John Simpson (2)

I realised after finishing this book that it's third or fourth thing I've consumed on lexicography, previous things being [b:The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary|155396|The Meaning of Everything The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary|Simon Winchester|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1442244303l/155396._SY75_.jpg|23982354] and the film version of [b:The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making show more of the Oxford English Dictionary|25019|The Professor and the Madman A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary|Simon Winchester|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1407110918l/25019._SY75_.jpg|1628566] (plus, since modern lexicography looks kindly upon referencing non-traditional sources, a podcast interview with Jane Solomon of Dictionary.com on Talk the Talk). An endlessly fascinating subject!

I was engrossed in this book, which was written by the former chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary about his career at the OED, interspersed with insights into selected word histories and vignettes of his personal and family happenings. His descriptions about the thorough research and analysis process of pinning down definitions, etymologies, bibliographies, quotations, and so on just to get one word into the dictionary—so illuminating and really makes you appreciate the final product! As a technology enthusiast, I was especially hooked in the later chapters, in which he takes the reader through the OED's transition from a collection of antiquated Victorian tomes into an unbelievable networked digital mine for knowledge and exploration. (So many questions and curiosities to explore!)

Despite the joy that the book's contents offered me, I'm glad to see that other reviewers have noted the somewhat disagreeable voice of the author. Many a time, while reading the book, I made a face upon encountering a thing that felt unnecessarily resentful or holier-than-thou (never mind that the beginning chapters give a relatable account of his own humble and inexperienced start at Oxford's hallowed halls).

On "loving words", here are some of the author's thoughts on that distasteful idea: 'One of my ongoing issues is with people who "love words."' and 'I should state it outright: lexicographers are not people who "love words"—at least, not in a schmaltzy, sentimental way.' and 'So how do we weed out those word-lovers?' Okay, so, we get it, Mr. Oxford English Dictionary and (in one international sense) literally the face of the British language, you don't love words… or whatever. Not to harp on about this, but this sentiment and its repetition is so bizarre to me—for one, because this book by him could be considered a "pop" language book: it's not written in an academic style, neither is it published by an academic institution, and from all perspectives is packaged from cover to subtitle to structure as a book for the so-called "word lovers" that the author likes so much to ridicule. I suppose I can maybe see his point about glitzy, exceptional words that overshadow the foundational words—for which the research work is indeed elaborate, and he shows us that diligently—but sir I'd argue that a love and enthusiasm (did you see me use enthusiast up there?? even though the author deems it, and apparently all other even slightly non-neutral feelings, barbaric??) for words is a trait shared by many lexicographers and non-academic contributors—I'd venture to say even by those you respect.

Another prickly aspect of the book for me was the elitism and exclusivity that I felt still perpetuated, despite the author's sustained interest, throughout working on the Supplement and on New Words, in tugging the dictionary into more modern and democratic stances. Granted, he acknowledges, "I come from a generation and a society where over-enthusiasm was deplored, and keenness was deprecated." Not to mention the ancient grand elephant of working at Oxford for thirty-five years. So, maybe, analogous to the old age of OED1 and to the final chapter title, "Becoming the Past", the author's attitude is a product of his time, as in sentiments such as, "[…] it told us something about the sort of people and society we had become. Not thoughtful and reflective, but self-obsessed, capturing images of ourselves in rear-view mirrors, like selfies on sticks."

Unfortunately I can't quite account for whatever attitude is displayed in the author giving himself nines and eights out of ten compared to new lexicographer candidates, or emphasising repeatedly how difficult lexicography is, or the left-handedness Plan B test ('Instead of marking scripts at the end of an assessment session, you just look around the room and see who is left-handed, and then appoint them'), or, 'But as with any simple but crucial development (I'm giving this one more credit than it's due as I devised it), it's not the program that is important, but the very first spark of the idea' (not the same, but…), or, 'If you don't see a difference, that's one of the reasons you're not working on the OED.' (What, what is that?? Reader, are you exasperated yet??)

The rant portion of this review carried on for much longer than first anticipated—always easier to talk about things you don't like, I guess. Having said all that! I did enjoy the book as a whole and I've been exploring the online OED in great delight, truly astounded by both the palpable amount of research work that has gone into it over the years and the thrilling new capabilities afforded by digitality. (After all the fuss about accessibility, it's still a subscriber-only resource, which I'm fortunate to be able to access it through my university—hoping that you might have something similar at your disposal?)

TLDR: good read, but TFG. show less

There are a few of us for whom a memoir by a lexicographer sounds like fascinating stuff, and for us few John Simpson's “The Word Detective” (2016) is a winner.

Hired in the 1970s by the Oxford English Dictionary, after first being turned away, Simpson found a career as a "word detective" a perfect fit for him. He gradually rose through the ranks until he became its chief editor, overseeing the transformation of the OED from a giant, multi-volume reference found mostly in libraries to a show more valuable online resource available on anyone's phone or computer.

The phrase "word detective" seems apt, for the work of a lexicographer involves such tasks as discovering the many meanings of a particular word at various points in the expanding English-speaking world, accounting for different spellings and pronunciations and, perhaps most difficult of all, determining the earliest use of this word. "At the time," Simpson writes, "I couldn't imagine anything that was as much fun as doing this: working fast, assimilating insightful but sometimes mistimed comments, taking a good entry and making it as perfect as possible."

Throughout his book Simpson uses such words as crowdsourcing and transpired, then in an aside explains something about that particular word's history and meaning, thus not just telling us how he worked but showing us the actual results of word detecting.

Sometimes Simpson gets personal, never more so than when he writes about Ellie, his now adult daughter who can neither speak nor understand language. It's a tragic irony — the man in charge of the world's greatest English dictionary having a wordless daughter with whom he cannot communicate.

More than a memoir, “The Word Detective” is also a modern history of the OED, with a lot of its early history thrown in. Simpson is now retired yet, through his memoir, is still serving the old firm well. show less

I suppose this is as good a review as any to come clean about my addiction to lexicography.

Like a lot of people, I first experimented at university. It began with an obsession over obscure words – I would roll a fat copy of Ulysses, digging out anastomosis, boustrephodon or farraginous, or cook up some Anthony Burgess in search of furfur, hallux, ictal or margaric. Before I knew it, I was mainlining Will Self, Guy Davenport and Thomas Pynchon, the highs of sequipedalianism (as I would show more doubtless then have called it) pulling me through even the most turgid of plots.

But the adolescent appeal of showy, ten-dollar terms like dolichophallic or eutripsia soon wanes. The real thrill, I soon worked out, is in unpicking the definitions of seemingly-familiar words. Reading Spenser was a watershed. Consider a line like Shortly unto the wastefull woods she came, / Whereas she found the Goddesse with her crew. At first glance there’s nothing obvious that you need to look up. But wait – wasteful here clearly doesn’t mean what is usually means, which is to do with wasting resources. Sure enough, checking a good dictionary will show that an earlier meaning is ‘uninhabited, desolate’: that’s obviously what Spenser had in mind.

Another example from The Faerie Queene: He lookt askew with his mistrustfull eyes, / And nicely trode, as thornes lay in his way. Most people would read this without difficulty, but how many would grasp that nicely means ‘carefully, fastidiously’? Or that when he talks about someone being cherished, he means that they’re being cheered up? Or that when someone mainly does something, it means they are doing it forcefully or vigorously? That preventing something means outdoing it?

This was a whole new obsession. It changed the way I read books completely. Once you’re tuned in to an older text, you start to realise that in almost every sentence there’s a common word that ‘feels’ somehow wrong, and usually this is because its meaning has shifted over time, either subtly or quite dramatically. It was for predominantly linguistic reasons that I first read Robert Burton, Folio's translation of Montaigne, Francis Bacon, Sir Thomas Browne, Malory, Chaucer, or Beowulf. Come for the archaic verb inflections, stay for the artistry.

To describe all this, I got involved with the website Wiktionary, the dictionary counterpart to Wikipedia. It is terrifying to think of how many hours I have poured into that bloody site. (My wife once asked pointedly if I had worked on the definition of divorce.) I see that since I joined in 2005, I’ve edited more than 40,000 entries there and created well over 12,000 new ones. And the really involving, rewarding work was never the ‘weird’ words but the common ones – like of.

But that's just a hobby. John Simpson has made a living out of this kind of investigation into how words are used, how their meaning changes, and how quickly a dictionary needs to work to keep up. It was under his stewardship that the Oxford English Dictionary launched its incredible, fully-revised third edition, which began appearing in 2000 and is currently perhaps one-third of the way through, with more updates appearing online every quarter. It is truly vast, and will probably never appear in print, for ecological reasons if nothing else.

The OED is certainly now the best dictionary of any language in the world. In fact browsing the new entries convinces you of what a gigantic feat of scholarship it is – and that's because, as Simpson illustrates in this memoir, lexicography is above all a matter of deep and thorough archival research. The OED bases all of its definitions on citation evidence – it gathers together a load of examples of a word in use, and then tries to summarise what exactly it means in context. The citations are there in the entry so you can see for yourself. (This is in contrast to some other dictionaries, which first decide what a word means or should mean, and then conclude that people who use it differently are using it ‘wrong’.) So digging out and collating these historical examples is an enormous undertaking (and one of the many things that has been revolutionised by the internet).

This is particularly important with new words, whose eligibility for inclusion is a common point of contention for lexicographers (and their critics). The OED has an informal rule that a word should be attested over ten years before it can go in, to weed out flash-in-the-pan coinages. But with the online updates, this still allows for a dictionary that's extremely up-to-date – this year alone, amid the hundreds of older and more technical inclusions, the OED has added entries for things like glamping, bro-hug, sideboob and YOLO.

This is turning into an unwanted essay on why the OED is the greatest ‘book’ the world has ever produced (which it is – I've looked at it nearly every day of my life for the last twenty years). Suffice to say that Simpson takes you amiably enough through the story of how this beast of English scholarship has struggled, slowly but successfully, to keep up with and take advantage of the technological revolution to stay at the front of its field.

There is not much else to it – he attempts to maintain a kind of background story of his family life, but without much conviction. If you're not really into dictionaries, there's probably not a lot for you here. Though it is nice to learn that he once got performance poet Benjamin Zaphaniah into the office to gyrate in front of him and his team, so they could write an accurate description of skanking.

http://i67.photobucket.com/albums/h281/Wwidsith/Screen%20Shot%202016-11-21%20at%...

Stuff like that can still give me a pretty good high. show less

John Simpson started at the Oxford English Dictionary when it was still being edited and researched with handwritten index cards, when the internet was barely a twinkle in the world’s eye, when some entries hadn’t been edited for over 100 years. He left the OED after shepherding it through the publication of the most recent supplement, putting it onto CD-ROM, and later making it available online for users around the world. He intersperses his memoir with sidebars about interesting words show more that relate to the story he’s telling, and he includes some (but not too much) information about his personal life, including some particularly poignant challenges.

Overall I enjoyed this book, although it seemed to be better suited for reading in spurts, given that people would be reintroduced each chapter with their full name and title. And I don’t know whether it was because I was reading on a very tight deadline, but in some places the narrative seemed to skim the surface. Still, I would recommend this book for people who are interested in lexicography: Simpson busts some myths and makes it clear just how much research and analytical work is involved in editing the dictionary. show less