The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. James Gleick

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СКАЧАТЬ It must be in general use, beyond any particular place of origin; the OED is global, recognizing words from everywhere English is spoken, but it does not want to capture local quirks. Once added, a word cannot come out. A word can go obsolete or rare, but the most ancient and forgotten words have a way of reappearing—rediscovered or spontaneously reinvented—and in any case they are part of the language’s history. All 2,500 of Cawdrey’s words are in the OED, perforce. For thirty-one of them Cawdrey’s little book was the first known usage. For a few Cawdrey is all alone. This is troublesome. The OED is irrevocably committed. Cawdrey, for example, has “onust, loaden, overcharged”; so the OED has “loaded, burdened,” but it is an outlier, a one-off. Did Cawdrey make it up? “I’m tending towards the view that he was attempting to reproduce vocabulary he had heard or seen,” Simpson said. “But I can’t be absolutely sure.” Cawdrey has “hallucinate, to deceive, or blind”; the OED duly gave “to deceive” as the first sense of the word, though it never found anyone else who used it that way. In cases like these, the editors can add their double caveat “Obs. rare.” But there it is.

      For the twenty-first-century OED a single source is never enough. Strangely, considering the vastness of the enterprise and its constituency, individual men and women strive to have their own nonce-words ratified by the OED. Nonce-word, in fact, was coined by James Murray himself. He got it in. An American psychologist, Sondra Smalley, coined the word codependency in 1979 and began lobbying for it in the eighties; the editors finally drafted an entry in the nineties, when they judged the word to have become established. W. H. Auden declared that he wanted to be recognized as an OED word coiner—and he was, at long last, for motted, metalogue, spitzy, and others. The dictionary had thus become engaged in a feedback loop. It inspired a twisty self-consciousness in the language’s users and creators. Anthony Burgess whinged in print about his inability to break through: “I invented some years ago the word amation, for the art or act of making love, and still think it useful. But I have to persuade others to use it in print before it is eligible for lexicographicizing (if that word exists)”—he knew it did not. “T. S. Eliot’s large authority got the shameful (in my view) juvescence into the previous volume of the Supplement.” Burgess was quite sure that Eliot simply misspelled juvenescence. If so, the misspelling was either copied or reprised twenty-eight years later by Stephen Spender, so juvescence has two citations, not one. The OED admits that it is rare.

      As hard as the OED tries to embody the language’s fluidity, it cannot help but serve as an agent of its crystallization. The problem of spelling poses characteristic difficulties. “Every form in which a word has occurred throughout its history” is meant to be included. So for mackerel (“a well-known sea-fish, Scomber scombrus, much used for food”) the second edition in 1989 listed nineteen alternative spellings. The unearthing of sources never ends, though, so the third edition revised entry in 2002 listed no fewer than thirty: maccarel, mackaral, mackarel, mackarell, mackerell, mackeril, mackreel, mackrel, mackrell, mackril, macquerel, macquerell, macrel, macrell, macrelle, macril, macrill, makarell, makcaral, makerel, makerell, makerelle, makral, makrall, makreill, makrel, makrell, makyrelle, maquerel, and maycril. As lexicographers, the editors would never declare these alternatives to be wrong: misspellings. They do not wish to declare their choice of spelling for the headword, mackerel, to be “correct.” They emphasize that they examine the evidence and choose “the most common current spelling.” Even so, arbitrary considerations come into play: “Oxford’s house style occasionally takes precedence, as with verbs which can end -ize or -ise, where the -ize spelling is always used.” They know that no matter how often and how firmly they disclaim a prescriptive authority, a reader will turn to the dictionary to find out how a word should be spelled. They cannot escape inconsistencies. They feel obliged to include words that make purists wince. A new entry as of December 2003 memorialized nucular: “= nuclear a. (in various senses).” Yet they refuse to count evident misprints found by way of Internet searches. They do not recognize straight-laced, even though statistical evidence finds that bastardized form outnumbering strait-laced. For the crystallization of spelling, the OED offers a conventional explanation: “Since the invention of the printing press, spelling has become much less variable, partly because printers wanted uniformity and partly because of a growing interest in language study during the Renaissance.” This is true. But it omits the role of the dictionary itself, arbitrator and exemplar.

      For Cawdrey the dictionary was a snapshot; he could not see past his moment in time. Samuel Johnson was more explicitly aware of the dictionary’s historical dimension. He justified his ambitious program in part as a means of bringing a wild thing under control—the wild thing being the language, “which, while it was employed in the cultivation of every species of literature, has itself been hitherto neglected; suffered to spread, under the direction of chance, into wild exuberance; resigned to the tyranny of time and fashion; and exposed to the corruptions of ignorance, and caprices of innovation.” Not until the OED, though, did lexicography attempt to reveal the whole shape of a language across time. The OED becomes a historical panorama. The project gains poignancy if the electronic age is seen as a new age of orality, the word breaking free from the bonds of cold print. No publishing institution better embodies those bonds, but the OED, too, tries to throw them off. The editors feel they can no longer wait for a new word to appear in print, let alone in a respectably bound book, before they must take note. For tighty-whities (men’s underwear), new in 2007, they cite a typescript of North Carolina campus slang. For kitesurfer, they cite a posting to the Usenet newsgroup alt.kite and later a New Zealand newspaper found via an online database. Bits in the ether.

      When Murray began work on the new dictionary, the idea was to find the words, and with them the signposts to their history. No one had any idea how many words were there to be found. By then the best and most comprehensive dictionary of English was American: Noah Webster’s, seventy thousand words. That was a baseline. Where were the rest to be discovered? For the first editors of what became the OED, it went almost without saying that the source, the wellspring, should be the literature of the language—particularly the books of distinction and quality. The dictionary’s first readers combed Milton and Shakespeare (still the single most quoted author, with more than thirty thousand references), Fielding and Swift, histories and sermons, philosophers and poets. Murray announced in a famous public appeal in 1879:

      A thousand readers are wanted. The later sixteenth-century literature is very fairly done; yet here several books remain to be read. The seventeenth century, with so many more writers, naturally shows still more unexplored territory.

      He considered the territory to be large but bounded. The founders of the dictionary explicitly meant to find every word, however many that would ultimately be. They planned a complete inventory. Why should they not? The number of books was unknown but not unlimited, and the number of words in those books was countable. The task seemed formidable but finite.

      It no longer seems finite. Lexicographers are accepting the language’s boundlessness. They know by heart Murray’s famous remark: “The circle of the English language has a well-defined centre but no discernable circumference.” In the center are the words everyone knows. At the edges, where Murray placed slang and cant and scientific jargon and foreign border crossers, everyone’s sense of the language differs and no one’s can be called “standard.”

      Murray called the center “well defined,” but infinitude and fuzziness can be seen there. The easiest, most common words—the words Cawdrey had no thought of including—require, in the OED, the most extensive entries. The entry for make alone would fill a book: it teases apart ninety-eight distinct senses of the verb, and some of these senses have a dozen or more subsenses. Samuel Johnson saw the problem with these words and settled on a solution: he threw up his hands.

      My labor has likewise been much increased by a class of verbs too frequent in the English language, of which the signification is so loose and general, the use СКАЧАТЬ