[6] This is an educated conjecture. The handwriting on the slips looks very much like Sweatman's, and he was certainly in the right place at the right time for the entry to be written. But there is no absolute proof that the work is his. Some evidence suggests it might also have been an assistant named Henry Bayliss. However, the general point— that the definition of radium illustrates the kind of mind that was possessed by workers on the project—remains true, no matter who was the author of this particular entry.
William Craigie, who was senior editor at the time of the triumphant completion of the first edition in 1928, edited the final volumes from the University of Chicago, where he had been appointed Professor of English.Back
[11] Not quite all, in fact: the editors did practise some quite harsh selectivity in deciding whom to list and whom to omit. Bradley, for example, seems not to have listed one James Bartlett, of Bramley, near Guildford, who worked on G, M, O, R, and S. Perhaps this is because of his exasperation with the man, recorded in exchanges of correspondence which still exist. Most notable among them is a discussion over the word shake, where Bartlett writes: `I feel quite incompetent to tackle the formidable early forms of the word, and so leave them alone. Also the numbering off.' Bradley, with an irritable harrumph!, replies curtly: `I move to delete all after “incompetent”.' Back
8
From Take to Turn-down—and then, Triumphal Valediction
Clear Turtle Soup
Turbot with Lobster Sauce
Haunch of Mutton
Sweetbreads after the mode of Villeroi
Grenadines of Veal
Roast Partridge
Queen Mab Pudding
Strawberry Ice
Amontillado 1858
Champagne Pfungst, 1889
Adriatic maraschino liqueur
Chateau d'Yquem
(From the menu of the Dictionary Dinner,The Queen's College, Oxford, 12 October 1897)
On New Year's Day of 1895, a Tuesday, a customer with half a crown in his pocket could find, at the better kind of bookshops in London and Oxford and Edinburgh and beyond—and even in Manhattan (where the cost was a dollar)—the very latest part, the twelfth, of the new Dictionary. For his money he would receive a slender, 64-page paperbacked volume—new, slimmed down, promised to be more frequently produced, a welcome change from the 352-page and endlessly awaited monsters of before—that in this case contained all the known words that lay in the lexicon between Deceit and Deject (and which naturally included long entries for the words define, defining, and definition, which some might say the entire Dictionary exercise was all about).
This volume had a signal difference about it, however, something that made it stand apart from the eleven predecessor parts and volumes that had been offered for sale or subscription. It was a change in appearance which many would say was a sign that augured well for the eventual completion of the project, which had been in more than a little doubt. It lent a new tone to the volume, gave it a certain style, and heft, and a feeling of permanence and immutability.
For printed on the outer cover—not on the inside title page, but only on the slip cover—were, for the first time, the words Oxford English Dictionary. The formal realization had at long last come: that while to the philologists in London this might have been begun as the New English Dictionary, it had for eighteen years been firmly and formally part of the majestic engine-work of Oxford—and Oxford wanted the world and his wife to know that this was so. Hence the birth, late in the day but still some cause for joy, of what we know today as the OED, by which initials all—including this account—would henceforward invariably refer to it.
That was the first indication of a new energy, a new mood. Before long there were others, less formal but nonetheless indicative. By the mid-1890s the Dictionary was becoming well known, its name and uncommon scope fast entering the common culture. Newspapers wrote about it. Cartoons in Punch featured it. Lawyers quoted it—the OED definition of something was frequently used as evidence presented in court, accepted by juries and judges alike as an impeccable source of lexical infallibility. On 5 December 1893, Gladstone cited the OED in Parliament for the meaning of the thieves' slang phrase put-up job; four years later Joseph Chamberlain, the great Colonial Secretary, consulted Murray over the meaning of the word patriotism, which he said he intended to use in his installation speech as Chancellor of Glasgow University. 1 And in 1912 the then Home Secretary, accused in the House of Commons of using un-parliamentary language by calling someone `impertinent', opened a volume of the OED and displayed it to MPs to show that in early days impertinent meant not what the members ignorantly imagined, but `not pertaining to the subject or matter in hand, irrelevant'. `And I used the word', the minister said, smugly, `in its older sense.'
The fact that the Dictionary was still incomplete, but that what had already been made was so superbly authoritative, led to some interesting complications. It was noted by an in-house Press magazine in early 1900, for example, that `A Chinaman in Singapore, on opening up a school for his countrymen, announces that he is prepared, among other things, to teach English “up to the letter G”.' And yet at the same time the book's incompleteness was, it was at long last being acknowledged, only a temporary phenomenon.
The culminating event of this long climb to assured completion came in August 1897, a time when the nation was still reverberating with the self-satisfied pleasure taken from the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria. The great ceremony itself had taken place two months earlier, on 22 June—the tiny and still much beloved monarch had pressed an electric button at eleven, to send a message from the Palace—`From my heart I thank my people. May God bless them'—to every corner of her immense Empire.
A fortnight later the University, at Murray's urging, and with the editor choosing with the greatest care every letter and syllable and courteous and courtly phrase, wrote to the Palace: `Might Her Majesty perhaps see fit', Oxford enquired, `to accept the Dedication of the Oxford English Dictionary to her most August Personage, by way of a mark of respect for her Sixty Glorious Years on the Throne?'
In August a private secretary replied: yes indeed, after due consideration the Queen had seen fit to accept. Oxford was duly delighted. Murray was well pleased that what was, indeed, a ploy to ensure continuance had worked. A flyleaf was hurriedly inserted into the volume just finished—it was the first volume to embrace a pair of letters: D (edited by Murray) and E (by Bradley)—and the triumphal message announcing the dedication was inscribed in extra-large type: `To the Queen's Most Excellent Majesty this Historical Dictionary of the English language is by her gracious permission dutifully dedicated by the University of Oxford. A.D. MDCCCXCVII.'