The Meaning of Everything Read online

And then, as glasses were clinked, cigars were lit and lucifers put away, chairs pushed back from the long tables, and a hush was demanded, so from the centre of the high table rose the slightly less than commanding figure of the celebration dinner's most celebrated guest, the Right Honourable Stanley Baldwin, PC, MP, the nation's three-term Conservative Prime Minister.

  Perhaps no political leader or statesman in British history could have been better suited to the task that lay at hand. Baldwin, the calm, taciturn, steady, unadventurous, pipe-smoking son of a Worcestershire ironmaster, a figure of elaborated ordinariness— and a cousin of Rudyard Kipling—was both extraordinarily wellread (though his history degree from Cambridge was modest) and inextinguishably proud of being a sturdily provincial Englishman. `I speak', he once wrote, `not as the man in the street, but as the man in the field-path, a much simpler person, steeped in tradition and impervious to new ideas.'

  A colleague assessed Baldwin rather more acutely, in writing specifically of how this then 61-year-old politician saw his role as the nation's elected leader.

  Above all he must be patriotic; a lover of his fellow-countrymen, of his country's history, of its institutions, its ancient monarchy, its great parliamentary traditions, its fairness, its tolerance.

  All these things were innate in his own disposition. But he steeped himself in them, as the part which it was his duty to play as Prime Minister, and they became more deeply ingrained in consequence.

  It was thus in part Stanley Baldwin the actor—a man whose radio-ideal voice was said to be `delightfully modulated' and who was known for taking the greatest of care in selecting the words he spoke—who rose before his quietening audience. He was to deliver a speech which, if by no means the most important of his long career, must surely have been one of the most pleasurable, both to utter and to hear. He was there for no less a task than to propose a formal Toast of Gratitude and Admiration to the Editors and Staff of what was to be formally and unforgettably called The Oxford English Dictionary—for the twelve mighty tombstone-sized volumes were now, and after 70 long years of terrible labour, fully and finally complete. The first two sets had been made and formally presented: one had gone to King George V, the other to the American President, Calvin Coolidge. Downing Street had been obliged to purchase its own official set for Mr Baldwin—and rarely, he later said, did a day go by when he did not consult it.

  In 15,490 pages of single-spaced printed text, and at long, long last, all 414,825 words that the then Editor-in-Chief, Professor Sir William Craigie—this Derby Day newly knighted, and newly blessed with an honorary degree (which Oxford had bestowed on him the day before) and now positively beaming with pride from his place to the Prime Minister's left—all the words which Sir William and his colleagues had amassed and catalogued and listed and annotated and which were thus far in their sum reckoned to make up all that was then known of the English language, had now been fully and properly defined, their preferred and variant and obsolete spellings all listed, their etymologies all recorded, their pronunciations suggested, required, or demanded.

  There were in addition no fewer than 1,827,306 illustrative quotations listed—selected from five million offered by thousands of volunteer readers and literary woolgatherers—that showed just how and when the uses and senses and meanings of all of these words had begun and evolved and then, in the nature of the English language, had steadily and ineluctably reshaped and reworked themselves. These were essential: the millions of words from these quotations offer up countless examples of exactly how the language worked over the centuries of its employment, and by their use they mark the OED out as the finest dictionary ever made in any language, and made, as it happens, of the language that is the most important in the world, and probably will be for all time.

  And the work that was unveiled during that glittering Goldsmiths' summer evening was not simply magnificent in its unrelenting scholarship: it was almost unbelievably big—fat, heavy, shelf-bendingly huge—as a monument to the labour of those who fashioned it. A total of 227,779,589 letters and numbers, occupying fully 178 miles of type, had over the 70 years just now ended been corralled into place between the thick blue or red morocco covers of the first editions of this unanswerably monumental book.

  Dr Craigie and his staff—and the memories of many who had not lived to see their project finished, not the least of these being the great James Murray and Henry Bradley, whose names will deservedly be rather more intimately connected than is Craigie's with the making of the Dictionary—were all there to bask in their rightly earned glory, and to accept the gratitude of a grateful nation. And Mr Baldwin, more fully aware than most of the special significance of his task, rose to the occasion with an eloquence quite suited to the moment. It was a long speech—though read today, so many decades after its delivery, it seems fresh and interesting and not at all tedious—and there is much to savour in it. Most of all, its closing paragraphs.

  Lord Oxford once said that if he were cast on a desert island, and could only choose one author for company, he would have the forty volumes of Balzac.

  I choose the Dictionary every time. Like Ezekiel in the valley of dry bones, I should pray for the four winds to breathe upon those words, that they might emerge and stand upon their feet an exceeding great army. Our histories, our novels, our poems, our plays—they are all in this one book. I could live with your Dictionary, Dr Craigie. I choose it, and I think that my choice would be justified. It is a work of endless fascination. It is true that I have not read it—perhaps I never shall—but that does not mean that I do not often go to it.

  Let me remind you of those words which Dr Johnson used in his famous Preface about translators in his time, and which I think are apt today: `If the changes that we fear be thus irresistible ¼ it remains that we retard what we cannot repel; that we palliate what we cannot cure. Life may be lengthened by care, though death cannot be ultimately defeated; tongues, like Governments, have a natural tendency to degeneration; we have long preserved our constitution; let us make some struggle for our language.'

  It is in that great spirit of devotion to our language as the great and noble instrument of our national life and literature that the editors and the staff of the Oxford Dictionary have laboured. They have laboured so well that, so far from lowering the standard with which the work began, they have sought to raise it as the work advanced. They have given us of their best. There can be no worldly recompense—except that every man and woman in this country whose gratitude and respect is worth having, will rise up and call you blessed for this great work. The Oxford English Dictionary is the greatest enterprise of its kind in history.

  And all that was most suitably and appositely said by the Prime Minister on what the newspapers reported the following morning had been, for a thousand other reasons too, one of the happiest of Derby Days of all time. It was the conclusion of a story that properly began on a chill and foggy winter's evening almost 71 years before: the story that is told in the pages that follow.

  I

  Taking the Measure of It All

  The English Dictionary, like the English Constitution, is the creation of no one man, and of no one age; it is a growth that has slowly developed itself adown the ages; its beginnings lie far back in times almost pre-historic. And these beginnings themselves, although the English Dictionary of today is lineally developed from them, were neither Dictionaries, nor even English.

  (James Murray, `The Evolution of English Lexicography', 1900)

  I. The Making

  The English language—so vast, so sprawling, so wonderfully unwieldy, so subtle, and now in its never-ending fullness so undeniably magnificent—is in its essence the language of invasion. It was always bound to be so: geology and oceanography saw to it that the British Isles, since long before their populated time, were indeed almost always islands, and the ancestors of all who ever lived there first arrived by sea from beyond, bringing with them their customs, their looks—and their languages.

  O
f the gigantic amassment of words that make up the stock of the English language—the 414,825 that were discerned and discovered and catalogued in time for publication in 1928 of the first edition of the great Dictionary that is the subject of this story, the hundreds of thousands that had already been listed in Webster's wildly successful American dictionary, together with the scores of thousands that have been found or created in the decades since—the huge majority were conceived or otherwise made whole through the good offices of outsiders, visitors, or invaders.

  Of those settlers about whose language we know something, the Celts—who came from gloomy forests and swamps in the upper valleys of the Danube—are generally counted as the first. They swarmed westwards across Europe some time during the Bronze Age; about 500 years before the birth of Christ they settled themselves, among other places, on the cliff-protected fortress of the rainy and foggy islands that lay off the continent's north-western shores. Those that settled in the generally more climatically benign southern half of the islands called themselves Britons—a name from which in time was to come the British Isles, and, indeed, Britain.

  Here they created for themselves some kind of home and civilization, and they spoke languages that have left precious little trace on modern English, but which are preserved as the basis of such Welsh, Cornish, Scots Gaelic, and Irish as is still spoken today. There are a very few words—brock, for badger being one, combe, meaning a deep valley, and which appears in some English village names and in contemporary Welsh, another, torr, a mountain peak—which seem to have survived, at least among those who speak preciously or somewhat pedantically today. Some Celtic place names—London, Dover, and Kent, the rivers Thames, Exe, and Wye—exist today as well. Late in their history the Celts borrowed—probably; there is still debate among etymologists— a small number of words, such as assen for ass and maybe the word cross, from visiting Christian missionaries. But generally their linguistic role in the speech and writings of future English generations was fairly minimal; shortly after the beginning of the Christian era any idea that Celtic British might have a longterm linguistic influence was brushed aside: thousands of wellarmoured and tactically adept legionnaires swept ashore and, before the language had the chance properly to take hold, promptly placed all south Britain under the colonial suzerainty of Rome.

  The Romans remained in Britain for the next 400 years. By the time they left in ad 409, to attend (in vain) to the fate of their fastcrumbling Western Empire in Europe (Rome would be sacked by the Huns a year later, and the Empire would die after only seventy more), Britain had been under their military and cultural influence for very nearly the same amount of time as separates us today from the Renaissance. The Romans did leave something of an imperial linguistic legacy: by the time the next flotilla of invaders reached the shingle beaches of what is now East Anglia, a language had already taken root in the southern isles of the British archipelago that was a mixture, on the one hand, of the early Celtic dialects (or British, as some might call it) and, on the other, of that language which many English schoolchildren would recognize all too glumly as that still used today in texts like Caesar's Civil War, Book Two.

  The Latin-based hybrid tongue of the Roman-Britons that, had it remained unsullied by what happened next, might well one day have stood alone as the language of the islands, then dominated. In all but the most remote mountain valleys of Wales and Cumberland, and in those still more isolated Scottish glens where the much-feared and wildly painted Picts held sway, a form of language that would have been understood both by the subject natives and by the governors and legates who directed them and the soldiers who policed them was widely spoken. Had the events of the fifth and sixth centuries never taken place, Britain's linguistic evolution might have been much the same as that which was suffered or enjoyed by the similarly Roman-colonized peoples of Spain or France.

  But in fact it was all to turn out very differently—and that was because, in the middle of the fifth century, the longboats of a score of entirely new and unanticipated invaders and settlers slid up from the east onto the beaches of southern and eastern England, where there are now such counties as Yorkshire, Norfolk, Essex, Kent, and Hampshire. The flimsy craft that had made it across the heaving grey waters of the North Sea had all set out from the ragged, north-jutting Baltic peninsula of what is now known as Denmark. The invaders themselves had an easy time of it; the Romans had gone, and the remaining Celts were in no position to mount much of a defence. They were in consequence to be swiftly dominated by the newcomers, invaders who were linguistically of Germanic stock—Teutons. But though the invaders arrived at more or less the same time, they were not all the same people. Some, to an extent indicated by where their longboats had been launched, were Frisians, other were Jutes, still other Saxons, and—most importantly for the naming of both the English nation and the language that resulted—some of them were called Angles.

  We know something of their arrival. Hengist and Horsa, for instance, were—according to legend—two Jutish brothers who landed at Ebbsfleet on the muddy Isle of Thanet in the midfifth century, established with their compatriots a series of settlements in Kent, Hampshire, and the Isle of Wight, and set about decades' worth of slaying every Celt they encountered. The Saxons did much the same, landing in 477 in East Anglia and spreading themselves south and westward, pushing the Celts relentlessly westward to Wales and Cornwall and the Scottish borderland. And the Angles, who arrived from Denmark at a series of landing places just to the north of the River Humber in 547, established a kingdom in what is now Northumberland. The Venerable Bede, writing in Latin from his monastery on Tyneside two centuries later, captured something of the ferment of the time:

  In a short time, swarms of the aforesaid nations came over the island, and they began to increase so much that they became terrible to the natives themselves who had invited them. Then, having on a sudden entered into league with the Picts, whom they had by this time begun to expel by force of arms, they began to turn their weapons against their confederates …

  The consequence may have been bloodshed and turmoil, and the slaughter may have lasted for a very long and wretched time; but it left the makings of the first building blocks of what was to become today's English language. It also left a small number of names that are distinctly recognizable today. For example, the Teutons called the Celts wealas—foreigners—and it is from this word that we get the modern name Wales. The Celts first called their new oppressors Saxons, then Angles: King Aethelbert was known as rexAnglorum, the country became known as Anglia, and the words Engle, Englisc,1 and Englaland all slowly crept into common currency, until by the eleventh century the nation in the making was formally known as England.

  Not that the people were by then speaking or writing anything that would be very easily recognizable as English. Their language used to be known as Anglo-Saxon; nowadays, in an effort to promote the notion of English as an ever-evolving language, it is more generally called Old English. It was written—at least in its earliest incarnation—in runes, the writing system of intersecting straight lines that had been imported by the invaders. (Three of the runic letters—those corresponding to present-day B, H, and R—look almost identical to the current capital letters. The rest are easily decipherable, but unlike anything written today.) The more sophisticated writers of Old English (such as those in Northumbria) used a system that is now called futhorc, the acronym (much like the word alphabet) for the first six letters of their 31-letter alphabet (with -th—known as the thorn—being elided into a single symbol).

  The vocabulary of Old English—with its total lexicon amounting to perhaps 50,000 words—depended to some degree on borrowings from the available languages that were already being spoken in the British Isles. These were items that came either from the vanquished Celts—a tiny number of their British words (crag and dun and the aforementioned brock, combe, and torr among them) still surviving today—or some couple of hundred words coming from the Latin of the departing conqueror
s (although in most cases these words appear to have been borrowed on the continent before the Anglo-Saxons came to Britain). A fair number of these words—cyse, catte, weall, and straet, meaning cheese, cat, wall, and street in Old English respectively—still exist, albeit in modified form, in today's modern word stock. But for the most part, Old English was a tongue that grew out of its own resources, and these resources reflected in large measure the Germanic origins of the new settlers.

  Not a few romantics in modern times have touted the notion of the Teutonically inspired Old English as being the purest form of English ever written and spoken. Dickens, Hardy, and Gerard Manley Hopkins were enthusiastic backers of this idea; in more recent times George Orwell was a great supporter too, and publicly yearned for English to be purged of all its Latin, French, Greek, and Norse loans, and to be centred around and dominated by the short, simpler words that were of an undeniable `Anglicity'—what some call the `common words' of the English language. He keenly wanted English, as the sixteenth-century humanist John Cheke had once written, to be `written cleane and pure, unmixt and unmangled with borrowings of other tunges'.

  The Dorset dialect poet William Barnes, much taught at my own Dorchester boarding school, went rather further by creating his own vocabulary of new words, all of them rooted firmly in his beloved Anglo-Saxon. A small number of these—his preference for using faith-heat for enthusiasm, word-strain for accent, and wheelsaddle for bicycle—achieved some success and are to be found in occasional popular use. But given the multiplicity of loanwords on offer, many of them exceedingly pretty to look at and to say, his success in going retro was not quite what he would have liked.