Achived Review:

reviewed by Peter Darbyshire and George Murray

The Oxford English Dictionary is widely accepted as the single greatest philological work of all time. Doubtless its creation was a Herculean task, and its history is riddled with false starts, delays, and a colourful cast of characters (including murders, thieves, poets, and assorted ilk). But this "biography's" main interest lies in carefully organizing a story around the piecing together of years and years worth of painstaking (and voluntary) philological research rather than exciting tell-all bits one might find in a bio of a celebrity or politician. 

Does Simon Winchester, a well-heeled author of numerous books, go too far in his effort to dress up the story for a mass audience? Did he go far enough when looking ahead into the future?

Old-timer 'Ninjas Darbyshire and Murray each received the book as a gift (a testament to our shared book-nerd heritage) and decided to review it, rather than just complaining and extolling in private. 

GEORGE: Well, it was a pleasant surprise to realize we were both reading the same book at the same time. Given the recent holiday and our status as official book nerds, I suppose it wasn't unlikely, but it was still nice. My wife bought me the book on a whim (I had already been given Language Visible by David Sacks over the holidays) seeing that she needed few more bucks to get free shipping on some hard-to-find sociology books from Amazon (it does work, boys - exploit away), but it turned out to be a nice read. 

The book works as a biography for the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), running from the pre-concept world of rampantly uneven dictionaries, straight through to the 1990s. The main focus of The Meaning of Everything is on the OED's formative years, especially under the leadership of James Murray, my adoptive great uncle. The history of the OED is interesting and storied, but largely free of shockers, and this is where I start to find myself questioning the author. 

I have several problems with the book as a whole, mostly with Simon Winchester's style of writing. He is, to use his own favourite word (at least by count), grandiloquent. While his prose is clean, and his transitions smooth, he tends to overblow even the most simple facts, striving to lend events an inorganic drama. Sometimes the book reads like that friend who tells animated anecdotes that no one else seems to find as dramatic and/or funny. I kept wanting to shake him and say, "Just let the freaking story tell itself! Let interesting be interesting!" 

It strikes me that Winchester thinks he's writing for a much more general audience than he is. I mean, COME ON, it's about the freaking history of the OED! Who's gonna read it? Me, you, a handful of ninja readers, maybe Bert Archer and Harold Bloom. It's no potboiler, that's for sure. It is interesting and packed with useful historical and philological tidbits (like how linguist J.R.R. Tolkien spent some time in 1919 assisting the editors on words beginning with "w," only later to have his own neologism "Hobbit" added), but often these are drowned in relatively useless attempts to turn the story into Coronation Street. 

I'll get to what I liked about the book later, but for now, this has been itching to come out. What did you think of this, Pete? 

PETER: I'd been dying to read The Meaning of Everything for some time, but I had to wait, as there's always a book embargo around my place before Christmas. Very cruel and unjust, but it does mean I don't have to pay for the books in the end, so I can't complain too much.

What I find interesting is that the popularity of The Meaning of Everything isn't an isolated incident. Winchester's The Professor and the Madman, a story of OED head James Murray and William Minor, a major contributor to the project who also happened to be locked up in an asylum for murder, also did quite well. But both books appeared in this sudden frenzy for books on language and arcane knowledge, such as Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots and Leaves. And there have been all sorts of articles about fonts and the like appearing online. I don't know what the hell is causing this, but I say vive le revolution! 

I had mixed feelings about The Meaning of Everything. I agree with you, George, about Winchester's style. He does get carried away a bit, and I did find myself wishing he'd just let the story tell itself. I did find him much more restrained here than in The Professor and the Madman though, which I almost couldn't finish because of his wild attempts to dress up the material. I wish he'd trust the material and the readers. The book does have an audience that's been waiting quietly for this, and that audience deserves some respect. I hope Peter Jackson does the film adaptation. 

GEORGE: I've been having fun with the weird grammaphilic articles and books lately too - as I mentioned earlier, I'm currently reading a history of the alphabet and enjoying it (but, Mr. Sacks, do you think you could convince your publisher to fire the numbnuts who laid out your book? It's like reading a first-year workbook written by an MPD). So no argument that there is indeed an audience out there that Winchester has underestimated. 

But make no mistake about it, you're the main audience, Pete - the kind of guy who perches like a gargoyle waiting for these books to come out. I'm only the peripheral audience - the guy whose wife thinks he's spent far too much time updating a website and he needs to stretch his brain again. And if both of us are bored with the theatrics, then there's a real problem. Presumably, I'm the one who needed convincing, right? I hadn't read The Professor and the Madman before this, and now I won't ever. If it stretches the patience more than The Meaning of Everything then we're getting into the literary nonfiction equivalent of Vaudeville. 

What I DID like about the book was the depth of research and the loving attention to detail. Winchester is the perfect example of that kind of "competent" writer who succeeds brilliantly because of old-fashioned elbow grease. He's obviously been up to his thorax in moldering paper for the last few years, and it shows (perhaps the imposed drama is an unconscious effort on his part to validate the obsession?) The facts in this book are astoundingly well-researched and more often than not interesting as all hell, even the statistical analyses of word counts, which help impress on the reader the phenomenally enormous scope of the undertaking. Further, Winchester's digressions (often in footnote form) often add interesting colour and texture to the story. In fact, I bet these footnotes could have better created the sense of atmosphere and drama he seemed to be striving so hard for. I would have preferred a liberal peppering of these easily skippable tidbits to a mixed prose.

PETER: The Meaning of Everything is remarkably well researched, and I do have to give credit to Winchester for assembling an interesting narrative out of a lot of little facts and fragments. In some ways, he's emulated the project of the dictionary makers themselves.

The thing about the whole OED project is that it actually is a fascinating  story. It has great characters - obsessive scholars, madmen, lecherous old men, and at least one murderer - engaged in a monumental task that is almost inconceivable in a pre-computer world. The passion of these people radiates off the page, and it's invigorating. The whole time I was reading the book I kept trying to imagine a world in which dictionaries didn't exist, and I couldn't conceive of such a place. These people really did change the world, but they're not the usual historical celebrities.

I also felt a strong sense of nostalgia when I was reading the book. The OED project required such an incredible degree of personal and institutional  commitment that I think it would be impossible to replicate such an enormous undertaking today. I mean, where do we see the pursuit of knowledge for  knowledge's sake today? Certainly not in universities, which are too busy winning corporate awards. 

So in some ways the book feels a little like a testament, or perhaps an elegy, to these people as much as it is a history of the OED project. Which makes me more forgiving of Winchester's stylistic maneuvers. And before the Marxists start yelling, yes, I know many of these people had the leisure to work on the OED project because of the way the British class system benefited them, etc. (I'm reminded of a Futurama episode I saw the other night, in which one of the characters watches a Pepperidge Farms commercial: "Do you remember a time when chocolate chip cookies came fresh baked out of the oven? Pepperidge Farms does. Do you remember a time when women couldn't vote and certain folks weren't allowed on the golf courses? Pepperidge Farms does.") But at least that British system left monuments for the next generation. What the hell are the Simon Winchesters of the future going to write about? 

GEORGE: I think another thing the book does, for me at least, is put the weight of the finished product into perspective. My wife's mother found an entire set in some Texas used bookstore for $100 US. Looking at the wall of books, I thought, "Wow, what a bargain." After reading this book, I looked at the cleverly placed card that came with the book (Oxford included an ad about the size of a subscription card inside the front cover), which advertises the set at $1500 and thought, "Wow, what a bargain." Owning a set had been something I always assumed would happen when I won my first Nobel. I would pay off my life's worth of debt and with the remaining few thousand, buy the OED. Having read the history of it, I actually want one - now. 

Winchesters of the future? Hopefully, he himself'll be around long enough to amend his melodramatic ways with a riveting exposé of the Dewey Decimal System or something. (Others will write about the quaint days of the Internet when people talked about books instead of engaging in unholy acts we can now only begin to imagine.) 

Speaking of the future, there's one more quibble I'd like to add, but it should be said that it's no real fault of Winchester's, given the scope of his book: there was no real looking ahead into what's in store for the OED. It seems only logical to me that the entire thing should be available online or in one massive software package that can be stored locally on a computer and updated directly through the Web, but there's bound to be something beyond that. Throughout The Meaning of Everything, Winchester keeps making references to how difficult it is to pin down a language like English, particularly with the geological timeline kept on the OED. Computers and the Internet seem the perfect solution. I know there are purists out there who will be horrified at the thought of the books being released as a CD, but it's really the best way, isn't it? It also, as computers become increasingly wound into the fabric of all levels of society, helps undercut the classicism associated with the entire project. The entire OED as a searchable database on CD should really just be the price of the CDs, which is I think about 10 cents. Conceivably the entire thing should be some sort of yearly update subscription rate. Of course, people who want to purchase the fetish object books should always be able to do so, but eventually as POD only. (And given the cost of doing so, these freaks ought to get a free copy of the CDs too.) But, given that this is an Oxford book, couldn't we have had a chapter or two about where they see the project going in the next 50 to 200 years?  

I currently use Microcrap's Word as my main e-dictionary, so if the price was reasonable I think I'd be willing to subscribe to an Internet package. I still want the books though. I just want to watch them buckle  my plywood shelving.

PETER: The OED is available online at http://dictionary.oed.com/, but like the print version, it's not cheap. It runs about $300 US per year, although you can pay monthly. It's not unaffordable, I guess, but you're better off buying the print version if you can afford it, because at that price it'll be paid off in five years. You can also buy a CD-ROM version, and it's not a bad deal at just over $300 US, but I don't think it has all the same text as the print version (and there's no Mac version). It does, however, have some handy search features. And the advantage of the online version, of course, is that you can log in from anywhere, so you can check it while away from the house, or while in your bed (come on, there are times you need to know things in bed!). 

The thing that gets me about the online versions of things is how the price is still so high. It reminds me of software apps like Quark, which seem geared toward institutions in their pricing and just bypass individuals altogether. I can't help but think they'd make more money in the long run if they just dropped the price down to $100 or so and open it up to everyone. What writer or editor wouldn't buy the OED at $100? And how many of them buy it at $1500? I doubt the ratio is 15:1. 

The one free feature of the OED website is the OED word of the day, which is nice. Check it out at http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/display/wotd. 

All right, stay tuned until next week, when the Bookninjas discuss the latest bestseller, Em-dash Nation. 

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