The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary (review)

REVIEWS The Meaning ofEverything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary. 2003. Simon Winchester. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pp. xxvi + 260. $25. Simon Winchester's first book on the making of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) was a bestseller. In my view, it was a chronicle of unsubstantiated speculation starting with the idea that W. C. Minor's madness had its origin in sexual yearnings for nubile Lankan beauties cavorting on the beaches of Ceylon, and that these desires could only be put down when his missionary parents sent him to chilly puritan New Haven and Yale.1 Winchester could not deny himself similar imaginings about the visits of Eliza Merritt to Broadmoor, the asylum for the criminally insane in which Minor had been sequestered for murdering her husband in the pre-dawn hours of a foggy London morning in 1872. They must have been lovers, Winchester speculated; otherwise, why would Minor have cut off his own penis in 1902? When I read The Surgeon of Cawthorne on its first publication in London in 1998, 1 was disappointed that we were told at length about Winchester's ultimately successful efforts to obtain Dr. Minor's medical records for the period 1868-71 when he had been treated at St. Elizabeth's hospital in Washington. Something had happened in the Civil War that had unhinged him, and the army undertook to heal him. Alas, Winchester said nothing about the diagnosis which would have opened for readers the way in which insanity was recognized in the mid-nineteenth century or the ways in which it was treated. He knew a lot more that was interesting about Dr. Minor than he was willing to tell. In 1871, Minor went to England where he spent a year in debauchery before shooting George Merritt in the back. For this murder, he was found "Not Guilty on the 'Some notion of Winchester's earlier prose can be derived from this specimen composed for the British market: "the girls — young, chocolate-skinned, giggling naked girls with sleek wet bodies and rosebud nipples and long hair and coltish legs with scarlet and purple petals folded behind the ear" (1998a, 40). And this, blue-penciled for the North American audience: "the girls — young, chocolate-skinned, ever-giggling, naked girls with sleek wet bodies, rosebud nipples, long hair, coltish legs, and scarlet and purple petals folded behind their ears (1998b, 44). Aside from Dr. Minor's penis, no body parts normally covered by clothing in Anglo-American culture are mentioned in The Meaning ofEverything. Dictionaries:Journal ofthe Dictionary Society ofNorth America 25 (2004) 1 70Reviews Grounds of Insanity," an outcome of a capital trial still quite new in Britain. Once again, Winchester failed to deliver the goods by telling usjust what kept Minor from the gallows and put him instead into die asylum at Broodmoor. Interspersed wiui the chapters on Minor was an account of the quite different life ofJames A. H. Murray, nearly all of it condensed from Elisabeth Murray's excellent biography of her grandfather. On taking up the editorship of the Philological Society's dictionary, Murray had circulated a flyer asking for volunteers to prepare citation slips illustrating English usage, and one of these fell into Minor's hands and the prisoner-doctor became one of the odder of the many eccentrics who engaged themselves in this task. When the "Americanized" version of Winchester's Surgeon appeared, it was tided The Professor and the Madman. This packaging of the story lowered his effort in my esteem, since the tide put the work at an even greater distance from known truth. The "professor" was James Murray, who achieved many honors, but not the one that would have given him more satisfaction than his honorary degrees or even his knighthood — the title of professor. What Winchester had produced was a tale of two elderly men who spent their days copying fragments of older English onto slips of paper, one imprisoned by his task in an iron shed in his back garden in Oxford, the other imprisoned by the Queen behind the iron bars of Broodmoor. Yet within the confines of this unpromising narrative, Winchester brought to a huge audience...