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The Definition of CrazyLiterally crazy man writes a lot of the Oxford English Dictionary. Guess what? He's good at it. |
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The Oxford English Dictionary, affectionately known by academicians everywhere as the OED, was first completed in 1927. Of course, other dictionaries had existed before its publication. Samuel Johnson wrote the first one way back in 1755: What good was another? After all, Johnson's had old-world charm (his definition of elephant: "The largest of all quadrupeds, of whose sagacity, faithfulness, prudence, and even understanding, many surprising revelations are given... by one blow with his trunk he will kill a camel or a horse, and will raise of prodigious weight with it.") and English haughtiness (oats: "a grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people."). Noah Webster completed his dictionary in 1828, but his dictionary recorded American English, which would simply not do in Britain. Besides, he wasn't nearly as witty as Johnson: Webster was roundly damned as a severe, humorless pedagogue by an entire cadre of luminaries, including Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin. What the English needed was a work that encompassed the entire of scope of their language historically. The language has always been fluid; the next dictionary needed to reflect that. They needed to see sentences with the word in use, from the word's basic inception until the present day. However, to get a handle on the breadth of the tongue would require more than just a few guys in top hats and spats waistcoats. Samuel Johnson did his entire dictionary with six lowly clerks. To take on a project of this etymological magnitude would take thousands and thousands of readers.[1] A Rather Disorganized OrganizationThe basic strategy here was that the London Philological Society sent out fliers to all of England asking readers to comb through arcane works and write down words and the sentences where they were used. The mind reels: looking for, say, "malediction", or "putty" in a moldy book dating back to 1250 must have been a pain in the ass. As one might well imagine, the going was pretty slow. Most well-lettered readers sent in fifty-cent words like vituperation, confabulation or hircine. Nobody wanted to tackle should or toothbrush. Sizing up the problem, a certain James Murray joined the OED project some twenty years after its inception and started cracking the whip. Before Murray took over, the work was in complete disarray. Some two tons of readers' input had been chewed on by rodents or ruined in heavy London rains. Submission handwriting was atrocious. Large sections of the letter "I" had been left in a hamper, another collection of papers was found in a baby carriage, and the whole of the letter "F" had been accidentally mailed to Florence.[2] Murray, desperate, wrote an eight-page flier, addressed quot;to the English-speaking and English-reading public" begging for help. Words poured in from everywhere. In the end, some six million words, with literary references attached, were mailed to the project. In 1880, one of those eight-page fliers made its way to a Dr. William Minor of London, who began contributing voluminously. He penned some smashing words like buffoon, atom, azure, buckwheat, gust, and foresight.[3] Minor cranked for the dictionary for decades from a certain secluded spot in London. A very secluded spot, as we'll learn; he was an inmate of the Asylum for the Criminally Insane, in the Royal County of Berkshire. A primary architect of the mammoth tome categorizing and defining the English language was stark raving mad. nut-ball n. Linguist.Dr. Minor was born in 1834 and years later somehow found himself tending the wounded of the American Civil War. Unfortunately, tending the wounded also meant administering punishments: deserters were branded, and the field surgeons did the branding. Dr. Minor had the dismal luck of searing a scraggly member of the Irish Brigade, which was a collection of crazies who went to America to hone their fighting skills and use them to kick the British out of their native land. The Brigade fought the black regiments for last place on the social ladder; they enjoyed a well-deserved reputation of battlefield ferocity, and, indeed, berserker rages. In fact, "When anything absurd, forlorn, or desperate was to be attempted," as one English war correspondent wrote, "the Irish Brigade was called upon."[4] As one might well imagine, their erratic behavior terrified other Union troops. When Dr. Minor branded one, he was afraid. He knew their barbaric nature, and suspected the young man with the newly-scarred face might one day pay him an unpleasant visit. Years later, thinking about it kept him up at night, and rather unhinged him. He began to believe that members of the Fenian Brotherhood -- Irish nationalists -- broke into his house nightly and tried to pour poison down his throat with a funnel. Apparently, small boys lived in his rafters, drugged him, and forced him to perform buggery. As such, he could no longer perform his Army duties, and, in October of 1871, he went to London to "relax". He intended to study watercolor painting with the celebrated artist John Ruskin, but wound up moving to the pitiful suburb of Lambeth and did a lot of whoring instead. Our Kind of TownLambeth was a dirty, miserable place in the nineteenth century (and today, pretty much). Dark, sooty factories, drunks, crime, befouled cobblestones, and countless prostitutes thronged its narrow alleyways. Simon Winchester recounts in The Professor and the Madman, To see a play that would not pass muster with the London censors, to be able to drink absinthe into the small hours of the morning, to buy the choicest pornography newly smuggled from France, or to have a girl of any age and not be concerned that [the police or] her parents might chase after you... you [went] to Lambeth.[5] Minor was a man of means: he was from an aristocratic New England family and drew a considerable Army pension besides: there was simply no reason for him to be living in Lambeth. Well, perhaps one, one that walked and wore fishnet stockings. He availed himself of these commercial outlets with gay abandon,[6] and swiftly picked up the microbiological fruit of his labors. Despite the sophisticated appreciation of the medical arts one expects from Yale graduates, he had somewhere along the line injected his urethra with white wine in an effort to cure a stubborn case of gonorrhea.[7] Early on the morning of February 17, 1872, Minor shot a hapless brewery worker named George Merret, apparently mistaking him for one of the aforementioned Fenian brotherhood. Minor was swiftly sent to jail, but found not guilty by reason of insanity and sent to the Asylum.[8] Merret left behind a despondent, jobless wife and thirteen children in one of the most miserable cities in all of England, lending credence to Charles Dickens' seemingly interminable revelations about what a miserable place Britain is if you're poor. Miserable, We Guess, Unless You Live in the NuthouseAs for Minor, he didn't get much better in the asylum. In May 1877, an attendant noted Minor thought His spinal marrow is pierced and his heart is operated on with instruments of torture. His assailants come through the floor....[9] At another point, Minor cried, "They are trying to make a pimp out of me!" while insisting his invisible captors had taken him to Constantinople[10] and forced him to do rude and dirty things in public. However, during the day he usually appeared quite sane, actually making nice with his victim's widow despite her wretched poverty and childraising duties. Soon afterward, she unsurprisingly fell into depression and alcoholism, but before doing so began to bring him books. Lots of books. It was this very library that contained the fateful request for help from Murray, and also gave Minor the appropriate literary stepping-stone towards being a great linguistic contributor. It was this stepping-stone that allowed him to write so many definitions for the landmark work of the English language, and sustain a friendship with Murray for decades while he cranked. Unfortunately, Minor's condition eventually took a downturn. Around 1900 he rediscovered religion, and, seeing it at odds with the dirty things phantoms did to him in the night, did something about it. He took a knife he had and cut off his own penis, imagining that to be the root of the problem. It didn't help all that much. Minor's madness, and his physical health, never really recovered from the blow. As his prodigious output declined, so did his contact with people. His madness and ebullience, somewhat intertwined, both began to wane, and he grew reclusive and less easy to talk to. He puttered around for another twenty years, still occasionally visited by Murray, before dying in 1920. The dictionary that he produced went on to be worshipped by dry academes and raconteurs alike; precious few ever gave a thought to what sort of mind was helping them plod through their dissertations. Footnotes
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