OED #1: The Meeting

Simon Winchester’s book on the making of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is quite interesting. Since the topic of the book doesn’t exactly sound like riveting material, Winchester decided to narrate it with emphasis on one particular aspect, the one with the most masala in it.

 

The editor of the OED, Dr. James Murray was keen to meet one of the prolific volunteer contributors to the effort, one Dr W.C. Minor. While they’d corresponded over 20 years of effort, the two had never met! If the mountain will not come to Mohammed, then Mohammed would go to the mountain. And so Dr. Murray got on a train from Oxford, got off at Crowthorne Station, and took a carriage to the address, a mental asylum. He met the governor and requested a meeting with one of the doctors who worked there, his contributor.

 

The governor’s answer stunned Murray:

“Dr. Minor is most certainly here. But he is an inmate. He has been a patient here for more than twenty years. He is our longest-serving resident.”

On a lighter note: Is this why English is so crazy? Because one of the most prolific contributors to one of its greatest dictionaries was a madman?

 

Not surprisingly then, the title of Winchester’s book is: The Professor and the Madman. How this came to be is the main thread of the book. We’ll go into all that in this series of blogs.

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