Alphabetical (43 page)

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.'