The Meaning of Everything

by Simon Winchester

A long time ago, I read a book about the volunteer method of collecting words for the Oxford English Dictionary (The Professor and the Madman). It took me a long time to get through, and my main memory of reading it is the time I went with D. to East Lansing, Mich. It was also on that trip that I first saw a copy of the OED (in the c ompact form) with its little magnifying glass and everything. I recently looked up the OED on Amazon.com and found out I could have my very own OED (compact version) for only $250. Someday... Anyway, this is another book, by the same author, on the OED, only this one focuses on the Dictionary as a whole, and not what two specific individuals did. So I read it. And, besides, who could resist a title like The Meaning of Everything.

It's an interesting book, for word-nerds. Makes me appreciate WordSpy even more and Eats, Shoots & Leaves even more. And the vocabulary in it challenged me at times, which was neat. It made me appreciate the English language more, and think about the different shades of meaning that our language allows us to indicate, in order to allow us to closer approximate what we mean. It's an ode to our toolkit for expression, and to taking on the impossible because it needs to be done. And to not settling for easier substitutes when it is clear what the Right Thing should be. I liked it because it's a story of idealism that wasn't compromised. And it even had a sense of humor about the whole thing.

"Obsolete words, for a start, were not fully registerd in any dictionary thus far published. Secondly, families or groups of words were only capriciously included in these same dictionaries - some members of families made it in, some did not. Then again, such histories of words as were included in dictionaries rarely looked back far enough - the cited earlies appearances of many words was all to frequently given as more recent than their actual inauguration, because the research had been performed too sloppily. Fourthly, important meanings and senses of words had all too often been passed over - once again, the research had too often been too perfunctory. Little heed had been paid to distinguishing between apparently synonymous words. sixth, there seemed to be a superabundance of redundancy in all previous dictionaries - too many of them were bloated with unnecessary material, at the expense of what was really wanting. And finally, much of the literature which ought to have been read and scanned for illustrative quotations had not been read at all: any serious and totally authoritative dictionary had perforce to be the result of the reading and scanning and schouring of all literature - all journals, magazines, papers, illuminated monastic treatises, and volumes of written and printed publicly accessible works great, small, and impossibly trivial."

"He was a keen huntsman and a good shot. [Footnote indicated.]

[Text of footnote:] Fairly good: he blew off his right hand in 1864, but remained keen on the sport."

"The circumferential ripples of new-formed English words will become ever larger, ever wider, and ever less well defined: that much is certain. And what is certain too is that humans, being humans, will be on hand as well, in some way or another, as they have been for so long, to catch all these words, to list them all, and to record and fix them for all in time, for always."