Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Simon Winchester describes the rules for the volunteers for Oxford English Dictionary (OED) in The Professor and the Madman . They had to pick one from the list of the pre-defined periods (decided by the Oxford team); then read books from that period; make a list of every single word they ran into; and capture the title/ edition/ page and exact sentence in which the word was found.   Not surprisingly, the estimated project completion time was wrong by decades ! Some volunteers were slow; others misunderstood the instructions; many forgot even the simple word had to be captured. On the other side, the curators at Oxford found themselves drowning in the volume of inputs coming in.   One of those volunteers was the “madman”, Dr W.C. Minor. He was an American surgeon. He enlisted in the army during the American Civil War. Not only did he see gruesome things, he was also part of at least one horrific act. Since men often deserted the army, examples had to be made. A common punishmen

When William Shakespeare was writing his plays, there was no such thing as an English dictionary, writes Simon Winchester in The Professor and the Madman : “It (English language) was like the air – it was taken for granted.”   In 1604, Robert Cawdrey created a 120 page listing of 2,500 words and their meanings “for the benefit of Ladies, gentlewomen or any other unskilled persons”. The idea wasn’t to list all words; it was only to list the “hard words” – uncommon words, and other “pretentious and flowery inventions”.   Future attempts in the 17 th century increased the word count significantly – all the way to 38,000 words. But even then, two points were ignored: (1) Nobody tried to list all the words, including the easy ones, and (2) There were no clear rules on how/who decided what was a “valid” word.   A key driver to creating a dictionary that contained all words was Britain’s growing dominance of the world. That meant its language would have be needed in more and m

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 res