The Oxford University Press deserves a history of its own, and indeed has several: I recommend Peter Sutcliffe’s The Oxford University Press: An Informal History (Oxford University Press, 1978), which covers the saga of the making of the OED very well, and with reasonable impartiality.
The American Civil War is of course very comprehensively covered. The best book relating to the fighting in which Doctor Minor played a small but, for him, crucial part, is Gordon C. Rhea’s The Battle of the Wilderness (Louisiana State University Press, 1994), which I enjoyed enormously. D. P. Conyngham’s 1867 classic The Irish Brigade and its Campaigns has recently been reissued (Fordham University Press, New York, 1994), with an introduction by Lawrence F. Kohl, whose help with my own book I acknowledge elsewhere. Among the many books on Civil War medicine I enjoyed George Worthington Adams’s Doctors in Blue (Louisiana State University Press, 1980) and In Hospital and Camp by Harold Elk Straubing (Stackpole Books, Harrisburg, Pa., 1993). I also took time to read the relevant chapters in that elegant giant of a book The American Heritage New History of the Civil War, by Bruce Catton and James M. Macpherson (Viking, New York, 1996), which answers practically every imaginable question about the minutiae of those four years of bloody fighting.
The nature of the possible mental ailments that plagued Doctor Minor, which may have been triggered by his experiences during the war, are comprehensively explained by Gordon Claridge in Origins of Mental Illness (ISHK Malor Books, Cambridge, Mass., 1995). Andrew Scull’s splendid Masters of Bedlam (Princeton University Press, 1996) offers a fascinating history of the mad-doctoring trade before the times of psychiatric enlightenment.
I looked to Roy Porter—also an expert on madness and its treatment—for his rightly acclaimed social history of the city where Minor committed his murder: London: A Social History (Harvard, 1994) sets the scene admirably, and remains one of the best books on England’s remarkable capital.
But the one book that above all should be read in conjunction with this small volume is one of the biggest and most impressive works of scholarship to be found—the twelve-volume first edition, the 1933 supplement, the four supplementary volumes of Robert Burchfield, or the fully integrated twenty-volume Second Edition of The Oxford English Dictionary itself.
It makes for an expensive and bulky set of books—which is why nowadays the CD-ROM is much preferred—but it does, most important of all to his fans, acknowledge formally the existence and contributions of Doctor Minor. And I find that somehow the simple discovery of his name, buried as it is among those of the contributors who helped make the OED the great totem that it remains today, is always an intensely touching moment.
While it is of course in and of itself no justification for ever needing to own the great book, the finding of Minor’s name presents perhaps the finest of examples of the kind of serendipitous moment for which the OED is justly famous. And few would disagree that serendipity, in dictionaries, is a most splendid thing indeed.
P.S. Insights, Interviews, & More…
About the author
Meet Simon Winchester
About the book
A Few of Simon Winchester’s Favorite Words
Read on
A Reading Excerpt from A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great American Earthquake of 1906
Have You Read?: More by Simon Winchester
About the author
Meet Simon Winchester
SIMON WINCHESTER, author, journalist, and broadcaster, has worked as a foreign correspondent for most of his career, although he graduated from Oxford in 1966 with a degree in geology and spent a year working as a geologist in the Ruwenzori Mountains in western Uganda, and on oil rigs in the North Sea, before joining his first newspaper in 1967.
His journalistic work, mainly for The Guardian and The Sunday Times, has based him in Belfast; Washington, D.C.; New Delhi; New York; London; and Hong Kong, where he covered such stories as the Ulster crisis; the creation of Bangladesh; the fall of President Marcos; the Watergate affair; the Jonestown Massacre; the assassination of Egypt’s President Sadat; the recent death and cremation of Pol Pot; and, in 1982, the Falklands War—during which time he was arrested and spent three months in prison in Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego, on spying charges. He has been a freelance writer since 1987.
He now works principally as an author, although he contributes to a number of American and British magazines and journals, including Harper’s, Smithsonian, National Geographic, The Spectator, Granta, the New York Times, and The Atlantic Monthly. He was appointed Asia-Pacific editor of Condé Nast Traveler at its inception in 1987, and later becoming editor-at-large. His writings have won him several awards, including Britain’s Journalist of the Year.
He writes and presents television films—including a series on the final colonial years of Hong Kong and on a variety of other historical topics—and is a frequent contributor to the BBC radio program From Our Own Correspondent. Winchester also lectures widely—most recently before London’s Royal Geographical Society (of which he is a Fellow)—and to audiences aboard the cruise liners QE2 and Seabourn Pride.
His books cover a wide range of subjects, including a study of the remaining British Empire, the colonial architecture of India, aristocracy, the American Midwest, his experience of the months spent in an Argentine prison on spying charges, his description of a six-month walk through the Korean peninsula, the Pacific Ocean, and the future of China. Most recently he has written The River at the Center of the World, about China’s Yangtze River; The Fracture Zone: A Return to the Balkans, which recounts his journey from Austria to Turkey during the 1999 Kosovo crisis; and the bestselling The Map That Changed the World, about the nineteenth-century geologist William Smith. His book Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883 was published by HarperCollins in April 2003. His forthcoming book, A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906, will be published by HarperCollins in Fall 2005. Distinguished French director Luc Besson will adapt The Professor and the Madman into a major motion picture.
Simon Winchester lives on a small farm in the Berkshires in Massachusetts.
About the book
A Few of Simon Winchester’s Favorite Words
MOST OF US KNOW about twenty thousand words—a fine number, except that the Oxford English Dictionary lists more than half a million as making up the entirety of the language. A sobering realization: that of all possible words we know no more than a mere four percent.
This list might help improve matters. The entries that follow offer a selection of words that have in each case three characteristics: I like each one of them; I believe most to be shamefully underused; and yet I am sure that all can be used—in our daily conversation or our writings—with little risk of the user seeming or sounding foolish, high-flown, or bombastic.
These are all treasure-words, from the vast storehouse that is the OED. Each is worth considering, savoring, admiring, and employing. Thus may we begin to nudge our way up from four percent to five—about half the percentage of the sixteenth-century English word-stock that William Shakespeare supposedly knew. Not a bad ambition, to be half as good as the Bard.
Philogyny ()
At first blush this word seems little different from phylogeny, encountered most often in biology and meaning the evolutionary pedigree of a particular plant or animal. The marginally different spelling philogyny marks out a very different word, the meaning of which can be deduced by remembering the much more common misogyny. Of course! readers will be saying—if a misogynist is a man uninclined to seek out female company, so the opposite must be a man who suffers from or enjoys the fact of his philogyny, his
love of women
The man who seeks out feminine company in preference to bonding with his brothers is much derided—or much envied. One of the less attractive terms used to describe a philogynist is used by soldiers to describe a ladies’ man—a poodlefaker.
Tourbillion (), (turbij5
)
Come the summer solstice, and with it a reminder of the importance of time and the need for the accurate keeping of it—and we have a word we see all too often in advertisements for very expensive clocks and wristwatches. A tourbillion (or with the second i omitted) is explained by a quotation about
the escapement of a watch…fitted so that it revolves round the fourth wheel. The idea of the tourbillon…is to get rid of position errors.
In fact the word, perhaps coming from the Latin turbela meaning bustle or stir, and which itself comes from turba, a crowd, and which has links with turbine, disturb, and perturbation, means
a whirlwind; a whirling storm; a whirling mass or system; a vortex; a whirl; an eddy; a whirlpool
It has been around since the late fifteenth century, though in the watchmakers’ hands for only the last century.
Sainfoin
Given the complexity of modern menus I am a little surprised never to have seen the pretty word sainfoin mentioned as a possible ingredient for a vegetarian dish, not least because its origins are in the French for health-giving. Possibly its absence comes because even the most modish café owner would balk at giving customers what is usually reserved for cattle,
a low-growing perennial herb, Onobrychis sativa (formerly Hedysarum Onobrychis), much grown as a forage plant. Also, locally, lucerne.
Since lucerne is another word for the purple medick, a cloverlike growth that in America is called alfalfa and is almost exclusively used for feeding cows, one can appreciate the restaurateurs’ reluctance. A few further years’ searching for fresh inspiration, however, and we may yet find it: arugula, endive, and sainfoin salad, $9.95. And people will pay, eat, and insist they Enjoy.
Terebinth
In the King James version of the Bible there are many references to trees. In Isaiah 6, verse 13, there is a reference to an oak, and something called a teil. In Genesis another oak. But earlier bibles—particularly John Wycliffe’s of 1382, and the Coverdale translation of 1535—call trees by much more specific names, and in these two cases by a name still known and fairly familiar—the terebinth,
a tree of moderate size, Pistacia terebinthus…a native of Southern Europe, Northern Africa and Western Asia, the source of Chian turpentine, and a common object of veneration; also called turpentine tree, and Algerine or Barbary mastic-tree
Terebinth appears in the Catholic Douay Bible of 1609 too—yet there seems no mention at all, anywhere, in the King James. One has to wonder: what did the translating teams set up in Oxford, Cambridge, and Westminster have against turpentine? A harmless solvent, used by painters: surely, no harm to anyone.
Loosestrife ()
A curious misunderstanding surrounds the origin of loosestrife which, quite simply, is
the name for two common herbaceous plants resembling each other closely in growth (upright and tall) and habitat (margins of ditches and streams)
The two are Lysimachia vulgaris, the Yellow Pimpernel (or Creeping Jenny); and Lithrum Salicaria, the Purple Loosestrife.
They were thought to be named after the Greek farmer Lysimachus, who first discovered it; as it happens the two elements of his name do mean to lose (luein) strife (mache). But Pliny notes that oxen made to eat the plants became magically more docile and quite content to draw together. It is now thought the name never came from the farmer at all, but from the effect the plant had on ancient Greek farm animals.
Pellucid ()
Here is a good example—told with this lovely word pellucid—of how some words appear to be synonymous, but in fact and on close examination are not. Pellucid, from the Latin combination for through and light, is used to mean
having the property of transmitting, or allowing the passage of, light; translucent; transparent; clear
But does it mean the same as transparent? In its designatum (the word’s essential qualities), yes. In its connotation (its associated features), yes. But in its range of actual use—perhaps not. A deal between a government department and Microsoft can be described as transparent if all can see its details: but it could hardly be pellucid, which as a quality tends to be restricted to water and crystal and kinds of glass through which one can see, in actual, physical fact. One’s writing may be pellucid, true; but that is about as far, figuratively, as the word’s range will go.
Chance-medley ()
This wonderful legal word—the language of law offers up a profusion of delights—is ancient (first seen in 1494) and is defined as an
accident or casualty not purely accidental, but of a mixed character. Chiefly in manslaughter by chance-medley (for which later writers have used chance-medley itself): “the casual killing of a man, not altogether without the killer’s fault, though without an evil intent; homicide by misadventure; homicide mixt.”
The hyphen is not always present: an 1855 commentary on Shakespeare wonders out loud why Hamlet, after murdering Polonius, himself dies “by chancemedley.” But properly used, with hyphen or no, the word always implies tragedy as consequence: the OED warns us not to use the word as merely indicating happenstance.
Cacoethes ()
I cannot make up my mind whether this is one of the uglier of English words because of the way it looks and sounds, or one of the more delightful simply because of what its principal sense means,
an “itch” for doing something, as in the insanabile scribendi cacoethes (the incurable passion for writing) of Juvenal
Unkinder translators have suggested that Juvenal’s confession was actually to an incurable itch for scribbling, rather than for writing, and that a cacoethes is more of a mania for authorship, a fanatic eagerness to be rushed into print, than any deep longing for literary truth. Such would be born out of the other meanings of cacoethes, which include an evil habit or an obstinate or malignant disease. Those senses, combined with the word’s look and feel, nudge me to think this is perhaps not a word to be encouraged.
Boustrophedon ()
On one of those more pleasant traveling moments when I had been seated near the front of a plane, the attendant informed me brightly that the way she moved her cart during the delivery of dinners to her passengers—first to the seat A1, then to B1, then A2, B2 and so on—was technically known as boustrophedon. She, like the word, was Greek; when I looked it up later, it did indeed mean
(written) alternately from right to left and from left to right, like the course of the plough in successive furrows; as in various inscriptions in Greek and other languages
The OED offers examples relating to writing. I see no reason why any such first-one-side-then-the-other kind of activity—shopping on the two sides of a street, looking for your car in the lot afterward—should not be dignified by a word which derives from a combination of words meaning ox and turning, and that was how the ancient Greeks ploughed their fields.
Simon Winchester, The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity
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