Steven Poole's Trigger Happy is published by Fourth Estate.This is not a new book – it was published in 1998.This is popular history that, though it is published by the august Oxford University Press itself, feels no need even to pay lip-service to 'historical principles'. People at a ball in 1928 apparently 'whirled like stately dervishes'. Most gruesome of all are Winchester's attempts at pseudo-novelistic colour. He is also in love with hyperbole (he refers to a group of dining academics as 'a stellar gathering of intellect, rarely either assembled or able to be assembled since'). Winchester is besotted with ungrammatical constructions - which defect seems allied to his peculiar strivings for genteel archaism, as when he calls a year a 'twelvemonth', or refers to a short rest as a 'period of quietude'. (It was, of course, not 'literally' democratic, since the editor had absolute power in writing the final definitions.) quite literally, would be classically democratic'. (As the OED itself confirms, it means the quality of being very big, or 'vastness'.) He declaims grandiloquently that the OED '. He tells us that the Shakespearean word 'vastidity' means 'big'. Winchester explains well the enormous labours involved in compiling even four pages, and his notion of the OED as a triumph of Victorian engineering is apposite.Īccording to the lovably irascible Murray, the poet Browning used words 'without regard to their proper meaning'. He battles against interfering superiors and moves to Oxford, where the local post office erects a shiny new red pillar box right outside his house to handle the volume of correspondence. We see him erect his first Scriptorium - a corrugated-iron shed in his garden - to house his assistants, and to shelve the hundreds of thousands of quotation slips sent in by volunteers. Work on the dictionary was at best sporadic finally, in 1879, red-bearded Scotsman James Murray was appointed editor and became the hero of the story.

Then we come to the story of the OED itself and its early editors: Samuel Taylor Coleridge's grandson Herbert, brilliant but sickly, whose dying words were, according to legend, 'I must begin Sanskrit tomorrow' and Frederick Furnivall, who recruited pretty young women from Hammersmith cafés to induct them into his sculling club. He first sprints through the development of language in Britain and sketches the development of monolingual lexicography, from Robert Cawdrey's 1604 dictionary which advertised itself as being 'for the benefit of Ladies, Gentlewomen, or any other unskilfull persons', to Samuel Johnson and Noah Webster.

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