Students of my friend and colleague, John Gray, much enjoyed his lectures on English Dictionaries. Reprinted below, these lectures show how you can test your current Dictionary and how you can choose the right Dictionary. They talk about how Dictionaries are made, and describe the evolution of English Dictionaries over the centuries. John’s lectures end with sketches of some famous Dictionary makers: all of them were brilliant scholars; some were great teachers; some were eccentric; some (most?) were cranky; and one was a murderer.
USING DICTIONARIES AND WHY YOU NEED TO
HOW GOOD IS YOUR DICTIONARY?
Check your current Dictionary to find out what you can about each of these ten words:
(a) bootless
(b) zone
(c) enthusiasme
(d) titian
(e) Tartarus
(f) labyrinthine
(g) Galatians
(h) seven sleepers
(i) Agamemnon
(j) piss-weak
QUESTIONS WORTH ASKING
Students need to have constant recourse to a Dictionary at James Cook University, so, what makes a Dictionary serviceable? And that is the first basic question you have to ask:
1. Is my Dictionary serviceable? Is it a pocket Dictionary, a desk Dictionary, or better?
You also need to be able to answer this second question:
2. Which words do I look up, and just how often do I need to look up words in a Dictionary?
A third basic question (the reason for it becoming clear later in this lecture):
3. Does my Dictionary give quotations? and finally,
4. Is there a better Dictionary for my purpose? (Easy! The answer is always “YES”)
Most people have a tiny “Pocket Dictionary” at home. Such Dictionaries have their uses; these `pocket gems” are not to be despised, but they are totally inadequate for anyone reading English at university.
The next size up is the “Desk Dictionary” – the name defines its purpose well – you check spelling, or see if you were right about the MOST USUAL meaning of a modern, current word. But they are still inadequate for first year English, since, as the “HOW GOOD” page will show, almost EVERY SINGLE WORD you will want to look up simply isn”t entered. They simply won”t give you the words you most need. That doesn”t mean that they are unscholarly or worthless. These first two categories just have a different audience in mind.
They are both tragically limited by their size: they simply lack ROOM for many of the things you want. One of my colleagues at the Australian National University in Canberra worked night and day over one long vacation revising a pocket Gem English Dictionary into a pocket Gem AUSTRALIAN English Dictionary for the same publishers.
Now, as Bill Krebs freely admitted, the great problem for the reviser–and you can guess it, can”t you?–was lack of space. Most of his time was spent finding entries for words now obsolete, which could be deleted, which he could reluctantly CUT OUT. Can I show you how he did it? One word he thought was important for Australian users was the word “bush.” He found the entry “bush”, n. “small tree or scrub,” and then it had another phrase, in England, “often in a coppice” and decided to delete the last part. This left him a tiny space, about a thumbnail, and in that space after “small tree or scrub” he had room to write ~ n. fig., Used by Australians to mean “Anywhere but the city.” And by that magic technique a Pocket English Dictionary became a Pocket Australian English Dictionary.
This helps you to focus on the FOURTH of the questions about Dictionaries: IS THERE A BETTER WORK FOR MY PURPOSE? To answer that, you must be confident what your purpose is. Do watch out if you simply walk into a Bookshop to buy a Dictionary, since you can easily make mistakes. I am going to tell you about another Dictionary by Bill Krebs and Gerry Wilkes, who recommend it strongly, but they write in three different sizes for Collins. Publishers aim Dictionaries at specific markets: they know their buyers will have in mind specific purposes. There are several excellent rival Dictionaries but they come in various MODIFICATIONS.
The Macquarie Dictionary is a first class, respected work in its full $90 edition, but the one seen often in bookshops, the Penguin Macquarie Dictionary is much reduced in size, and a very different book.
We recommended the Concise Oxford Dictionary ed. by J. B. Sykes, which is fine for English courses, about $45, and scores about 6.5/10 words on my “HOW GOOD” page, but be careful- the AUSTRALIAN Concise Oxford Dictionary edited by Turner is an excellent book, but NOT what you need. These shorter Dictionaries are aimed at different markets, and designed for different purposes. In each of these smaller versions of the Macquarie, of the Concise Oxford or the Concise Collins, the editors are, like my colleague, DESPERATE for space, and they remove FIRST OF ALL those obsolete or archaic words YOU are most likely to look for if you are an avid reader. Can you see that the Penguin Macquarie or Concise Collins simply do on a large scale what my reviser colleague did on a small scale? So now move back to my first question: How can you tell if your Dictionary is a serviceable one?
HOW GOOD, THEN?
That”s where my opening “HOW GOOD” section comes into the picture. I call it “the John Gray patented ten-word Dictionary tester.” That page contains ten words with which to measure your Dictionary. As you will see shortly, these ten words came from widely different areas of the vocabulary.
The ten words include some now obsolete, as well as words which are still current but which are employed in strikingly different usages today (like “enthusiasme”). There are words thought to be vulgar or crude, like “piss-weak.” Is that word included in your Dictionary, or is your Dictionary “piss-weak” at recording vulgar slang? For this reason, I think that the “HOW GOOD” page is a reasonably good measuring stick. To see how serviceable your Dictionary is, look up each of those ten words, and see if your Dictionary scored a satisfactory or comparable results to those most students use. I”m not doing this because I’ve got undisclosed shares in the Dictionary market; these ten are simply a reasonably random selection of typical words from the books set in the past for first-year English. If your Dictionary can”t offer help to you with a reasonable proportion of the words on this list, then it’s not going to be a very satisfactory tool to help you read English literature.
When I asked what students found, few found ALL TEN words in the one Dictionary. Many years ago, someone found ALL TEN by using a three thousand dollar set of encyclopaedias. That is a little pricey for most people. Did anyone reading this find all TEN words in the ONE Dictionary? Someone found nine in the Collins Plus. Collins scores well because those publishers use the encyclopaedic tradition of Dictionary-making; they list PROPER NAMES, names of people, presidents, places, historical figures and ancient gods. That’s the American tradition: in England, they don’t include personal names.
The Collins English Dictionary has been superbly revised to include special Australian words, too. Who did the work? That same colleague, Bill Krebs, who revised that small Collins Gem so long ago. If you can afford the $90, you are getting a Dictionary which is FOR YOUR PURPOSES the equivalent of a $3,000 set of reference books.
Can you find “seven sleepers” in your Dictionary? Yes, the large Collins has it listed. Many Dictionaries have “seven deadly sins” “seven sages of Rome” “seven Christian champions” “seven seas” and a few more, but the Collins Plus EXTENDS lists of this kind, so that you get the words you seek.
Did your Dictionary list the word “enthusiasme” used in a pejorative or abusive way? Seven words is quite acceptable for a modest cash outlay, up to say $35. If you scored 6 words, that’s just about serviceable.
BUT if your Dictionary supplied only FOUR words or under, can you see why it won’t do the work you need for reading? Most of the time you just won’t find the words there, and you are not getting your money’s worth. Isn’t it time to retire it; give it a kiss, get what you can for it second-hand; and invest that money towards a Dictionary that will serve you all your life?
In fact, most of the TEN WORDS are used in ways which are quite removed from a 21st Century context. I’ll leave you to look them up yourself. That will answer Question 1 for you: is my Dictionary serviceable?
Turn to Question 2: Which words do you need to look up in a Dictionary? And how often do you need to use one? The answers may surprise you.
It”s easy to see if I print ten words on a page and underline them, but the problem is, if you came across any of those TEN just in your reading, how would you know WHEN to look them up at all? The answer is to be found in the phrases in which such words occur. If you read those phrases and supply the modern meaning of the words, and then the lines don’t quite make sense, you need to check out meanings. To recall one example from a poem most people have seen, John Keats’ “La Belle Dame sans Merci.”
“I made a garland for her head,/ And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;”
Fragrant ZONE?? Something is obviously unclear; you cannot easily work out the meaning of “zone” there. All you can do, all anyone can do, is look up that word “zone” in a Dictionary. You can’t simply ignore it and hope it will go away and not be there. It will still be there when you read the poem next time. And you must find a meaning which fits the line. A “fragrant locality allowance” or a “fragrant geographical region” clearly will not do: you must find another meaning that fits the line. What you need to find is the archaic sense of zone. (“Archaic” means that the word is no longer used with that sense in speech.) In its poetic use “zone” can mean “belt” or “girdle” or even “waist.” You must work your way through the meanings given until you find one which applies. And your Dictionary must give you a wide enough range of meanings to include items like “zone” meaning belt, “I made her a fragrant belt.”
Can you see the problem? First, you must draw on your close reading skills to tell you that a word is being used in an unusual way; then you must own a Dictionary adequate enough to let you find the special meaning. Right? Many of you reading Julius Caesar will have met the famous line: “Doth not Brutus bootless kneel?” It is clear that “bootless” cannot mean “in bare feet”: that makes nonsense of the scene–can you see you MUST look up “bootless” in a Dictionary?
Would it make things easier if I now told you what those ten words words mean? Well, I won’t: instead, may I repeat a famous warning? One of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, Ludwig Wittgenstein, issued a very well-known warning to his students: “Never ask for the meaning of a word.”
It is very wise advice. Never ever ask anyone what a word means. Never ask anyone for the meaning of a word? Why? Because people will LIE to you. You try it. If you ask someone for the meaning of a word they will straightaway lie: they will tell you what their mother thought it meant, what their grandfather said it had to mean, what they themselves would LIKE it to mean, etc. So “Never ask for the meaning of a word.” Wittgenstein”s full warning was: “Never ask for the meaning of a word. Ask for its use.”
What you need, if you want to know about the meanings of words, he used to tell his students, is EXAMPLES OF HOW PEOPLE HAVE USED THEM. How did people who lived in Shakespeare’s day use “bootless”? Did John Keats use “zone” anywhere else? What you need is a good list of DECISIVE illustrations, giving you examples of every single time a word was used in the normal way or in a strange way in English, starting off about 600, and finishing off in the twenty-first century. It would be impossible, wouldn’t it? And no one could afford to pay for it. One can imagine that it would be the dream of almost every intelligent reader of English to have, right at his fingertips a complete set of illustrative usages from every possible period for every word that he was likely to come across when reading literary classics.
But this, incredibly, is exactly what users of English do have. All these words can be found, with a decisive explanatory quotation, in the great Oxford English Dictionary. Later I will explain how this extraordinary (27)-volume work was made.
(a) bootless; (b) zone; (c) enthusiasme; (d) titian; (e) Tartarus; (f) labyrinthine; (g) Galatians; (h) seven sleepers; (i) Agamemnon; (j) piss-weak
This list of ten words holds a hidden secret. The ten almost all come from a different region of the English wordstock. Look at the printed diagram below. It shows the composition of English vocabulary, and answers Question 3: How often do I need to use a Dictionary (and why is that so?)
The second question concluded “How often does one need to refer to a Dictionary?” As you might guess, from the words we have been looking at, very often indeed. Why is this so? Is it that you don’t know much? No. Are you just paranoid? Have the writers of English all plotted to use words which you alone will find obscure? Do the writers you read choose their words for no other reason but to confuse you? Well, that obviously can’t be the answer, either.
Then why are you obliged to consult the Dictionary so often?
The reason lies, deep-buried, in your habits of daily usage. The English language is alleged to have the richest vocabulary in the world, with a stock of something around a quarter of a million words. (The figures I’m quoting are only approximate.) Yet C.K. OGDEN designed a course of BASIC ENGLISH employing a minimal vocabulary of only 850 words. Well, there you have the problem: over a quarter of a million available; yet you can speak a clear, workable, English–BASIC ENGLISH–with only 850 words.
Consider the daily demands you make on your own vocabulary. We all have different and special intimate vocabularies. If you talk to cats, or to parents, or a lover, or to small children, or to a judge, you use in each case a different register, and a you employ different vocabulary. Your own personal vocabulary, your idiolect, also depends on your hobbies, and the clubs or societies you belong to, right? And it depends on what studies you are taking at University. So, we all have private, intimate vocabularies AND we all use a number of highly specialised words each day, depending on our interests, BUT, but, it has been estimated that fully half of our daily requirements are served by only fifty words. (It sounds like a breakfast food commercial, doesn’t it? But it’s true–It HAS been estimated that fully half of our daily requirements are served by only fifty words.) You use fifty words again and again throughout the day: you simply repeat them. So HALF of the time during the day you are repeating some of those fifty words; the other half of the time you are using words which reflect your own special interest. Look at the “DIAGRAM OF ENGLISH VOCABULARY” in the Oxford English Dictionary: <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Murray_OED_vocabulary_types_diagram.svg>
So, in fact, the COMMON VOCABULARY of English speakers is only a very tiny proportion of the total number of words currently available for use in English. And our common vocabulary is an even smaller proportion still of the totality of English words both past and present. So the moment you go out of today and back to the past, like the 1960s or the 1940s or the 1920s, or the remote past, like the nineteenth century, you will find that the number of English words available INCREASES markedly.
This is because, if it’s fair to say that if there are a quarter million words available for use today, there are AT LEAST one quarter-million or even one-half million words which have DROPPED OUT OF USE during the development of English until 1960. New words are flooding into the language all the time, and, since language isn’t stable, words are constantly falling OUT of use. When you read ANYTHING less recent than this morning’s newspaper you may well need to look at a Dictionary.
If you were around in 1963, and only the very ancient among us were, you would have noticed that the word “escalate” took on a new meaning during the Vietnam war. It meant “to increase the level of bombing” in a certain region. That meaning was not known before, and it had dropped out of use except in specialised military jargon. Look more carefully at that diagram of the vocabulary of English and its components.
At the centre of the vocabulary diagram is a circle called COMMON words. At the centre of your wordstock, you have a common vocabulary. And I’ve defined that common wordstock as the words we all know, words absolutely no-one would need to look up in a Dictionary.
Depending on your own individual vocabulary, depending on your life style, you will be familiar with varying numbers of words from the categories which surround the central mass, broad categories known as LITERARY (words that turn up in writing) and COLLOQUIAL (words that turn up in speech). These make the top and bottom and bottom regions, circling that common central core.
Literary language includes such specialised outposts as foreign words, and of course it includes the huge number of words in the vast literature of science, many scientific words are used ONLY IN WRITING, aren’t they?–and of course LITERARY language includes archaic words, like “zone” meaning “waist” or “belt,” which you would encounter only in reading. Archaic words are no longer in ordinary literary use, they have been retained for some special purpose; they are antiquated but not yet obsolete.
Now, underneath, in the lower half of the diagram, COLLOQUIAL represents the huge linguistic domain of words commonly encountered in speech rather than in writing. Two of its most important specialised outposts are dialect. (You all know dialect if you”ve ever watched “Minder.”) Dialect is the colloquial speech of a limited region. Colloquial language also includes technical terms, which incorporates all the specialised usages of fishermen, farmers, carpenters, coachmen, soldiers, sailors, shearers, miners, merchants, tradesmen, gamblers and so on.
Have you heard someone say “What a balls-up!”? You probably thought the term crude. But no, it comes from an earlier term “all balled up.” It comes, would you believe, from 19th century American blacksmiths, who noticed that in winter one often got a large ball of snow in the hollow under a horse’s hoof, and one couldn”t proceed any further in a journey. Technical terms are usually found in the spoken language of a small, specialised community, like the mechanics who repair cars, and who use a whole host of terms that you won”t find in any car manual. Their words exist only in speech.
Now, as well as that domain, you also have SLANG, and vulgar terminology, which are more closely related to the colloquial band, and quite remote from the literary sphere. Words which are called “vulgar” in today”s Dictionaries (and are so flagged) are words which are likely to give sexist or racist or religious offence to some particular group, and today are very clearly labelled with a “danger” sticker.
What classes of words do you need to look up in your Dictionary? Well, you know all the COMMON words, by definition. And you all know SOME proportion of the words in the LITERARY and COLLOQUIAL bands, depending on your interests, but you ALL need to look up almost all of the words of all the other categories. That is the reason why, even as native born English speakers, we all have to consult the Dictionary so often. We all have to go our Dictionary MOST OF THE TIME.
How can you be sure of the region of the vocabulary a word comes from? Is it vulgar, poetic diction, or slang? Thankfully, we have great encyclopaedic books that tell us exactly which realm of diction any item in our wordstock comes from. We call them Dictionaries.
HOW DICTIONARIES ARE MADE
Did you realise that most of the words that the people who write Dictionaries (and I mean the really GREAT lexicographers, the really great Dictionary-makers, like Sir James Murray) come across, and have to define are words which they themselves HAVE NEVER USED BEFORE and most often have NEVER SEEN BEFORE. Do you know “polyphiloprogenitive” do you know “photosphere”? –you may know “endocrinology” or “iconographical”– but most times if you are looking up one of the great Dictionaries you will find vast numbers of scientific terms you have never seen in writing, highly specialised, which you would never use in your speech. Now, the people who actually WROTE the Dictionary definitions for those words had ONLY EVER seen those words then and there for the first time. So why isn’t writing Dictionaries impossible? How can you define a word you have never seen before?
It means (and this is something you should think about) it means Dictionaries do not PRESCRIBE, they only ever DESCRIBE. When people are having a quarrel over the meaning of a word, you know one will say “I’ll look it up in the Dictionary, and see what the Dictionary says,” as if that would solve anything. Dictionaries do not say “this word MUST be used in this way.” These days Dictionaries, using linguistic principles, try to DESCRIBE how people have used words. Dictionaries can only ever do that, can you see why? Because if Dictionary-writers have never come across a word before, then on what basis can they prescribe for someone else, how to use it? All Dictionaries can do is accurately describe what previous speakers have done. Even to do this, they must go to examples of usage, written out on slips.
How do you write Dictionaries, if you’ve never seen the word before? I’m going to illustrate that now for you. Has anyone ever seen a word called “clop” C-L-O-P before? When I put that question to a Cairns audience many years ago a Chinese boy put up his hand and said “A clop is a Chinese policeman.”
Apart from that witty joke, there has never been a Dictionary definition of a “clop” because it”s a made-up word. Here are three sentences: you are detectives now, or you are Dictionary writers; imagine these three sentences were all you had, and you have to work out from them just what a “clop” is, and then how to describe it. All you have is three tiny sentences, mere scraps of information. All are ILLUSTRATIVE EXTRACTS, each showing a specific use of the word “clop.”Here they are:
Imagine the first sentence is from a Mills and Boon romance–it sounds a little steamy to me:
1.”Do get me a clop,” she said, smacking her lips, but her brother, with a scornful glance up at the branches, said that there were none ripe yet.
The second quotation:
2.A girl with clop-yellow hair came towards them.
The third quotation might from the television news last night:
3.The Malayan terrorists smuggled arms to the dockside under crates of clops.
And that’s it! That”s all you’ve got. And that’s the position that most Dictionary-makers, or (as they are known) lexicographers are in when they try to describe a word. Could you write a definition of “clop” just from those?
A great modern lexicographer, Randolph Quirk, by reading through the three illustrative extracts for “clop” came up with an incredibly elegant definition in his The Use of English:
clop n.”the name of an edible yellow fruit grown South-East Asia; a commodity in the export trade of Malaya.”
It sounds wonderful and assured, doesn’t it, it sounds as if he has known “clops” all his life, but all he has had available are just those three pieces of information printed above (all of which he invented.)
The problem is the same even if you are writing the world’s greatest ever Dictionary. Most of the time, you are making definitions of words you have NEVER SEEN BEFORE. All you can do is gather whatever illustrative slips are available, and extract from them whatever meanings you can.
STORIES OF THREE OUTSTANDING DICTIONARY MAKERS
SIR JAMES MURRAY
When the great Oxford Dictionary was compiled, Sir James Murray and his colleagues examined millions of sentences illustrating the usages of words to be defined, but finally they were tied down to using simply the slips of paper that hundreds of readers had collected. If you went out to Oxford, to Sir James Murray’s backyard, you would have found a big old shed, about as wide across as a lecture theatre, and you would have found an enormous number of pigeon-holes, or mail-shelve. Every one of those pigeon-holes you would have found stuffed with pieces of paper, each with illustrative quotations on them, covering the whole long wall. If you ever get a chance to read the wonderful book called Caught in the Web of Words by his grand-daughter, Elisabeth Murray, please do so. My examples today are drawn from it. In that book you can see an illustration of that whole wall stuffed with slips of paper, and it was just words beginning with the letter “C.” What someone first had to do was sort the pieces of paper into alphabetical order. Can you guess how his grand children earnt their pocket money? First, put all those slips in strict alphabetical order. After that, simply take all the illustrations for each word, just like those for “clop,” and do what you can from them.
Of course, if ever you had the time to hunt out illustrative uses of a word from Anglo-Saxon times to the present day, every single time a word was used in the normal way or in a strange way in English, starting off about 600, and finishing in the twenty-first century, then you would of course have a very WIDE experience of what a word had previously meant. But where could anyone ever find the time to do that? It would be impossible, wouldn’t it? And no one could afford to pay for it. But such a huge range of illustrations exists.
These illustrative quotations, incredibly, are exactly what users of English have, after that amazing Scot, James Murray, was asked by the Philological Society to establish a “New English Dictionary on Historical Principles.” Murray did it only by never-ending personal labour and an immense world-wide volunteer network, of people who just spent time, with books, finding illustrative quotations to show how English words were used. So as not to destroy books, they wrote down illustrations on slips like the ones for “clop.”
Do you know the word “rhinoceros”? One such Murray slip made it clear that English writers in 1616, in the time of Shakespeare, did NOT. A careful reader has cleverly discovered a very early meaning of “rhinoceros” when the word was NOT known to English speakers. That’s what Dictionary writers like to call “a decisive entry.” It lets you know decisively that the word was just coming into English in 1616. Here is the evidence he found:
“In Bengala there are found great numbers of ABADAS or Rhin-oc-er-ot-es.”
The writer of 1616 is obviously making the plural in a Latin way, since English speakers hadn’t invented “rhinoceroses” yet! Some alert reader found this illustration for Murray, and posted it to him on a slip (with the name, date, edition and page of the work). MILLIONS of slips like these came in from all over the world. How was such information discovered and supplied?
Well, Murray sent out a world-wide appeal; about 2000 copies of a request for volunteers. The response was incredible: some Americans spent most of their spare time doing nothing but writing slips illustrating words; for years two Americans sent in 17000 slips between them. The response from women was particularly strong. It was still quite exceptional for women to be able to come to University, and two sisters in Liverpool who today would both be professors of linguistics sent in about 15000 words that showed a staggering knowledge of Old English, historical English, and local dialects; so they wrote masses and masses of slips for the Dictionary from their own knowledge and reading.
And all the labour was voluntary–nobody could afford to pay for it now or then. The two most amazing assistants were first of all a specialist in foreign languages, James Platt, who could speak every European language: he had about 100 languages–but he could only work in his lunchtimes. He worked in his dad’s wool shop in London, but it was right across the road from the British Museum Library. So everyday he would take his sandwiches, walk across the road to the BM, sit down, and get another book on Old Turkish or something, and find more words in the category of “foreign words used in English” for Murray’s Dictionary. He was an irreplaceable man.
Another volunteer, Dr W. C. Miner, had about 8,000 quotations sent in. They were superbly done by a real scholar, and Murray decided to meet him. He went to the address asking, “Are you Dr Miner?” The official replied “No, I”m in charge of this place which is an institution for the criminally insane, and Miner is an inmate.” Dr Miner though kind and intelligent, was paranoid, believing people were trying to kill him and one day, out of the blue, he simply turned around in the street and murdered the person walking behind him–a tragic case. He realized what he had done and gave himself up at once. They tried to release him on many occasions but he could never live comfortably in the outside world. His story is told by Simon Winchester in The Surgeon of Crowthorne. Books like the great OED don”t get written without some very great heroes, and I’d like to conclude with an account of two of my own heroes.
JOSEPH WRIGHT
First, a man called Joe Wright, who, at fifteen, COULD NOT READ.
Joe Wright was a Yorkshireman, a truly self-made man who had worked his way up from the humblest origins. He had been employed in a woollen-mill from the age of six, and at first this gave him no chance to learn to read and write. But by the time he was fifteen he was jealous of his workmates who could understand the newspapers, so he taught himself his letters. This did not take very long and only increased his desire to learn, so he went to night-school and studied French and German. He also taught himself Latin and mathematics, sitting over his books until two in the morning and rising again at five to set out for work. By the time he was eighteen he felt that it was his duty to pass on his knowledge to others, so he began a night-school in the bedroom of his widowed mother’s cottage, charging his workmates twopence a week for tuition. By the time he was twenty-one he had saved enough tuppences to finance just ONE semester’s study at a German university, provided he walked. So he took a boat to Antwerp and walked stage by stage to Heidelberg, where he became interested in philology. And there this boy who couldn’t read at fifteen stayed to study Sanskrit, Gothic (on which he’s written a book), Old Bulgarian, Lithuanian, Russian, Old Norse, Old Saxon, Old and Middle High German and Old English. He eventually took out a doctorate and returned to England. He established himself in Oxford, and was soon appointed Deputy Professor of Comparative Philology. He then brought out an immense 6 volume Dictionary of the dialects of England, and preserved forever, just before radio and before television was invented, the dialect of his own home town, including the words used in his local region.
Finally, a young man who was later to become a Professor of Languages and write a book most of you have heard of, had just come to Oxford after fighting as a soldier in France in World War I. He was trying to decide what to study. This man sat down at the other end of the table from old Joe Wright, and asked: “Professor Wright, what shall I study?” Joseph Wright, who never lost his broad Yorkshire accent, said “ee, lad, stoody Celtic, there’s brass in Celtic.” This young man was J. R. R. Tolkien, and the book he wrote was The Lord of the Rings. The Celtic languages he studied at Oxford lie behind the language of the elves in Lord of the Rings. So Tolkien did make a fortune from Comparative Philology. He didn’t forget Joe Wright: he writes about him as the old troll in some of his poems.
So, if you think you are having a hard time when essays fall due, or getting to Uni part-time or at night, remember Joe Wright who was still collecting tuppences at 18, and who became one of the most brilliant students of rare and ancient Germanic languages.
SAMUEL JOHNSON AND HIS DICTIONARY
The first Dictionaries of English in modern times were little more than WORD LISTS; their aim was to record occurrences of RARE or HARD words used in English. The first great Dictionary of modern times was compiled by Dr Samuel Johnson. His aims were PRESCRIPTIVE, as shown in his more famous definitions:
OATS: A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.
PENSION: An allowance made to any one without an equivalent. In England it is generally understood to mean pay given to a state hireling for treason to his country.
WIFE: It is used for a woman of low employment.
LEXICOGRAPHER: A writer of Dictionaries; a harmless drudge.
“A harmless drudge”? Does that sound sour?
Consider what Dr Johnson had hoped for, and what he got at the end of those labours:
When first I engaged in this work, I resolved to leave neither words nor things unexamined, and pleased myself with a prospect of the hours which I should revel away in feasts of literature, the obscure recesses of northern learning, which I should enter and ransack, the treasures with which I expected every search into those neglected mines to reward my labour, and the triumph with which I should display my acquisitions to mankind. When I had thus enquired into the original of words, I resolved to show likewise my attention to things; to pierce deep into every science, to enquire the nature of every substance of which I inserted the name, to limit every idea by a definition strictly logical, and exhibit every production of art or nature in an accurate description, that my book might be in place of all other Dictionaries whether appellative or technical. But these were the dreams of a poet doomed at last to wake a lexicographer.
I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to please have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are empty sounds: I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquility, having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise.
When using Dictionaries–and the ones in English are unsurpassed–keep in mind the centuries of effort that have gone into placing them at your disposal.