44. Order out of chaos (part-5)

It appears that during the U.S. Civil War, having suffered an attack of sunstroke,

Dr. Minor developed a persecution mania, believing he was being pursued by

Irishmen. After a stay in an asylum he was considered cured and undertook, in

1871, a visit to England. But one night while walking in London his mania

returned and he shot dead an innocent stranger whose misfortune it was to have

been walking behind the crazed American. Clearly Dr. Minor's madness was not

incompatible with scholarship. In one year alone, he made 12,000 contributions

to the OED from the private library he built up at Broadmoor.

Murray worked ceaselessly on his dictionary for thirty-six years, from his

appointment to the editorship in 1879 to his death at the age of seventy-eight in

1915. (He was knighted in 1908.) He was working on the letter u when he died,

but his assistants carried on for another thirteen years until in 1928 the final

volume, Wise to Wyzen, was issued. (For some reason, volume 12, XYZ, had

appeared earlier.) Five years later, a corrected and slightly updated version of the

entire set was reissued, under the name by which it has since been known: the Oxford English Dictionary. The completed dictionary contained 4,14,825 entries

supported by 1,827,306 citations (out of 6 million collected) described in 44

million words of text spread over 15,487 pages. It is perhaps the greatest work of

scholarship ever produced.

The OED confirmed a paradox that Webster had brought to light decades earlier

—namely, that although readers will appear to treat a dictionary with the utmost

respect, they will generally ignore anything in it that doesn't suit their tastes. The

OED, for instance, has always insisted on -ize spellings for words such as

characterize, itemize, and the like, and yet almost nowhere in England, apart

from the pages of The Times newspaper (and not always there) are they

observed. The British still spell almost all such words with -ise endings and thus

enjoy a consistency with words such as advertise, merchandise, and surprise that

we in America fail to achieve. But perhaps the most notable of all the OED's

minor quirks is its insistence that Shakespeare should be spelled Shakespeare.

After explaining at some length why this is the only correct spelling, it

grudgingly acknowledges that the commonest spelling "is Shakespeare." (To

which we might add, it cert. is.) In the spring of 1989, a second edition of the

dictionary was issued, containing certain modifications, such as the use of the

International Phonetic Alphabet instead of Murray's own quirky system. It

comprised the original twelve volumes, plus four vast supplements issued

between 1972 and 1989. Now sprawling over twenty volumes, the updated

dictionary is a third bigger than its predecessor, with 615,000 entries, 2,412,000

supporting quotations, almost 60 million words of exposition, and about 350

million keystrokes of text (or one for each native speaker of English in the

world). No other language has anything even remotely approaching it in scope.

Because of its existence, more is known about the history of English than any

other language in the world.

One of which, incidentally, is said to be the longest word in the English

language. It begins methianylglutaminyl and finishes 1,913 letters later as

alynalalanylthreonilarginyls-erase. I don't know what it is used for, though I

daresay it would take some rubbing to get it out of the carpet.