Shock troops mobilised in Dictionary Corner

Now, Dr Burchfield did not have infinity at his command. His project had already taken over his life. He had neglected his first love, the Ormulum. The Ormulum is not a musical instrument but an endless treatise by a 12th-century monk from Lincolnshire called Orm, or as he insisted on spelling it, Orrm. For the interest (if any) of this unique manuscript is the author?s idiosyncratic spelling system. The Ormulum has never been properly edited and printed. It would have made Burchfield?s name. Instead he slogged away at the OED. Much thanks he got.

So his four supplementary vols had to be kept within limits. There was no point, he declared in his introduction, in including foreign regional words being covered in specialist dictionaries of American English, Canadianisms or Jamaican English.

I can?t see why Dr Ogilvie is over-excited. She complains, for example, that Burchfield ?was going against OED policy? by dropping the 1933 Supplement?s entry for chimney-sweeper. Now, it would be bad if future generations were left puzzled by a word in Shakespeare?s couplet: ?Golden lads and girls all must, / As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.? But, no, the sense of chimney-sweeper that Burchfield chose not to incorporate into his bulging volumes was: ?The sooty powder on the flowering parts of corn-plants.?

Today an online lexicographer can find room for any hapax-legomenon or even ghost words such as abacot, supposed by many a dictionary to have been a cap of state worn by English kings, but in truth a misreading for ?a bycoket?. No tree need die to record aberglaube or danchi, calabazilla or igloowik (?a kind of igloo?).

It was not so in Burchfield?s day. Every word was consigned to paper by hand. The indefatigable Marghanita Laski, when not appearing on What?s My Line?, was sending in 100,000 ink-written slips with citations of words. Sir St Vincent Troubridge sent thousands connected with the theatre, scribbled on the backs of envelopes.

It all had to be set in type, printed on paper and sold. An endless, unaffordable dictionary would have foundered, as had similar enterprises in France or Germany.

To my mind, the worst kinds of new dictionaries purport to embrace all ?World English?. They sound all relaxed and Andy Kershawish but soon lose their bearings. The Encarta World English Dictionary (1999), which contained mistakes, was sensibly republished as the Bloomsbury English Dictionary five years later.

James Murray, the son of a village tailor from Hawick who aged into the greybeard father of the OED, had it right. He drew a diagram of English resembling a spiny sea-cucumber. The radial spines were marked Scientific, Technical, Dialectal, Slang, and Foreign. Those spines might be studied by specialist lexicographers. The prey of the OED was the sea-cucumber?s body, and this was marked in big letters COMMON. ?The English language has a well-defined centre but no discernible circumference,? was the dictum of the OED that Burchfield quoted with approval. Let not his name, daily blessed by dictionary-ramblers, be blackened by world-English guerrillas.

Source: http://telegraph.feedsportal.com/c/32726/f/568297/s/2606fce8/l/0L0Stelegraph0O0Cculture0C970A60A20A0CShock0Etroops0Emobilised0Ein0EDictionary0ECorner0Bhtml/story01.htm

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