Empire of Words: The Reign of the OED by John Willinsky (review)

HUMANITIES 315 soon discover to their annoyance that these contradictions also had real political correlatives. The alliance offeminism and moralism was not finally secure enough to sustain a legislative program. Even the usually adeptJohn 'Crosbie, the new Tory justice minister, erred in playing to the Right on the issue, as he reveals in an interview with Lacombe. Then, at the time of Bill C-54, the Conservatives' second try (in 1987), Canadiaillibrarians rebelled. The only organized intellectuals in Canada prescient enough to articulate an effective critique, the librarians spotlighted the obvious potential dangers of the new law. Meanwhile, in an odd turn, the Right had mulled matters over and decided the old obscenity statutes were probably better, after all, than the more 'permissive' compromise the new justice minister, Ramon Hnatsyshyn, was trying to cobble together. The legislative adventure failed. However, the Butlerdecision, five years later, approximated the position the Fraser Committee recommendations called for - albeit without changing the criminal statutes. The long-term significance of the Butler decision remains to be seen. The main reason why Lacombe's book is so valuable is that it brings this complex set of developments into focus. It is the only full study of the recent political history of the pornography struggle. Lacombe recognizes that issues underwent a remarkable change in the terms of debate, in the style ofpolitical action and, consequently and more durably, in the juridical grounds on which pomographywill be disputed. Nonetheless, Blue Politics has remained undeservedly obscure, perhaps because the I age' Dany Lacombe depicts so well has already come to seem a rather remote past. (BART TESTA) John Willinsky. Empire ofWords: The Reign ofthe OED Princeton University Press 1994. x, 260. $31.00 Empire of Words: the Reign of the OED is one of the most recent academic critiques of the Oxford English Dictionan;: Roy Harris (TLS 1982) and Charlotte Brewer (Review of English Studies 1993) have noted and condemned the Victorian character and especially the literary bias not only of the first edition (1888-1933) but, respectively, of the Supplement (1972-86) and the second edition (1989). The relationship and relevance of literary language to 'ordinary' language has always been problematic, and twentieth-century troubles with the OED merely manifest a classical issue: whose usage has the authority to be codified as 'common usage'? Though John Willinsky is not the first to observe or to question lexicographical reverence for the culture of print and especially for the cult of the literary author, he departs from tradition, first in quantifying the OED's biases by analysing the text of the dictionary with the computer technology that has already transformed the materials and methods of lexicography, and also 316 LETTERS IN CANADA 1995 by closely analysing such other sources as live editors and rejected citation slips. His detailed and complex history of lexicographical theories· and practices at Oxford University Press makes it clear that the third edition of the OED, now in preparation, will differ vastly from earlier editions in its balance and scope. But vastly enough? Willinsky's interpretation of the OED as a Victorian cultural icon acknowledges the best and the worst of Victorian culture: idealism about the civilizing properties of literature and its language, and hopes that linguistic standardization would empower the masses and unite the nation - and the empire. He affirms previousscholarship showinghow suchideals were used to justify nation- and empire-building. But the extensive research presented here produces a more subtle and balanced argument than its title might suggest. Willinsky assesses the extent to which the liberal intentions of the dictionary's various editors were realized in print. The OED began as a glimmer in the eye of Richard Chenevix Trench, a Victorian Christian imperialist, and gleaned many a citationfrom the historical texts energeticallyexhumed bythe indefatigable Frederick Furnivall. Other editors, however, were more sympathetic to · current usage. The project's first editor, Herbert Coleridge, plaIUled to include headwords authorized only by contemporary speech, but Cole,. ridge's plans died with him. His successor,J.A.H. Murray, though resistant to purely oral authority for new words and meanings, successfully fought the oUP delegates to include newspaper citations in the dictionary. Indeed, many of those who...