The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (15 page)

Elephant
(e·l
f
nt). Forms: a. 4–6 oli-, olyfaunte, (4
pl
. olifauns, -fauntz), 4 olyfont, -funt, 5–6 olifant(e, 4 olephaunte, 5–6 olyphaunt, 4–7 oli-, olyphant(e. β. 4 elifans, 4–5 ele-, elyphaunt(e, 5 elefaunte, 6 eliphant, 5–6 elephante, 6– elephant. [ME.
olifaunt
, a. OF.
olifant
, repr. a popular L. *
olifantu-m
(whence Pr.
olifan
; cf. MDu.
olfant
, Bret.
olifant
, Welsh
oliffant
, Corn.
oliphans
, which may be all from ME. or OFr.), corrupt form of L.
elephantum, elephantem
(nom.
elephantus, -phas, -phans
), ad. and a. Gr.
  (gen.
). The refashioning of the word after Lat. seems to have taken place earlier in Eng. than in Fr., the Fr. forms with
el
- being cited only from 15th c.

Of the ultimate etymology nothing is really known. As the Gr. word is found (though only in sense ‘ivory’) in Homer and Hesiod, it seems unlikely that it can be, as some have supposed, of Indian origin. The resemblance in sound to Heb.
 
eleph
‘ox’ has given rise to a suggestion of derivation from some Phœnician or Punic compound of that word; others have conjectured that the word may be African. See Yule
Hobson-Jobson
Suppl.,
S.V.
For the possible relation to this word of the Teut. and Slavonic name for ‘camel’, see O
LFEND
. The origin of the corrupt Romanic forms with
ol
- is unknown, but they may be compared with L.
oleum, ol
va
, ad. Gr.
]

1.
A huge quadruped of the Pachydermate order, having long curving ivory tusks, and a prehensile trunk or proboscis. Of several species once distributed over the world, including Britain, only two now exist, the Indian and African; the former (the largest of extant land animals), is often used as a beast of burden, and in war.

The achievements of the great dictionary makers of England’s seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were prodigious indeed. Their learning was unrivaled, their scholarship sheer genius, their contributions to literary history profound. All this is undeniable—and yet, cruel though it seems even to venture to inquire: Who now really remembers their dictionaries, and who today makes use of all that they achieved?

The question begs an inescapably poignant truth, of the kind that dims so many other pioneering achievements in fields that extend beyond and are quite unrelated to this one. The reality, as seen from today’s perspective, is simply: However distinguished the lexicographical works of Thomas Elyot, Robert Cawdrey, Henry Cockeram, and Nathaniel Bailey, and however masterly and pivotal the creation of the Great Cham, Samuel Johnson himself, their achievements seem nowadays to have been only stepping-stones, and their magnificent volumes of work very little more than curios, to be traded, hoarded, and forgotten.

And the reason for this is principally that in 1857, just over a century after the publication of the first edition of Johnson’s
Dictionary
, there came a formal proposal for the making of a brand-new work of truly stellar ambition, a lexicographical project that would be of far, far greater breadth and complexity than anything attempted before.

It had as its goal a quite elegantly simple impertinence: While Johnson had presented a selection of the language—and an enormous selection at that, brilliantly fashioned—this new project would present
all of it
: every word, every nuance, every shading of meaning and spelling and pronunciation, every twist of etymology, every possible illustrative citation from every English author.

It was referred to simply as the “big dictionary.” When conceived it was a project of almost unimaginable boldness and fool-hardiness, requiring great bravura, risking great hubris. Yet there were men in Victorian England who were properly bold and foolhardy, who were more than up to the implicit risks: This was, after all, a time of great men, great vision, great achievement. Perhaps no time in modern history was more suited to the launching of a project of such grandiosity; which is perhaps why duly, and ponderously, it got under way. Grave problems and seemingly intractable crises threatened more than once to wreck it. Disputations and delays surrounded it. But eventually—by which time many of those great and complicated men who first had the vision were long in their graves—the goal of which Johnson himself might have dreamed—was duly attained.

And while Samuel Johnson and his team had taken six years to create their triumph, those involved in making what was to be, and still is, the ultimate English dictionary took seventy years almost to the day.

The big dictionary’s making began with the speech at the London Library, on Guy Fawkes Day, 1857.

Richard Chenevix Trench was officially designated by his contemporary obituarists as “a divine,” a term that is rarely used today but that embraced all manner of good and eminent Victorians who pursued all kinds of callings and who wore the cloth while doing so. At the time of his death in 1886, Trench was still regarded more as a divine than anything else—he had had a glittering ecclesiastical career that culminated in his being made dean of Westminster and then archbishop of Dublin. He also was lame because of breaking both his knees: not because of any excess of genuflective piety, however, but because he fell down a gangplank while crossing on the boat to Ireland.

His theme on that lexicographically famous evening was intriguing. Advertised on handbills and in flyers posted around London’s West End, it was “On Some Deficiencies in Our English Dictionaries.” By today’s standards the title seems self-effacing, but given the imperial temper of the time and the firm belief that English was the quintessential imperial language and that any books that dealt with it were important tools for the maintenance of the empire, the title offered an amply understandable hint of the impact that Doctor Trench would be likely to have.

He identified seven principal ways in which the dictionaries then available were to be found wanting—most of them are technical and should not concern us here. But his underlying theme was profoundly simple: It was an essential credo for any future dictionary maker, he said, to realize that a dictionary was simply “an inventory of the language” and decidedly not a guide to proper usage. Its assembler had no business selecting words for inclusion on the basis of whether they were good or bad. Yet all of the craft’s earlier practitioners, Samuel Johnson included, had been guilty of doing just that. The lexicographer, Trench pointed out, was “an historian…not a critic”. It was not within the remit of one dictator—“or Forty” he added, with a cheeky nod at Paris—to determine which words should be used and which should not. A dictionary should be a record of
all
words that enjoy any recognized life span in the standard language.

And the heart of such a dictionary, he went on, should be the history of the life span of each and every word. Some words are ancient and exist still. Others are new and vanish like mayflies. Still others emerge in one lifetime, continue to exist through the next and the next, and look set to endure forever. Others deserve a less optimistic prognosis. Yet all these types of words are valid parts of the English language, no matter that they are old and obsolete or new and with questionable futures. Consider the golden question, said Trench: If someone needs to look up any word, then it should be there—for if not, the work of reference that book purports to be becomes a nonsense, something to which one cannot refer.