Words with Oxford accountants

Press, 24 March 1984, Page 20

Words with Oxford accountants

As Oxford University Press celebrates the centenary of the first appearance of the “Oxford English Dictionary,’’ a New Zealander, Dr Robert Burchfield, guides to completion its Supplement. Publication of the O.E.D. began in February, 1884, with the twelfth volume, V-Z, appearing in 1928. In the mid-19505, by which time revision was badly needed, Wanganui-born Dr Burchfield was appointed as Editor of the Supplement to the O.E.D. The dictionary had been published in instalments, with more than half the alphabet completed by the turn of the century. This meant the supplement had to cover all the new words, and new senses of words, that had come into the language this century — the vocabulary of two World Wars, the motor car, the cinema, and numerous other twentiethcentury inventions and innovations. “I remember being very excited at the time,” said Dr Burchfield recently. “But then, New Zealanders always think they can do anything.” It was proposed that the supplement would take seven years to complete and occupy just one volume. Dr Burchfield accepted this — “lexicographers are endlessly naive.” When the fourth and final volume of the Supplement (Scz-Zz) appears next year, the work will have taken 28 years. When he started, Dr Burchfield was given one full-time and one part-time member of staff. Today there are 28 of them, plus two secretaries. Meanwhile, O.U.P.’s accountants have looked on with some alarm. “There was just more vocabulary than the press envisaged,” said Dr Burchfield. “They took it on the chin until the recession and they started thinking about survival. They came with furrowed brows. Could we cut? No. They accepted it for a little while and then came back

No private firm could have kept the publication going as Oxford has. 0.t1.P. is a department of the University of Oxford and although it is in commercial com-

petition with other publishers, its aims are essentially the same as those of the university itself — academic, educational, and cultural. So while the accountants ponder their figures, some instinct, deeply embedded in the Oxford University Press and its Delegates, makes it possible to proceed. Abandonment would mean a shattering of high ideals and great commitments to scholarship. Nothing about Dr Burchfield indicates the character of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice which he may by now have assumed in the minds of his publishers. A sturdy, white-haired man of 61, he sits in his office with all the 20 Oxford dictionaries for which he is responsible on the shelves above him.

“When you take the other editors of dictionaries, their problems are so puny,” he says. “It’s usually just 700 pages of this or that meaning. This is so different.

The structure of the O.E.D. is quite unlike that of any other dictionary in the English-speaking world because of the historical dimension. Here I have 5000 pages with named and specified sources.” Any human discovery anywhere is a small ripple reaching the dictionary department’s offices in St Giles, Oxford. When the oil industry reached the North Sea there was a whole new glossary. Dr Burchfield’s method is to identify a new trend and then to set up teams of researchers reading books about it. Their task is to pick out words not covered in the O.E.D. and then to provide quotations to illustrate their meaning. The results are stored in the filing cabinets which occupy one whole room. The criteria for a place in the Supplement are present currency and likely trends. Dr Burchfield’s working rule is that a word should have been in the language for five years although some words,, such as “streaking” or “Ayatollah”, get in overnight because of sheer usage. Present currency is determined by the number of times he and his staff see a word being used. There is some debate about whether a dictionary should prescribe, or merely reflect the state of, the language. “I do, occasionally, throw up my hands in horror,” said Dr Burchfield. “Then I add ‘generally avoided by writers’ or ‘this word does not sit easily in the language at present’.” He has a file which he calls the lunatic fringe. A man wrote in imploring him to find a word for “a collector of fire helmets from all over the world.” He replied that he know of no such word and it was not their policy to make one up. As editor of the work that is considered the authority on the English language, Dr Burchfield carries an enorm-

ous responsibility. For the entire Eng-lish-speaking world, he is the man in the

engine room. Poets play tricks on him, scientists disturb his life with each new discovery, the crazed count him a friend. There has never been a job like it.