James Murray, the editor of the OED

The book I chose to read from (only now I need to read all of it!) is Caught in the Web of Words: James Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary. This is an account written by his granddaughter about his life and work. James, himself, did not think much of biography and wrote that "It is one of the hateful characteristics of a degenerate age, that the idle world will not let the worker alone, accept his offering of work & appraise it for itself, but must insist upon turning him inside out, and knowing all about him and really troubling itself a great deal more about his little peculiarities & personal pursuits, than his abiding work." James was born in 1837 in the area that marks the border between Scotland and England--an area that is claimed by both countries and "whose inhabitants were neither English nor Scotch but simply Borderers." This is where James' interest in language unknowing began--he was criticized in school for not forming his grammar and speech correctly. Later, after years of self-study, James realizes that his grammar was not incorrect--it was simply how the people spoke in his little town.

James studied many subjects and had many interests, but he came to study languages and their history. He "discovered" Anglo-Saxon--he found an old text in a bookshop. The excitement about this is that realized that the Border dialect of his childhood speech wasn't something local--it actually belonged to the Anlgo-Saxon root. He traced the Highland speech to Gaelic origins and in the Strathclyde area he found words similar to Welsh, but the Border and east owed their speech to Anlian invaders, with some Norse elements. He paid more and more attention to the words he heard. In Hawick, the processes an tools used in preparing flax were mostly pure Anglo-Saxon with a few borrowings from Dutch. In Orkney many more words of Norse origin were used. He went on to observe many more things about the language about him.

He was learning much, but he was still on his own. He met Melville Bell (Alexander Graham's father), at a lecture, who was one of the first men in Scotland to make a scientific study of phonetics and was the inventor of Visible Speech (an alphabet of symbols with the same purposes of the IPA). This was exactly was James was looking for because it made phonetics an exact science which could be used in the comparative study of languages.

He was eventually accepted into the scientific societies which accepted and encouraged his work. He became well-known for his work with language and its applications to other studies, and he was asked to be the editor for a definitive work on the English language--The New English Dictionary--known to us today as the Oxford English Dictionary. This is of course an important and amazing work. It was a work of devotion for James and he spent many years trying to complete it. He exasperated the publishers and everyone else with his meticulous and time-consuming work, but in the end it is a definitive work. He found many incorrect definitions as he worked through the dictionary, and he would follow every word to its original source, saying that that was the only way to assure the correctness. He died before the work was completed, but he received honors and recognition for his contributions in his lifetime. Though he was not able to complete the OED, he left instructions and outlines for the completion of the work.

And I thought I loved dictionaries! --Love and kisses. There was an explosion of "Mashmallow Maties" throughout my house yesterday, and a dirty diaper in a sack by the front door, but I'll crunch through the spilled cereal, hurry past the malodious offender, step over the Barbies, and see you all in class. --Evelyn