It is always curious how the work once characterized, and not altogether in jest, as harmless drudgery remains capable of exciting scandal among journalistic writers. With a few notable exceptions, those who write about what Sidney Landau has called ``the gentle art of lexicography'' seem compelled to politicize what in fact remains one of the last bastions of old-fashioned, painstaking, a-political scholarship.
The past year has seen the publication of two books about dictionaries and dictionary writing: Herbert Morton's The Story of Webster's Third: Philip Gove's Controversial Dictionary and Its Critics (CUP) and John Willinsky's Empire of Words: The Reign of the OED (Princeton). I mention them together because of the telling contrast they represent. Only rarely has the process of lexicography been given such insightful and understanding treatment by a non-lexicographer as we find in Morton's book. One only wishes the same could be said about Willinsky's discussion of the OED.
Morton, of course, didn't have to jazz his subject up with scandal. The controversy was built in ever since the journalistic press jumped on some ill-considered advance publicity for Webster's Third. Morton's detailed discussion of this controversy is fascinating in itself and serves as a cautionary tale for any lexicographers faced with the daunting task of modernizing a cultural icon. That most of the criticism was unfair, beside the point, or simply wrong (many of the critics seem to have had little in depth knowledge of either Webster's Second or Third) is made clear in the early chapters devoted to Philip Gove's thoughtful planning and brilliant execution of the revision. All the major changes in Webster's Third -- the exclusion of non-lexical (encyclopedic) material, the consistent if cautious labeling policy based on citation evidence, the revision of etymologies, and the sharpened defining style -- were in fact dictated by the need to reflect the changes in the language (that is, incorporating over 100,000 new entries) while retaining what was most valuable in the previous edition. Though all of these changes, especially Gove's ``descriptivism'', were subjected to harsh criticism, they reflected the standard modern practices, with precedents not only in the OED but Webster's Second as well. James Murray noted in his ``General Explanations'' preface to the OED that ``no one's English is all English. The lexicographer must be satisfied to exhibit the greater part of the vocabulary of each one, which will be immensely more than the whole vocabulary of any one.'' In such circumstances, the best a ``scientific'' lexicographer can do is trust his citation evidence, and if this is broad enough, it is certainly more objective than the opinions of any ``usage panel'' could hope to be.
Of course, lexicography has never been a ``hard science'' practiced in the best of all possible worlds. Morton is particularly good at conveying a sense of the ``real world'' difficulties, unknown to most outside the field, but common to all lexicographic enterprises: the need to train and re-train fluctuating, underpaid staff (and all real lexicographic training is on-the-job training) so as to produce a homogeneous end product, the need to produce careful, scholarly work while trying to maintain the unrealistic deadlines set by publishers, the minute details of proofreading and printing far more various and difficult than those faced by ordinary scholars (the sheer number of special printing characters in works like Webster's Third or the OED is mind-boggling). That Gove could deal with these problems as well as he did and produce his dictionary so close to schedule represents a remarkable accomplishment. What he did not do well was explain to the public, who maintained a proprietary attitude toward Webster's dictionaries, what he was trying to accomplish. This, combined with the fact that like most lexicographers he exercised little control over the publicity department, led to the debacle at publication time.
Much of what Morton writes about Webster's could be used to describe the OED as well, and sad to say the reader will learn more about the sort of thing that goes into making the OED from Morton than from Willinsky. Willinsky, whose original working title was ``The Book of Books'', has parlayed a series of interviews in the mid '80s into a book that, as its cover proclaims, ``challenges the authority of this imperial dictionary, revealing many of its inherent prejudices and questioning the assumptions of its ongoing revision.''
Willinsky's thesis (and his is a thesis-driven book) is that the OED, as a product originally of Victorian times, cannot help but express British imperialism, that it is, as it were, the dreadnought of British ``gunboat linguistics'', a linguistic extension of British imperialism that specifically disempowers women, the working class, and regional speakers of English. All this is offered on the basis of some misleadingly used statistics generated by computer searches and ``close readings'' of a handful of OED's more than 600,000 word-forms. It would have been interesting to see an honest critical reading of a dictionary, but all that Willinsky's attempted deconstruction gives us is a tissue of innuendo, much of it beside the point. The term that best describes this book is politically correct passive aggression. Willinsky constantly insinuates that the OED claims an ``imperial authority'' for itself and that an ``unshakeable regard'' for the dictionary has sprung up, threatening the disempowered classes. In fact, no OED editor from Murray onwards has claimed more than the respect due the best and unstinting scholarly efforts of the many men and women who have contributed to the dictionary. Harmless anecdotes that have long been part of the ``lore'' of the dictionary are given an undeserved, sinister spin. For example, one of the Supplement's more eccentric, volunteer readers, a well known author in her own right, once went on record as saying that when she couldn't find a word she thought should be included, she would use it in her own writing and ``card'' it. But Willinsky's implication that these words have entered the dictionary is laughable. No terms would be put forward for drafting on the strength of one reader's use of them or, with exceptions like Shakespeare, one author's use.
Indeed, the heavy representation of Shakespeare in the original OED comes in for a lot of niggling criticism, but I believe a case can still be made for somewhat special treatment of the writer Harold Bloom has recently called ``the very center of the canon''. If we accept the modern dictionary genre, flawed though it invariably is, as at all useful and valid, then we must accept at least provisionally, its recourse to the authority of the printed word. It is not really surprising or unwarranted that Shakespeare, Milton, and the Bible are given more weight than Hester Chapone. They are given more weight than T.S. Eliot as well. It is interesting that Morton's list of the most cited authors in Webster's Third begins with -- you guessed it -- Shakespeare, the Bible, and Milton. No one denies that Murray was in many ways a man of his age (an age that did not subscribe to and should also not be judged by Willinsky's brand of political correctness), and yet in spite of Willinsky's repeated suggestions that the OED reflects ``what amounts to a writers' guild, the language of a profession'', it was in fact, as early as Murray's tenure, remarkably liberal in the range and variety of its citation materials. One need only compare Murray's citation sources with those of Dwight Whitney, the editor of the Century Dictionary. A dictionary, however, must be more than a fashionable demographic register.
I should like to make one more point about the essential weakness of Willinsky's book. His knowledge of the ``on-going revision'' that he would like to call into question is woefully out of date. What he witnessed was merely a transition period in the '80s. The real planning of the revision has taken place in the years since then. Although he claims to have interviewed people in Oxford as late as 1992, he makes no mention, even in passing, of the North American Reading Program, which was begun in 1989 and was in full swing by then, producing as many as 16,000 fully electronic citations a month drawn from a wide variety of ``regional'' sources. As this at least doubled the size and range of Oxford's reading, one would think it would be relevant to Willinsky's subject. Nor is there mention of the OED's full-text historical corpus, now over 40 million words in electronic form including a great many women writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft. We have made no secret of these, and one must assume that Willinsky simply ignored them because they did not fit comfortably with his thesis. Morton has written perhaps the definitive book on Webster's Third, but Willinsky's book, originally and wisely turned down by CUP, is not the book of the OED.
Jeffery Triggs is the Director of the North America Reading Program for the Oxford English Dictionary