The meaning of everything

In 1998, the British journalist and writer Simon Winchester published a book called The Surgeon of Crowthorne, about the life and works of Dr WC Minor (1834-1920), a former US army surgeon who became one of the most prolific contributors to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) in the 19th century, while being locked up in a lunatic asylum for murder. The publishers emblazoned the words “A tale of murder, madness and the Oxford English Dictionary” on the UK edition’s cover while the American edition was retitled The Professor and the Madman (the professor bit referred to Sir James Murray, the chief editor of the OED from 1879-1915).

Madness is compelling enough for the advertiser, but madness combined with a felicity for language captures something elemental. The automatism that comes with pop cultural depictions of “madness” is a perfect conduit for the linguistic savant. The madman, not bound by the cautious self-interest mode that capitalism hardwires into society, transgresses boundaries, the first being the limits of ‘acceptable’ language. Cue Peter Finch ranting about the news media in Network (1976) or the enraged, suicidal Amitabh Bachchan from the climax of Main Azaad Hoon (1989). In Jerry Pinto’s novel Em and the Big Hoom, the titular Em, losing control over her mind, comes up with hilarious puns and neologisms such as “yorricking about” (a reference to Yorick from Hamlet).

A choice of words is a political choice, a source of resistance, eminently worth getting mad as hell over. And a dictionary, as we shall soon discover, can represent wildly different things to different people. It could mean the perfect distillation of your opinions about everything. It could be the sum total of everything that you disagree with. It could also be your life’s work.

An imperial urge

Last week, Winchester was at the Jaipur Literature Festival to speak about his book: the session was, once again, called ‘Murder, Madness and the Oxford English Dictionary’ (in September 2016, Mel Gibson and Sean Penn began shooting for a movie adaptation of The Surgeon of Crawthorne, directed by Apocalypto screenwriter Farhad Safinia.)

One of the first things Winchester explained to the audience was that a dictionary, in the modern-day sense of the word, is actually not that old an invention. Up until the 17th Century, a dictionary was a book that contained the meanings of the more common non-English words and phrases. It was in 1641 that Robert Cowdrey, a schoolmaster in Coventry, decided that “women and other unskilled persons” needed a book that contained the meaning of tough English words. From kindly patronisers like Cowdrey, Winchester turned to some of the more eccentric lexicographers in history, like Samuel Johnson, who famously used the word ‘oat’ to insult Scotland. (“Oat: A kind of food grain that horses eat. But in Scotland, it is used to feed people”) Reciting Johnson’s dictionary entry for ‘elephant’, Winchester showed the audience how sex was used to sell a book, centuries before it became cool.

“Wild elephants are taken with the help of a female ready for the male. She is confined to a narrow place around which pits are dug. These are covered with a little earth, scattered over hurdles. The male elephant easily falls into the snare. In copulation, the female receives the male lying on her back. Such is his pudicity that the male never covers the female as long as anybody is in sight.”

The fact that ‘pudicity’ (meaning ‘shame’) was used to explain ‘elephant’ made the eccentric Johnson’s book “not a very good dictionary”, according to Winchester. Jonathan Shainin from The Guardian, who was in conversation with the author, noted that eccentric and lovable as Johnson’s efforts were, England before the OED lacked a comprehensive record of the language and the words that it now encompassed. In competition with other European forces such as Italy and France, the British could not afford to fall behind in the culture wars. As the British Empire extended itself, there was “an imperial urge” behind the efforts to put together the OED — with a crucial difference, as Winchester explained.

“What we wanted to do was very different from the Italian or particularly the French. The Académie Française prescribe what words should mean. They say that you cannot pollute the language (…) French is pure Gallic and allows for no mongrelisation whereas the English received their language from France, Germany, the Celts and so on. We’re a mongrel people and our language is a mongrel language. It is not pure: it is a fugitive language that benefited from the Empire’s reach (…)”

It was Murray, one of Johnson’s reviled Scotsmen, who helmed the OED project. Murray and the OED enlisted the help of thousands of far-flung volunteers — amateur philologists among them — to track the correct meaning and usage of English phrases past and present. Such an endeavour, undertaken on a massive scale like this, would be termed ‘crowdsourcing’ today. Winchester called it a “democratic venture”.

“The political statement that the makers (of the OED) were making was that ‘We are going to reflect everything, we’ll rejoice in our mongrel nature and we’ll rejoice in the fact that our empire allowed us to scoop thousands of words from around the world into our mother tongue.’”

Prescription pills

The difference between the French and the British lexicographic approaches remains a crucial philosophical difference. Fans of prescriptive dictionaries are seen as puritans, people who are afraid of change, clubbed in the same disparaging ontological category as priests, Luddites and xenophobes. Prescriptive fans, of course, see the other side as pretenders of feeble intellect, making things up as they go along. They believe that standards of scholarship, journalism and literature will take a beating if all dictionaries started taking their cues from the word on the street. Both sets of arguments are not without merit. But what’s remarkable is the amount of rancour that’s on display in the world of lexicography.

David Foster Wallace began his essay ‘Authority and American Usage’ with the following over-the-top rhetoric: “Did you know that probing the seamy underbelly of US lexicography reveals ideological strife and controversy and intrigue and nastiness and fervour on a near-Lewinskian scale? For instance, did you know that some modern dictionaries are notoriously liberal and others notoriously conservative, and that certain conservative dictionaries were actually conceived and designed as corrective responses to the “corruption” and “permissiveness” of certain liberal dictionaries?”

During the course of the essay, Wallace describes the fascinating ways in which Bryan Garner, the author of A Dictionary of Modern American Usage (the book Wallace was supposed to review through the essay), negotiates this central dilemma. Wallace’s own take on the problem veers towards the prescriptive — with a thorough acknowledgement of the ideological problems that position entails.

“This reviewer’s own humble opinion is that some of the cultural and political realities of American life are themselves racially insensitive and elitist and offensive and unfair, and that pussyfooting around these realities with euphemistic doublespeak is not only hypocritical but toxic to the project of ever really changing them.”

Wallace is warning us against language being used to underline and perpetuate oppression — he correctly locates the dictionary as the frontline of this battle.

The situation is further complicated by the binary that imperialism drew between English and other languages. During a separate JLF session on diasporic Hindi last week, a distinguished panel led by Philip Lutgendorf (who translated the Murty Library’s edition of the Ramacharitmanas) spoke about the many diasporic Hindis around the world and what they added to the Hindi corpus. Almost everybody on the panel agreed that diasporic fiction has added to the complexity and richness of Hindi as a language, that the English words used in, say, Nirmal Verma’s Prague stories, were a turning point for Hindi literature.

And yet, there are stories like Shubham Shree’s. In August last year, the then 25-year-old Shree was awarded the Bharat Bhushan Memorial Prize for her Hindi poem ‘Poetry Management’. Shree’s poem uses English words liberally and alludes to the pressures of the marketplace and how it affects poets and students of literature. In Daisy Rockwell’s translation of the poem, here are a few lines.

“Unprofessional profession! / Part time! / Why didn’t I do some MBA-type thing? / It’d be a blast, man! / I’d write a poem; the SENSEX would fall / The poet Mr. So-and-So has written a poem against capitalism / The SENSEX has fallen / Chatter on the channel / This is an example of the fall of American imperialism / Will America be able to control poets inspired by Venezuela? / Assurance from the Finance Minister: / Have faith, small-time investors!”

Several Hindi writers, some of them decades older than Shree, condemned the award being given to a poem that, according to them, was not Hindi at all. In a Caravan piece detailing the controversy, Rockwell cited the blogger Sushil Kumar’s takedown of Shree’s poem. “Scores of English words have been forced into just a single poem like ‘Poetry Management,’ and jumbled up with Hindi (…) it is an attempt to disfigure and insult Hindi.”

Lexicographers know better than most that there’s just no pleasing some people.

Nuts and bolts

The Surgeon of Crowthorne is, above all, a fascinating character study of Dr Minor, the surgeon-turned-murderer-turned-lexicographer. The wife of the man Minor murdered later became good friends with him, as she realised that he was clearly suffering from delusions. To ease Minor’s pain, she would bring him fresh books to gorge on. In his later life, his work on the OED (using his vast collection of old books, he was helping Murray with the usage of antiquated phrases) took a backseat as his condition worsened. Finally, he was convinced that an enemy was kidnapping him on a nightly basis and forcing him to sexually abuse children. In the throes of one such delusion, he cut off his own penis. Shortly after, he was released on the orders of Winston Churchill and spent his last days as a dementia patient back in America.

For decades, however, Minor was arguably the most valuable person on the OED project, one whose contributions “could almost cover the past four centuries” by themselves, according to Murray. Reading about Minor’s life reminded me of what Pinto told me about his character Em in 2012, during an interview. “Neologism comes out of schizophrenia. If everything around you is hollow, language becomes the hollowest thing. Ultimately, you create a new word to create a new reality.”

And that’s why lexicography — and the occasional pettiness that it can inspire— ought to be of greater interest to you. You never know who’ll end up making the next great dictionary, or how it will shape your reality.