The Meaning of Everything
Simon Winchester
Contents
Acknowledgements
Prologue
I. Taking the Measure of It All
2. The Construction of the Pigeon-Holes
3. The General Officer Commanding
4. Battling with the Undertow
5. Pushing through the Untrodden Forest
6. So Heavily Goes the Chariot
7. The Hermit and the Murderer—and Hereward Thimbleby Price
8. From Take to Turn-down—and then, Triumphal Valediction
Epilogue: And Always Beginning Again
Bibliography and Further Reading
List of Illustrations
Picture Acknowledgements
Acknowledgements
The idea that I should write this book came first from Alysoun Owen, an editor at Oxford University Press who had once read The Surgeon of Crowthorne and put it to me that since in that story I had written what was essentially a footnote to history, would I now care to try writing the history itself? It seemed a splendid idea, and it would have made for a pleasing symmetry to deliver the manuscript to Alysoun in due course—but for the fact that she took off on maternity leave shortly after I had begun work on the book. She was succeeded by the admirably competent Rebecca Collins, to whom I am extremely grateful; but since this book was in essence Alysoun's idea, I owe her a very great deal for first getting me involved in what turned out to be the most enjoyable of tasks.
Enjoyable and stimulating though the work may have been, its complexities would have tried me sorely had not Elizabeth Knowles—an old OUP friend with whom I have been in touch ever since she advised me on early drafts of the W. C. Minor story—agreed to help with the telling of this tale also. She advised me both on the book's overall tone and structure, and on the finer details relating to lexicography and etymology. Philip Durkin, an expert on etymology and a philologist at the OED, was most helpful in navigating the minefields of Chapter 1, and worked with Elizabeth on such vexing matters as the supposed origins of words like periwinkle, skirt, and ketchup.
It is to Peter Gilliver, a senior lexicographer at the OED, that I owe perhaps the greatest debt. Peter's eternal enthusiasm for the Dictionary and its makers, and his fascination with the eccentricities of its making, should by rights have led him to write this book himself. But his current continuing work on the OED's third edition is an all-absorbing task, and that Peter felt able to step aside from these private ambitions to help me—by illuminating the unlit nooks and crannies of the story, and by digging out stories of ageold lexicographical conundrums that made the telling of this story such fun—is something for which I will always be grateful.
Martin Maw, the OUP Archivist, was helpful and hospitable in equal measure. No request, whether for a long-forgotten picture or a long-lost quotation slip, ever managed to fox him, and he responded to my Ypres-like barrage of queries and demands with endlessly good cheer. It is to his former colleague Jenny McMorris that this book is dedicated: we all miss her greatly, but few more so than Martin, and I hope that he will infer from the dedication my gratitude to the OUP archives team more generally, even though, of course, we all wish to memorialize Jenny in person.
Madeline Kripke kindly copied many rare papers and documents from her immense collection of dictionaryalia, and offered much sage advice.
I am grateful to Robert Faber at the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography for asking contributors involved in preparing OEDrelated essays to let me see, in advance, some of what they had written; this was a favour that proved to be a very great help.
Sarah Barrett copy-edited the manuscript from her Somerset home, and did so with speed, finesse, and great charm; and Carolyn Garwes prepared the index.
My London agent Bill Hamilton, of A. M. Heath, dealt with the very particular publishing idiosyncrasies of so venerable a firm as OUP; and Peter Matson, of my New York agent Sterling Lord Literistic, was unfailingly helpful and supportive over such fascinating complications as made it across the Atlantic. Also in New York I am especially grateful to my long-time friend Casper Grathwohl of OUP for his wise counsel during the editing and publishing process.
As so often, I owe a great deal to my son Rupert Winchester, who worked tirelessly at the OUP archives, and at the London Library, through all stages of the making of this book. He is the stuff of which any father would be most proud.
I wrote this book in a little barn on my farm in Massachusetts during what turned out to be one of the wildest, coldest, and darkest of New England winters in living memory. But I was kept warm and content through it all by my partner Elaine, and it is a tribute to her determination, support, and comforting kindness that this book was finished, on time, with both of us looking happily back at a winter exceedingly well spent.
S.B.A.W. Sandisfield June 2003
The Meaning of Everything
The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary
Prologue
The culminating celebrations of what was to be called `the greatest enterprise of its kind in history' took place in 1928— and on Wednesday 6 June of that year, the date when this majestic phrase was first spoken, in England it was Derby Day.
A great horse race on a sunny afternoon tends always to bring out the best in people, and it is probably fair to say that the concern of most in England that summer's day was not so much with historical enterprises, however great or small they might have been, but rather more prosaically with whether to `have a flutter'— whether to back the Epsom favourite, that morning a horse called Fairway, or whether to risk a tanner, a shilling, or half a crown on a rank outsider called Felstead, on whom the bookies were offering tempting odds of 40 to one.
The prosaic concerns of the people suggest the placid temper of the time. With Europe and the world beyond generally at peace and with a fair measure of prosperity all around, a good number of those living in the British Isles, where this story both begins and ends, do appear to have been in an appropriately summery and congenial mood that day. And the weather certainly helped: the forecasters in London recorded this first Wednesday in June as having been, after an early cool dew-crispness, both nicely sunny and shirtsleeve warm, the islands basking beneath an anticyclone anchored benevolently over the Western Approaches.
All England, it is probably fair to say, languished that day in the careless blue-skies rapture of early summer, with little but pleasure—the 148th running of the Derby foremost among them—on the nation's horizons. True, there were a few small smudges of cloud to spoil the idyll. There was an outbreak of smallpox in Wandsworth, and it seemed, rather ominously, to be spreading. A Romanian woman was arrested on the Old Kent Road for trying to evade paying duty on a consignment of watches and artificial silk handbags. And in central London, a needlewoman and a dispatch clerk—neither a trade that would be formally recognized today—were found dead in Hyde Park, with neck wounds suggesting that at least one of the pair had succumbed to what the newspapers darkly referred to as felo de se, the archaic legal phrase then much used by the polite for the indelicate crime of suicide.