Post by mipela on Oct 17, 2016 11:22:05 GMT 10
Things we take for granted, in this case, Dictionaries.
Have you ever thought about your dictionary ? Have you ever thought about where it came from ? About how it came to be ? About who might have compiled it ? And when ? Have you ever thought about any of this ?
I’ve been reading about this subject and I find it fascinating reading. If, like me, you’ve a bent for writing, you will have a dictionary at hand and it’s sibling; the Thesaurus. Want to know the correct spelling of say, wholesome (fairly easy) or improve your context of wholesome ? Then you go to the thesaurus for wider meanings/interpretations of wholesome, what it means.
However, as my Forum friend Epictetus posted today on The Shed Online, he is dismayed that computer held dictionaries default to Americanized English, the software engineers eschew the English version. I prefer to write and read the English format, i.e., “Americanised”.
I am reading a most engrossing book written by knowledgeable Englishman Simon Winchester wherein he recounts for us the history of the dictionary, one of those things we take for granted.
This 207 page Penguin paperback is entitled “The Surgeon of Crowthorne”, first published in 1999, it’s ISBN is: 0 14 027128 7. The front cover advises it’s “The Number One Best Seller”, a tale of murder, madness and the Oxford English Dictionary. Scribe Will Sell of the London Times endorses it with the approbation “Absolutely riveting - a tour de force”. No disagreement from me.
The world standard in dictionaries is The New Oxford English Dictionary, abbreviated to OED.
The first recorded attempt to organise language into some sort of order was undertaken in AD 1225, the main language of the time being Latin. In London in 1538, Thomas Elyot produced and printed an attempt at collating words in common use and attempted to define their meanings. This was the first published book to use the word “Dictionary”. Attempts to collate words and meaning in the various European languages stumbled along and it wasn’t until English schoolteacher Nathaniel Bailey produced a wider and more useable version in 1725. By 1782, he’d produced twenty five ever improving editions.
Then came Dr. Samuel Johnson who mostly succeeded where all others before him had failed. He produced “A Dictionary of the English Language” (Quote) “which was and has remained ever since, a portrait of the language of the day, in all its majesty beauty and marvelous confusion. Few are the books that can offer so much pleasure, to look at, to hold, to skim, to read.” (Unquote).
It wasn’t until 1857 that a concerted effort was proposed to capture the English language, word by word. It was proposed that the task be given to volunteers across the Empire to collect and catalogue the English language. The men who dedicated themselves to this herculean task were unable to predict that the goal of the project they started in 1857 would not be achieved for another seventy years !
All the foregoing is perhaps a dry read but I have so far avoided the interplay between the various protagonists, as the interactions between these men is the skeleton of the story and I do not want to pre-empt your enjoyment of this most absorbing story.
I commend to you “The Surgeon of Crowthorne’ as an excellent read, it will make you view your dictionary with new respect.
Cheers,
Mipela