The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (21 page)

Poor
(
),
a. (sb.)
Forms:
a.
3–5 pouere (povere), 3–6 pouer (pover), (4 poeuere, poeure, pouir), 4–5 poer, powere, 5 poyr, 5–6 power, (6 poware). β 3–5 poure, 4–6 powre, pour. γ. 3–7 (-9
dial.
) pore, 4–7 poore, (6) 7– poor. δ.
Sc.
and
north. dial
. 4–6 pur, 4–8 pure, (4 puyre, 5 pwyr, poyr, 6 peur(e, pwir, puire), 6– puir(ü), (9 peer). [ME.
pov(e)re, pouere, poure
, a. OF.
povre, -ere, poure
, in mod.F.
pauvre
, dial.
paure, pouvre, poure
= Pr.
paubre, paure
, It.
povero
, Sp., Pg.
pobre
:-L.
pauper
, late L. also
pauper-us
, poor. The mod.Eng.
poor
and Sc.
puir
represent the ME.
p
re
: with mod. vulgar
pore
, cf.
whore
and the pronunciation of
door, floor
.

On account of the ambiguity of the letter
u
and its variant
v
before 1600, it is uncertain whether ME.
pouere, poure, pouer
, meant
pou
- or
pov
-. The phonetic series
paupere(m, paupre, paubre, pobre, povre
, shows that
povre
preceded
poure
, which may have been reached in late OF., and is the form in various mod.F. dialects. But the 15th and early 16th c. literary Fr. form was
povre
, artificially spelt in 15th c.
pauvre
, after L.
pauper
, and ME.
p
re
(the source of mod.Eng.
poor
) seems to have been reduced from
povre
like
o’er
from
over, lord
from
loverd
. Cf. also P
OORTITH
, P
ORAIL
, P
OVERTY
. But some Eng. dialects now have
pour
(paur), which prob. represents ME.
pour
(p
r).]

I. 1
. Having few, or no, material possessions; wanting means to procure the comforts, or the necessaries, of life; needy, indigent, destitute;
spec
. (esp. in legal use) so destitute as to be dependent upon gifts or allowances for subsistence. In common use expressing various degrees, from absolute want to straitened circumstances or limited means relatively to station, as ‘a poor gentleman’, ‘a poor professional man, clergyman, scholar, clerk’, etc. The opposite of
rich
, or
wealthy. Poor people
, the poor as a class: often with connotation of humble rank or station.

6
. Such, or so circumstanced, as to excite one’s compassion or pity; unfortunate, hapless. Now chiefly
colloq
.

In many parts of England regularly said of the dead whom one knew; = late, deceased.

The first slips of snow white unlined paper, six inches by four, and covered with William Minor’s neat, elaborately cursive, and so distinctively American handwriting in greenish black ink, began to drift out from the Broadmoor post room in the spring of 1885. By the late summer they were arriving at their destination in small brown paper packets every month, and then larger packets every week. Before long the gentle shower of paper had turned into a raging blizzard, one that was to howl up from Crowthorne unceasingly for almost all of the next twenty years.

The paper slips were not, however, sent to Mill Hill. By the time Doctor Minor had begun to engage in the second stage of his work, contributing the quotations rather than amassing the lists, James Murray and his team had all moved up to Oxford. The editor had been persuaded to give up his comfortable job as a schoolteacher, and despite the poor pay and the interminable hours, he had taken the plunge into full-time lexicography.

This was in spite of a general mood of malaise and wretchedness. Murray’s experiences with the first years of work on the big dictionary were far from happy, and many were the times he had vowed to resign. The Delegates at the Press were parsimonious and interfering; the pace of work was proving insufferably slow; his health was suffering from the interminable hours, his monomaniacal devotion to an almost impossible task.

But then there was one sustaining fact: The first of the fascicles, the revenue-producing installments into which Oxford insisted that the dictionary be divided, had at last been published, on January 29, 1884. Nearly five years had elapsed since James Murray had been appointed editor. Twenty-seven years had passed since Richard Chenevix Trench had given his famous address in which he called for a new English dictionary. Now, in a muddy off-white cover and with its sheets half uncut, was the first part, 352 pages’ worth of all the known English words from
A
to
Ant
, published by the Clarendon Press, Oxford, at a price of twelve shillings and sixpence.

Here, at last, was the first morsel of substance: part one of
A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, Founded Mainly on the Materials Collected by The Philological Society, edited by James A. H. Murray, LL.D., Sometime President of the Philological Society, with the Assistance of Many Scholars and Men of Science
.

Murray could not help but be proud; the problems that seemed so insuperable, and that so pressed down on him, would tend to vanish whenever he held the flimsy paper-covered volume in his hand. And in a sudden sunburst of birthday-eve optimism, the editor—he would be forty-seven in less than a week—declared that he now felt confident in predicting that the final part would be published in eleven years’ time.

It was in fact to take another forty-four.

But now, after all the years of waiting, the interested world could at least see the magnificent complexity of the undertaking, the detail, the filigree work, the sheer intricacies of exactitude that the editors were bent on compiling. Those in England could write and receive a copy for 12s. 6d; those in the United States received a fascicle printed in Oxford, but published by Macmillan in New York, for $3.25.

The first part’s first word—once the four pages devoted to the simple letter
a
had been accounted for—was the obsolete noun
aa
, meaning “a stream” or “a watercourse.” There was a quotation supporting its existence from a work of 1430, which had a reference to the still rather damp and water-girt Lincolnshire town of Saltfleetby, in which, four centuries earlier, there had been a rivulet known locally as “
le Seventown Aa
.”

The first properly current word in the fascicle was
aal
, a Bengali or Hindi name for a plant related to the madder, from which a dye could be extracted and used to color clothes. Andrew Ure’s 1839
Dictionary of Arts, Manufactures and Mines
provided the authority: “He has obtained from the aal root a pale yellow substance which he calls morindin.”

And then the first properly English word—if, a linguist might quibble, there ever is such a thing. It was to be
aardvark
, the half armadillo, half anteater that lives in sub-Saharan Africa and has a sticky two-foot tongue. Three quotations are offered, the earliest from 1833.

Thus does the vast emporium of words begin to display itself, through
acatalectic
and
adhesion
, via
agnate
and
allumine
, to
animal, answer
, and, finally, to
ant
. By that last, Murray’s team meant a great deal more than “simply the small social insect of the Hymenopterous order” there is also the contraction for
ain’t
, a rare prefix meaning “anti-,” as with
antacid
, and more commonly the suffix derived from the French for “sometimes,” and appended to make words like
tenant, valiant, claimant
, and
pleasant
. Three hundred and fifty pages of scholarly amassment, the first pages of what would in more than four decades’ time swell to no fewer than 15,487.

It was in the new Scriptorium in Oxford that Doctor Murray was to do all future work on the dictionary. He and Ada and their considerable family—six sons and five daughters—had moved there in the summer of 1884, six months after
A-Ant
. They had taken a large house on what were then the northern outskirts of the city, at 78 Banbury Road. It was called Sunnyside. The house, large and comfortable in the manner of North Oxford, which is a sedate settling ground for the university’s greater dons and lesser institutes, exists still, together with the red pillarbox that the Post Office erected outside to swallow up the immense amounts of outgoing letters. Today the house is occupied by a popular anthropologist, and he has changed it little enough on the outside.

Only the Scriptorium—the Scrippy, as the Murray family knew it, which Murray’s own dictionary defines as “the room in a religious house set apart for the copying of manuscripts”—has gone. Perhaps not surprisingly: No one, even in Victorian times, much liked the iron-and-corrugated-tin construction, fifteen feet by fifty, that was put up in the back garden. The next-door neighbor said it spoiled his view, and so Murray had it sunk into a three-foot-deep trench, which made it damp and cold for the staff and produced a huge bank of discarded earth that offended the neighbors even more. When it was finished, people said it looked like a tool shed, a stable, or a washhouse, and those who labored in it cursed the monkish asceticism of its construction and its irredeemably bone-chilling cold, and called it “a horrid, corrugated den.”

But it was twenty feet longer than the Mill Hill Scriptorium (which does still exist, an annex to the library of what is still a costly and fashionable school), and the arrangements for filing, sorting and then using the incoming quotation slips—which by now were flooding in at the rate of more than a thousand each day—were much improved.