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 ...

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...

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-se...

Have you heard of Urban Dictionary ? It is a different from regular dictionaries in these ways: 1)       It is not associated with any big-name dictionary from the past. 2)      Most of its content is slang words and phrases, especially the ones trending on the Internet. 3)      And like so many things today, its definitions are a “product of the internet hordes”, writes Clio Chang . Anyone can add a definition, and other users get to up-vote or down-vote it. 4)      The definitions then get ranked based on those up and down votes and the most popular ones show up first. A side-effect of this mechanism is that people try to come up definitions that will be popular. Sometimes this leads to humorous definitions. Like the Devil’s Dictionary of old time. At other times though, it leads to racist and sexist definitions. Of course, whether or not the likes of Chang like to admit it, racist and s...

I have always wondered why some random authority gets to decide which new word gets to become a part of the language. After all, if enough people use the word, it is a part of the language for all practical purposes. Even if it’s only used in some parts of the world, it’s still a word in that part of the world, isn’t it? And isn’t that the purpose of language: to get the message across? So why should only some Brit or American agency get to certify that a word is now a part of the English language? Many tell me I shouldn't care about this since people already use (and will continue to use) words that fulfill their needs, regardless of what the dictionary says. The problem with that approach is figuring out the meaning of a new word you hear (or more often, read on the Net) but that is not part of any dictionary because it has not yet been accepted by the Keepers of the Language? Are you supposed to wait until it becomes part of the dictionary? Who knows when (or even if) that mig...