O to Scz, but don’t Reno or Park

Press, 2 October 1982, Page 16

O to Scz, but don’t Reno or Park

The Oxford University Press recently published-another of the volumes intended to update the Oxford English Dictionary “A Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary, Volume 111, 0 to Scz” has been edited by R. W. Burchfield. In a review in “The Spectator” last month, A 7 N. Wilson had this to say about the dictionary and its New Zealand editor: Sufferers from night-melancholy and insomnia should console themselves by thinking about New Zealand, and the bland winds which waft over Wellington and Auckland. I have never been there, and nor do I wish to, for I believe every thing.about it to be excellent, and it would be sad to have one’s illusions shattered.

They have Maoris, short stories (Dan Davin, Katherine Mansfield), cheap, butter, superb lamb and the only unimpeachably heterosexual Anglican theological college on the planet. . -When Great Britain stood alone against the world after the Galtieri Raid, it was the Prime Minister of New Zealand who was the first to offer support to Our Boys. And as if all this were not enough, they have also provided us with some of our most distinguished philologists. In the field of phonology (sound-change) the world knows no equal to Eric Dobson, who hasrecently retired as a Professor of English Language at Oxford. Anything unknown to Professor Dobson about vowel-sounds in the English Language between 1500 and 1700 is not worth knowing. He has also cracked the secrets surrounding the origin of that masterpiece of Middle English devotional prose, “Ancrene Wisse.” His is one of the most original intelligences in post-war Oxford. Needless to say, he is a New Zealander. Phonology is a comparatively obscure science, so Professor Dobson is only famous in his own field. Lexicography is something which interests us all. And it is no surprise to discover that the most distinguished lexicographer of modern times, Dr Robert Burchfield, is also a New Zealander. , ■

For more than a quarter of a century, Dr Burchfield, assisted by a hard working team of experts, has been revising the great dictionary, and we have now reached Volume 111, O-Scz. Those with

ample bedside tables who tire of soothing their minds with thoughts of New Zealand sheep stations can now, for the cost 1100 cigarettes, peruse this magnificent and endlessly fascinating piece of modern archaeology. For the “Oxford English Dictionary" is an historical dictionary. Its task is to record usage, and to explain words in use. We have no French-style academy here, telling us what is, or is not, correct English. Infuriated letter-writers to “The Times” will tell us that infer does not “mean the same” as imply. The “Oxford English Dictionary” will merely relate that Milton used the two words indiscriminately. By turning its pages, we are not told that some words “really mean” one thing rather than another; merely that they have been used in a particular sense. It was in 1909 that Sir James Murray finished the letters 0 and P in the original dictionary. Sir William Craigie, working on Q and R, published his findings more or less contemporaneously, while Henry Bradley had started on S, getting as far as words beginning with Sc by 1911. In the years which have elapsed since, some inevitable lacunae, errors or omissions in these volumes have to come to light. (They missed salad-bowls in Trollope.) And the vocabulary of English has expanded at a rate of something like 450 words a year. Of these words, many are borrowed from foreign languages, some reflect the March of Mind, others were thought too coarse for inclusion first time round.

Dr Burchfield has followed the principles of his great predecessors. Lexicographers should not, in his view, be censors. The Jews objected to his inclusion of the offensive verb to jew, meaning to swindle. Doubtless, when he reaches W, there will be similar howls of protest about the verb to welsh., They both deserve to be included, not because they reflect the human language, at its most edifying, but because they have been used. By the same token, he includes obscenities and Americanisms.

Dr Burchfield is recorded as believing that American and Standard English speech are diverging so fast that, within the space of a life-time or two, they will

have become, effectively, different languages. This is almost certainly right. Any speaker of Standard English visiting New York today will find that he only understands about two-thirds of what is said to him; and that, for their part, the New Yorkers understand perhaps a quarter of the speech of an English visitor. I doubt if it would be possible for the “Oxford Dictionary” to be comprehensive in its coverage of the American language, but the attempt made by this volume is most impressive. Addicts. of modern American fiction can hardly afford to dispense with this' generous survey ot yiddish, negro and pop vocabulary. Inevitably, one notices omissions. We find here petting (“the action of amatory caressing and fondling; non coital sexual activity”— but not parking, in its sense frequently used in American True-Life Romance comics: “to bring a motor vehicle to a stationary position for the purpose of amatory caressing,” etc., and so, by transferrence, “to indulge in such caressing.” I looked out for “Reno, vb. intrs.” in this dictionary and was disappointed to find it was not included. Reno was the place where everyone used to go to get their divorce. “To Reno” consequently came to .mean to ditch one’s spouse. Was it in the “Chicago Tribune” in 1936 that the famous headline appeared, announcing that Wallis Simpson had obtained a divorce in Ipswich? It would have been good to have it immortalised by Dr Burchfield: KING’S MOLL RENOS IN WOLSEY’S HOME

TOWN. Presumably poppers are of too recent vintage to have claimed the attention of the lexicographer. A recent article in "Time Out” described them as an aphrodisiac inhalant, said to cause cancer, and particularly popular with the nancies and the margeries. It was in 1850, incidentally, that someone first called them poofs; poofter was in a dictionary of Australian slang in 1910. The world had to wait until 1929, according to Dr Burchfield, for the first flower-

ing of the pansy. (A much nicer word than gay: we would all read “Pansy News” and vote for Pansy Rights.) Much of the joy of reading the O.E.D. derives from its qualities as an anthology. Under the aforementioned entry, for instance, there is the splendid sentence from Edmund Crispin’s “Long Divorce” (1951): “I’d want her to be walking out with a decent lad, not a pansy little foreign gramaphone record.” It is much to be regretted that the ambiguity of the note pinned to 'the window-boxes by Sybil Colefax (please treat the pansies with respect) disqualified it from entry here.' The evidence is drawn from a wide variety of sources: novels, newspapers, memoirs. The frequent recurrence of allusions to the work of Raymond Chandler, Eric Ambler, Ngaio Marsh, Agatha Christie and other masters of suspense doubtless reflects in part the tastes of the indefatigable Marghanita Laski, who has contributed over 30,000 of the quotations, a figure rivalled, among the voluntary assistants to Dr Burchfield, only by Mr Chowdhary-Best, who certainly deserves a mention. To them, and to all the other contributors named in the preface to this dictionary, the English-speaking world owes a huge debt.