A Further Trip over the Tramlines

A Further Trip over the Tramlines David Micklethwait 2 Mansion Cottage Bronllys Powys LD 3 OLU UK Arnyone keen on the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) would have „read Sarah Ogilvie's (2008) paper "The Mysterious Case of the Vanishing Tramlines," as I did, with pleasure and profit. It left me, however, wanting to know more. Tramlines (thus : || ) appear beside nearly ten thousand headwords in the first edition of the OED, the indication being explained in the List ofAbbreviations as meaning 'not naturalized.' The same explanation appears in the List of Abbreviations in the 1933 OED Supplement, but Ogilvie shows that tramlines beside headwords were removed from the Supplement as the result of a deliberate policy decision by the editors, Charles Onions and Sir William Craigie. One can say that the tramlines "were removed from" rather than "were not included in" the 1933 Supplement, because the tramlines were present in printed page proofs in 1928 and 1929, but did not appear in 1930 proofs or in the published work. Ogilvie also demonstrates that the decision to remove the tramlines from the Supplement almost certainly resulted from the influence of the Society for Pure English (SPE), which favoured consciously reforming the spelling and pronunciation of foreign words, when used in English. Ogilvie points to the curious fact that there are two instances, but only two, where tramlines did appear beside headwords in the Supplement - " ? Kadin ... A lady ofthe sultan's harem" and " || Rhexis ... The breaking or bursting ofthe wall ofa blood-vessel" - and she spends some time considering why those two should be the only words with tramlines. This is a rather pointless investigation, because as soon as it has been understood that the editors' policy was to remove all the tramlines from headwords, the fact that two reDictionaries :Journal ofthe Dictionary Society ofNorth America 30 (2009), 17-20 A Further Trip over the Tramlines1 9 mained could only have been accidental. Furthermore, attributing one accident to each ofthe two editors is rather unkind - the removal oftramlines throughout the Supplement would have been a purely mechanical exercise, entrusted to a subordinate, and one could not expect the two editors to examine the final proofs oftheir respective parts ofthe Supplement just to make sure that it had been done thoroughly. I am not myself comfortable with the notion that foreign words used in English should be distorted to give them English spelling and pronunciation, but the Society's attitude to tramlines has something to be said for it. The justification for including foreign words in a dictionary of English is that they are used by people speaking or writing in English. Conversely, words not used by people speaking or writing in English should not be in an English dictionary at all. When I studied law, I became familiar with a variety of Latin expressions, some ofwhich (such as decree nisi, caveat emptor, et cetera, etc.) are commonly used by non-lawyers, while others (for example ceteris paribus, mens rea, novus actus interveniens, obiter dictum, in pari delictu potior est conditio defendentis , res ipsa loquitur and suppressio veri est suggestiofalsi) are not. Any of those, and many other such expressions, might be found in written court judgments -judgments written, that is to say, in English - and it is therefore appropriate for them to be explained in an English dictionary, but the person consulting the dictionary does not need tramlines to tell him that the words are not English. Furthermore, foreign words are translated immediately after the indicated pronunciation, which must dispel any remaining uncertainty. It is open to question, therefore, whether Murray was right to include tramlines in the first edition of the OED. Ogilvie tells us that the editors of the third edition have come to a different decision, and dropped tramlines. What is not open to question is that the decision was Murray's to take, and that he and his fellow editors "considered tramlines so important that they counted the total number per volume, and published the results in every preface" (Ogilvie 2008, 1 2 ). That being so, whatever the views of the SPE, indeed, whatever their own personal views, Onions and Craigie should not have removed the tramlines from the...