pedestrian saga

Rather than relinquishing this book to the library right away, I felt compelled to reread the fourth chapter on the history of English dictionaries (which transports us back to Shakespeare’s time, when it was impossible to look a word up—the horror!—and highlights some amusing entries in Dr. Johnson’s mid-18th-century dictionary) and also to append a few more notes to my review.

Best echo of recently enjoyed English fiction about crotchety German philologists (amidst a marvelous digression on the controversy surrounding the plural form of protagonist, which prompts a close examination of the OED entry and oldest citation of the word’s written use):

This, from a lexicographical point of view, seems to be the English word’s mother lode, a fair clue that the word may well have been introduced into the written language in that year, and possibly not before. (But the OED offers no guarantee. German scholars in particular are constantly deriving much pleasure from winning an informal lexicographic contest that aims at finding quotations that antedate those in the OED: At last count the Germans alone had found thirty-five thousand instances in which the OED quotation was not the first; others, less stridently, chalk up their own small triumphs of lexical sleuthing, all of which Oxford’s editors accept with disdainful equanimity, professing neither infallibility nor monopoly.)

Best stirring reminiscence of the first feature film I captioned (at the scene in Westminster of the seminal November 5, 1857, meeting of the London Philological Society):

The gas lamps fizzed and sputtered, and on the corners of Piccadilly and Jermyn Street small boys were still collecting last-minute pennies for fireworks, their ragged models of Guy Fawkes—soon to be burned on bonfires—propped up before them.

Mapped, in my mind, just around the corner from the murder and insanity of Hangover Square!

Moving ahead, The Professor and Madman inspires me to:

• read more Simon Winchester, including even his second book on the OED, The Meaning of Everything (because I’m that dorky).
• collect a personal copy of Hangover Square, now finally available on DVD!
• spend some time with The Devil’s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce.

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