wonder, say, what words appeared for the first time during the First World War, or during Cromwell’s Commonwealth, and the OED’s huge database of words can now be shuffled digitally to give you this information in a moment. It wasn’t impossible pre-computer, just very laborious. Indeed, any kind of statistical cross-section through the language can now be extracted from the data. The digital revolution has broken the grip of the alphabet over how we classify words and how we investigate change.
If you keep company with dictionaries, though, you find difference. You could have had a dictionary from the nineteenth century that wasn’t alphabetical. One book on our shelves at home was called Der Grosse Duden, published in 1935 by the Bibliographisches Institut AG in Leipzig. As it is beside me as I am writing this, I see that it’s stamped ‘The County Secondary School, Clapham’. One of the mysteries about my parents’ books was that some of them had acquired stamps like this. You could put up an argument for saying that my parents were book thieves, kleptomaniacs of a sort, but they were also teachers who took their own books into the schools they taught in. My Beatrix Potter books are signed ‘C. Rosen’ and stamped ‘Harvey Road Junior School’ because my mother decided that I didn’t need them any more, took them to school and then, when she left, retrieved them.
There is no English word for a ‘Duden’. It’s a Duden. I have an English Duden. It’s called The Oxford-Duden: Pictorial English Dictionary. It is an un-alphabetical dictionary of over 28,000 illustrations, each one multi-labelled. So there is an illustration of ‘Cement Works (Cement Factory)’ and there are sixteen labels including ‘9 clinker cooler’ and ‘14 gypsum crusher’. My parents’ Duden has the subtitle ‘Bildwörterbuch’ – a ‘picture-words book’. ‘Der Schlafzimmer’ (‘the bedroom’) has forty-two labels where you can find out, say, the words for ‘a bolster’: ‘7 die Schlummerrolle (das Nakkenkissen)’. Neither the themed pictures nor the labels are arranged alphabetically. You go to the index for the alphabetic sorting.
The Duden was invented by Konrad Duden, a ‘Gymnasium’ (secondary-school) teacher from Thuringia in eastern Germany – coincidentally a place my brother and I stayed in 1957 when our parents spent the summer in East Germany. Duden published his first version in 1872 and it grew to be the official spelling dictionary. Being non-alphabetical it provided an alternative route to solving the problem of a person not knowing where to go in a dictionary when he or she didn’t know how to spell a word: you start from the topic, find the picture, find the label and, hey, there’s your ‘Nakkenkissen’. The 1981 Oxford-Duden has ‘11 [wedge-shaped] bolster’. Disconcertingly, this British version of 1981 follows the German model of 1935, by illustrating, for example, ‘Man I’ with a naked woman – and fifty-four labels – with no accompanying picture of a man. Presumably, parts of the man were unnameable even in 1981. The page for ‘Hairstyles and Beards’ is more evenly distributed in the British version: 1–25 are men’s beards and hairstyles; 27–38 are ladies’ hairstyles. Someone looking incredibly like Sigmund Freud in his later years appears in both the German and the English Duden from nearly fifty years later to illustrate ‘der Vollbart’, ‘the full beard’.
To keep up to date, a Duden ended up being explicitly political. The history of Germany between 1872 and today can be traced through the tiny details in the scenes and people illustrated. As a child I loved looking at the line drawings of a house being built, fifteen different kinds of breads or a cross-section of a gasworks but I overlooked the same attention being given to the eighteen different flashes worn by the different grades of Stormtrooper. When Germany was divided after the Second World War, the home of the Duden, Leipzig, found itself in the Communist East, so the West had to have its own Duden and the two Dudens started to diverge. Russian words and endings began to turn up in the East’s Duden, particularly when it came to tractors. As ever, these were non-alphabetical in the front, alphabetical at the back.
If this all seems political in a modern way, an earlier political use of the alphabet could be found in another one of my parents’ dictionaries. It was a book that carried a name that millions of Americans then and now are familiar with: Webster’s Collegiate. As a child and a student in north London I didn’t know anyone else who had a Webster’s Collegiate on their shelves. I didn’t know anyone who knew what it was.
My father was born in Brockton, Massachusetts. When he was called up to the US Army in 1945, his first posting was to Shrivenham in Oxfordshire. The American Army had created the US Army Shrivenham and with my father’s degree in English he was reckoned to be qualified to teach there. Along the shelves in our house sat the evidence of this era in his life, grey-paperback or blue-grey-hardback, multi-volume editions of the history and culture of America. One of these was Webster’s Collegiate. ‘Everyone knows about Webster in America,’ my father said.
I don’t remember any of us opening it very often and I can’t find his particular copy of it any more. I thought at the time that it had one particularly flashy feature: each letter of the alphabet had its own labelled finger mark in the right-hand side of the book, a minute alcove, enabling you to put in your finger or thumb and flick open the book where you wanted. Each letter was printed in gold on black. They were like tiny wayside shrines. As a child, I had no idea that this dictionary and Webster himself – whoever he was – are two of the foundation stones of the United States of America.
The children I work with in British schools will quite often write ‘color’ and ‘center’. My view is that we should just accept these as alternatives just as we accept ‘realise’ and ‘realize’. No, I’ll revise that: my view is that within fifty years we will. I often sense that when people on this side of the Atlantic talk about American English, they imply that there’s something faulty with it, and a spelling like ‘maneuver’ shows how sloppy they are and how very disregarding of European history it shows them to be. There’s an irony here. The man behind it all, Noah Webster Jnr, was one of the most fastidious, pernickety scholars ever to have attempted to lick language into alphabetical order.
He was a republican, a devout Congregationalist, and an abolitionist. He started out life as a farm-boy in a home that had no book other than the Bible, and by the time he died at the age of eighty-five, he was celebrated as one of America’s greatest scholars, patriots and heroes.
He began work on his dictionary in 1800 and first presented its 70,000 defined words to a publisher in 1825. The moment is full of ironies. Webster wasn’t just ‘American’, he was someone who devoted most of his life to trying to define what ‘America’ meant. In his own words, he once ‘shouldered a musket’ to define America, by fighting the British. The America that he wanted to help create wasn’t just another country. At the age of twenty-three in 1781, he wrote to the son of a pastor:
[The] American empire will be the theatre on which the last scene of the stupendous drama of nature shall be exhibited. Here the numerous and complicated parts of the actors shall be brought to a conclusion: here the impenetrable mysteries of the Divine system shall be disclosed to the view of the intelligent creation . . . You and I may have considerable parts to act in this plan, and it is a matter of consequence to furnish the mind with enlarged ideas of men and things, to extend our wishes beyond ourselves, our friends, or our country, and include the whole system in the expanded grasp of benevolence.
So quite modest in ambition, then.
However, when Webster came first to present his American dictionary it was in the capital city of his old enemy, red-coat England. If you glance at the title page of the book you are reading now, you will see that it’s published by John Murray and it was to the John Murray who had published Byron and Jane Austen that Webster took his dictionary. And John Murray turned it down. (It’s OK, we all have lapses in judgement. When I read the first Harry Potter book, I said it was fun but wouldn’t sell.)
The Oxford dictionaries to one side, there has never been a more popular or more successful family of dictionaries than the Websters. In fact, the US assault on Brit supremacy across the spelling fields of the world didn’t start with the manuscript that Webster presented to Murray. The first salvo came in 1783 with Webster’s first hit, his Blue Back Speller (‘The American Spelling book: containing an easy standard of pronunciation being the first part of a grammatical institute of the English language’). Webster wrote: ‘A spelling book does more to form the language of a nation than all other books’ and if we are in any doubt about how political he thought his job was, he added: ‘It is the business of Americans to select the wisdom of all nations, as the basis of her constitutions . . . to prevent the introduction of foreign vices and corruptions and check the career of her own . . . to diffuse an uniformity and purity of language – to add superiour [sic] dignity to this infant empire and to human nature.’
In Webster’s speller, ‘zed’ became ‘zee’. I can feel a clerihew coming on:
Noah Webster Junior
in 1783
began the revolution:
he turned zed into zee.
Thirteen years later, in 1806, he stormed the barricades with the
Compendious Dictionary of the English Language, in which five thousand words are added to the number found in the BEST ENGLISH COMPENDS; The ORTHOGRAPHY is, in some instances, corrected; The PRONUNCIATION marked by an Accent or other suitable Direction; And the DEFINITIONS of many Words amended and improved.
Out went the ‘u’ in ‘favour’, the ‘k’ in ‘musick’ (‘a Norman innovation’, he claimed); the ‘re’ in ‘theatre’ and the ‘ce’ in ‘defence’ were reversed. He also took the ‘e’ off ‘doctrine’ and ‘discipline’, turned ‘tongue’ into ‘tung’, ‘women’ into ‘wimmen’ and ‘ache’ into ‘ake’. Despite its later massive success, his ideas were not initially approved. The Albany Centinel said it was ‘madness to endeavour to establish . . . an American or United States dialect’ and Webster, they thought, had the ‘disposition to revolutionize and disorganize the English Language’.
My father’s edition of Webster’s must have been the fifth. As a child, I felt that one other feature marked it out as utterly different from the Shorter: its occasional small line drawings. There was a joke going round when I was about ten which was to ask people to tell you what a spiral is without moving their hands. Invariably, they end up waving and pointing. I remember looking in the Webster’s to see what he said a spiral was. I’ve forgotten what Webster said, but I remember that there was one of those small line drawings to make it clear. Noah Webster Jnr couldn’t do it without moving his hands either.
With the OED and Webster’s, the two countries created what we might call their ‘pride of place’ dictionaries, places that people go to for an authoritative voice on spelling and meaning. The publishers of the OED insist that it is authoritative only because every entry can be ‘attested’, i.e. shown to have really existed. The full dictionary doesn’t exist in order to tell us the best words, or to exclude the worst words. For some, this isn’t good enough. They see language as unruly, disturbing and ambiguous – which in some senses it is – and hope that a dictionary will lay down the law. They want dictionaries to prescribe and proscribe. You could argue that the shorter the dictionary, the more it makes its entries ‘official’ through its selection of words and their definitions – albeit by implication.
In my lifetime, I’ve seen two revolutions in the dictionary world. In the 1960s, publishers discovered (or created) a hunger for encoding the whole world into dictionaries. Almost overnight, it seemed that you could buy cheap ‘dictionaries’ of any branch of science, the arts and knowledge. Over the next twenty years or so I acquired a shelf of them, supplemented by ‘Keywords’ dictionaries which isolate the fundamental concepts and offer academically reliable definitions. A cynical interpretation of this publishing bubble would say that it’s a product of the need for insta-knowledge in lieu of slow study. Quick, we might have said to ourselves, what exactly is this ‘post-modernism’ everyone is talking about? What exactly is this ‘rood screen’ that was being mentioned in a radio programme about church architecture? Then with a speedy use of the alphabet, the word could be found, with its hundred-word definition, provided by someone reputable. Even more cynically, I might say that this was yet another blow in the victory of fact over process that has bedevilled our sense of what thought and understanding are.
In this battle, on one side are people trying to find shape and meaning in the world. On the other are those who construct quizzes, TV and radio panel games based on contestants’ memory of names, terms, dates, events and the order of sequences – or ‘facts’ as these are usually called. The person who wins these is the ‘brain of Britain’ or the ‘mastermind’ as if being able to investigate, infer, interpret, plan, test, experiment, deduce and speculate is secondary or unimportant. Perhaps the 1960s wave of dictionaries helped create this lopsided view of the capabilities of the human mind, and, in turn, the alphabet was hijacked to assist in the breaking up of knowledge to suit this view.
The second revolution is digital and is represented by Wiktionary and Urban Dictionary. These are online dictionaries founded on a principle never tried before: that anyone can contribute. Wiktionary asks for its examples and definitions to be attested. The Urban Dictionary is not so bothered. This major change in the compilation method of the two dictionaries coincides with a second change: searching does not rely on the user using the alphabet. As it’s online, you simply type the word into your search engine, and the computer does the rest by whatever invisible system computers use. (Excuse my ignorance.) We no longer have to flick pages alphabetically. Perhaps, one day, we shall see this moment of the loosening of the grip of the alphabet over the classification of knowledge as a significant turning point.
Back with that matter of the compilation method, I once witnessed an interesting confrontation between old and new school. I was at university with Jonathon Green but we disappeared out of each other’s lives for many years until I started to present BBC Radio 4’s Word of Mouth. On occasions on the programme, we talk about slang and we turn to someone who has compiled more than a handful of dictionaries of slang and jargon, Jonathon Green. Unlike the OED, Jonathon is not in the grip of Oxford’s golden rule that a word must be (a) written down, and (b) written down in a significant publication. Jonathon has given himself the freedom to include words that he’s heard spoken, that others have heard spoken and which have appeared in insignificant journals. This means that he can collect much more ephemeral and recent words in use.
For one edition of the programme we invited Jonathon to meet one of the editors of the online Urban Dictionary. In a sense it was a meeting between someone who felt that his overview and knowledge of the field should count for something in the compilation of a dictionary, and someone who thought none of this mattered. In the Jonathon Green school of dictionary-compiling, no matter how slangy or vulgar the content of a dictionary might be, it should have ‘authority’ and this was provided by the known person, Jonathon Green, whose record could be checked out. In a sense, this is the academic principle – every statement can be tested in terms of who is saying it and where. The editor of the Urban Dictionary was working to a completely different principle: he was just making an internationally viewable loading bay.
‘But people could make up any old word,’ I said, ‘and claim that it meant, say, a provocative way of dancing the samba or whatever.’ He made clear that he was utterly unfazed by that possibility. For him, a word existed whether it was in usage amongst this or that group of people, or had been invented that afternoon by Harry Harryface. What’s more, if it was good and funny then Harry Harryface’s word would go into circulation anyway. And isn’t that what newspaper columnists, stand-up comedians, novelists . . . and, holy of holies, William Shakespeare have been doing for years?
I felt threatened. I can’t speak with any certainty for Jonathon, but I suspect he was too. All the principles on which we found our sense of what is true were being overthrown by this malarkey. How could you distinguish between what was a ‘real’ piece of slang and what was just someone’s ‘neologism’? The point is, the Urban Dictionary editor wasn’t interested in that kind of knowledge, and, he indicated, nor were the billions who read and compile the dictionary. They were just interested readers and users, enjoying surfing the underworld of taboo words and words for taboos, looking to see if their favourites were there along with other uses that I for one couldn’t name.
It’s probably too early to say where all this is leading. It’s not knowledge as I know it – signified by the fact that the alphabet is not needed in order to access it.
When I was ten, it occurred to me that I was learning a set of new words. These were ‘rude words’. In fact, there were so many of them, I wasn’t sure I could remember them all so I started to compile a glossary. I created a very long strip of paper by sellotaping one strip of paper to another, end to end, and then I wrote each word and its definition along the strip. It included some backslang words that my little bunch of friends and I thought that we had made up. Then, I would sit in bed, feeding the strip through my fingers, reciting what I had written. I didn’t list where or when I had heard or seen the word. I didn’t shuffle the words into alphabetical order. I just added a word as it occurred to me or as I came across it. Its order was the chronology of the act of my writing the words. I invented the Urban Dictionary in 1956.