Logomania

By LANCE MORROW

CAUGHT IN THE WEB OF WORDS: JAMES A.H. MURRAY AND THE OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY by K.M. Elisabeth Murray Yale University Press; 386 pages; $15

With its splendid hoard of half a million words, the Oxford English Dictionary is the central bank of the language --a trove of Latinate abstractions. Old Frisian or Old French oddments, fubsy eloquences of Middle English and exotic intrusions from the Arabic. It contains a million and a half quotations to show the historical progress of language, the way its vocabularies have stirred, matured in meaning and eventually decayed. But the logomaniac's great joy in the O.E.D. is to wander through it looking for the glint of old coins: sippet, maumetry, floscule, gimmer, the wonderfully dark deathbird and night-hag.

The O.E.D. is a magnificent but inconvenient enthusiasm; the full 13-volume set costs $395 and weighs too much (80 Ibs.) to take on trips. A two-volume microprint edition has been available since 1971, but requires a magnifying glass to read. The eyestrain is well earned. The enterprise of the full dictionary engaged the labor of hundreds--editors, subeditors, voluntary readers--over more than half a century. The greatest of the dictionary's editors, James A.H. Murray, died in 1915, while finishing up the letter T, 13 years before the last of the Zs (zymurgy and zynder) went into print. But in 35 years of leadership, Murray laid the plan for the dictionary and edited half of it. Murray more than anyone else established the art of historical lexicography: defining the language by its various usages through time.

Samuel Johnson, in his own idiosyncratic dictionary, defined lexicographer as a "harmless drudge." Murray was a delightful drudge of enormous energy. Born in a small Scottish village and largely self-taught (a process that saved him from mere pedantry), Murray could pick up languages as if he were shopping for groceries. For a time a schoolmaster and later a London bank clerk, Murray was drawn into the dictionary project by his work with the Philological Society. In his "Scriptorium," a room lined with hundreds of pigeonholes stuffed with more than 5 million quotation slips, Murray presided like a medieval abbot. Originally he had proposed to devote a mere ten years of his life to the great work. Had he known what it would cost him, Murray might never have started. Always pressed for money, he had eleven children to support, along with his revolving cast of helpers. He endured constant sniping and professional infighting at the Oxford University Press.

Murray's granddaughter, K.M. Elisabeth Murray, has written a biography that possesses many of the virtues of James Murray himself--grace, humor, intelligence, curiosity and scholarship. Aside from personal difficulties, writes Miss Murray, James faced thousands of odd problems. He found a special class of "ghost words," misspelled or ill-defined items that had been admitted to some previous dictionary, thus undergoing an illegitimate birth. He worried over a word like condum (sic), later judged "too utterly obscene" for inclusion.

Murray maintained a huge correspondence, sometimes writing 40 letters a day; his mail went, he said, "to Lord Tennyson to ask where he got the word balm-cricket and what he meant by it; to the Sporting News about a term in horse-racing, or pugilism; or the inventor of the word hooligan ... to the Mayor of Yarmouth about the word bloater in the herring fishery." Once he wrote to the Linnaean Society for help with the word aphis -- first used by Linnaeus for green fly; his inquiry made its scholarly rounds until someone in desperation thought to ask the best wordman he knew -- Dr. Murray.

The doctor thought of the English language as something celestial -- swirling, nebulous, with a bright density of words at the center and others flying off toward the margins of space and time. He came at last to regard the Dictionary as "a great abyss that will never cry 'Enough!' " Out of that chaos he fashioned one of the monuments of English-speaking civilization.

--Lance Morrow

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