The Professor and the Madman

Talking about dictionaries, the OED is perhaps the best, the classiest of them all. But as dictionaries go, you’d have to be insane to actually read it. And that’s only because it was written by one. Him, a hyper-religious man from Sri Lanka, who immigrated to America, then had sex with so many prostitutes that the people in New York got embarrassed and banished him to Florida, then to England, where he shot an Irish guy and got himself admitted to a mental hospital, called William Minor. And also, a Scottish cowherd.

The Scotsman, James Murray, was a polyglot, a member of the Philological Society, and is currently my favourite Impractical Joker. His aim was to make a directory of words “more complete than any”. Eventually the Society was approached by Oxford, and the wheels of what we call OED now, were put into motion. The work was easy enough, just trace the development of the word, along with evidence. Problem? Read every book ever written, and then read those written after that. Only an insane person could do such a thing.

 A still from the movie "The Professor and the Madman" based on the story of Murray and Minor. Sourced from Golden Scene.⁣

Enter the Ceylonese nymphomaniac. One advantage of being in an asylum, is that nobody bothers you when they see you jumping from reading about chemistry, to bookbinding, to mathematics of the octave scale. William Minor was perfect for the job. Minor thought so too, for he immediately applied after seeing an ad for “voluntary readers” in the newspaper.

So, they corresponded. Minor sent notes after notes of lexicographic evidence to Murray. The two eventually became friends. Murray even tried counselling Minor. Which perhaps worked, because Minor in about 1902, sliced off his own penis. A lot of pain, agony and long hours of holding in pee followed before the OED came to be.

That’s it, the origin of the Bible for anglophones all around. Courtesy of a team led by a pretentious cowherd, with help from an impulsive madman (which I think says a lot about the subject, and those interested in it). Etymology isn’t Latin or Greek, or even pure scholarly. It’s anecdotal.  

And no, Webster sucks so I won’t be doing a post on him and his.