Humble Beginnings

In which our heroine starts a new project...

One of my life goals is to own a copy of the OED. That’s Oxford English Dictionary, for those of you not in the know.

The current incarnation of the OED is 20 volumes long, encompassing nearly 300,000 main entries. The thing that separates the OED from your basic Webster is that the OED lists source quotations for each of its entries.

“Fascinating!” You are surely thinking. “But so what?”

The idea behind the quotations is that it places words in their actual, real-world context. And multiple quotations trace how usage of the words has changed and expanded through its lifetime. The OED tries hard to find the earliest written use of any word, to set exactly when a word entered the English language.

“Get on with it!” You are surely thinking now.

Compiling the OED was an undertaking that took seventy years and used the services of thousands of volunteers around the world. The volunteers were asked to read works and find the oh-so-important quotations to fill the dictionary. Not just hard words, or unusual words, or so-called important words, but absolutely every word.

“Rrraarrrgh!” You are surely thinking now.

The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, by Simon Winchester tells the story of one of the volunteers who helped gather these quotations for the dictionary. A very seminal volunteers, who personally contributed over 20,000 quotations. A volunteer who just happened to be stark raving maaaaaaad.

It may be a measure of my own word geekery, but I was riveted by this book. Finished the thing, from epilogue to “thank-yous” in just four hours. The writing is informative and interesting.

The best part of this book was that Winchester managed to relay the importance of the OED, when it was created and even today. The OED defined Anglo culture; the way English-speakers saw themselves and the way we wanted to world to see us. And it was an undertaking that any English-speaker could participate in creating. It was a book of the people. It was of a way of saying, “This is who we are. This is what we know. This is how we say it.”

This book inspired me. I am a writer by trade and by hobby. But my writing usually floats at the lowbrow end of the pool: comic books, sitcoms, screenplays. So here I am, starting a simple blog in the corner of the interweb, trying to writing things of merit. I would like to say, “This is who I am. This is what I know. This is what I want to say about it.” I do not have twenty volumes of beautifully bound scholarship behind me, but all things in time.

Thank you for reading.