By Scott Sullivan
Editor
OED
I was bad at football. Told “run a set play,” I thought of the Oxford English Dictionary: run has 645 meanings, set 430 and play so many I’d need timeout to fathom the combinations.
My parents bought me an OED Compact Edition 1, micrographically shrinking 13 text volumes into 2 y, box and magnifying glass included. A-O ran 2,048 pages, P-Z with Supplement and Bibliography 2,058. I couldn’t put it down, barely pick it up.
OED 2, printed 53 years later, per publishers would take one person 120 years to key in its 59 million words, 60 years to proofread and 540 megabytes to store. This assumes constant tapping and proofing speeds, plus byte capacities.
In 1919-20, discharged World War I Lt. J.R.R. Tolkien was hired by OED to report on history and etymology of Germanic-origin words from “Waggle” through “Warlock.” Years later he parodied editors in his children’s story “Farmer Giles of Ham,” like “The Hobbit” published in 1937.
An Oxford professor by then, he spent 12 more years penning the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy. Middle-Earth was made up of men, hobbits, elves, wizards, dwarves, orcs, trolls, ents … each with their own lore and languages.
Pipeweed or not, other luminaries have weighed in on Oxford’s efforts. Anthony Burgess called the 20-volume 1989 OED 2 “the greatest publishing event of the century.” This from the author who gave Stanley Kubrick “A Clockwork Orange.”
Already OED 2 sections were outdated, says Wikipedia, some by decades. Oxford frowns on such imprecision. What instant did each word in each section become outdated? Document, please. What or what sequence of terms replaced it? No wonder Tolkien afterward decided to make things up.
OED backwards spells deo. Latin for “God” in excelsis. OED 3 likely won’t see print — there are only so many trees — and on 2037 projected release stands to be more inadequate than its forebears. That’s why we read classics.
Last week I rescued OES 1 from its cobwebbed box and started reading. With a screen click I could magnify print and not squint holding convex glass in correct light at proper angles, but that seemed like cheating.
Gaze glazed, I called timeout for mail and hauled in 10 flyers worth of large color print ringing glossy photos picked to depict, praise or pillory candidates per the PAC that paid for them.
DANGEROUS RADICAL LIES = BAD. WORKING FOR MICHIGAN FAMILIES, VALUES, JOBS = GOOD, Godlike even. Parties too run set plays. Screw word inflation; whip its money cousin and give PACs more.
Early language compendiums make OED look paltry. The Dutch Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal, tallied between 1849 and 1998, runs 43 volumes and 49,255 pages.
Not just the Dutch were frugal. When the Grimm Brothers weren’t recounting how Gretel followed a breadcrumb path through woods to find birds had eaten it, they in 1838 launched a German dictionary completed in 1963 already overdue for updates.
Want more summer beach reading? The 1612-published Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca of then modern Italian, the 1716 Chinese Kanxi Dictionary, 1780 Diccionario de la lengua Española and companion volumes await your pleasure. Like to explore Esperanto, Swahili, Tagalog? Computer languages evolving too fast for technology to keep pace? See if like war-wasted Tolkien, someone will pick up your tab for research.
Don’t forget cross-pollinations between dialects, bleed-overs, borrowings, outright thefts … To prevent a Word War, we can’t build a Maginot Wall too soon. Body and sign language, words unspoken or expressed via music, wind, sun, inverse electricity and wave currents? All too speculative to say.
Language is “the principal method of human communication,” per Oxford. That’s why we make up jargon: to bind an in-crowd and exclude others.
OED 1 makes slow reading. Even compacted, A-O is hard lugging to the gym where I exercise while reading. Perching it on the elliptical’s digital readout platform between moving arms, magnifying glass in my right hand while still keeping balance at age 67 on my bad ankle is a challenge, let alone P-Z with supplements. Can I finish OED 1, read 2 and stay abreast 3 previews? No one can work out that long.
As I prepare ala Tolkien to ship off with Bilbo, Frodo, Gandalf and elves for the Grey Havens, I recall with regret the helmet my high school wasted money on.
Chip Bodine, a 6’4”, 250 Red Devil senior tackle, drove me freshman year to the nearby Purdue equipment room, him to procure Size 15, 7E cleats, me a Size 8-1/2 armored hat stretched oblong to house my freak noggin.
Perhaps they repurposed it as a planter.