Abracadabra

Entry of the Day:

Abracadabra in Bailey's Dictionarium Britannicum

Nathan Bailey's Dictionarium Britannicum was the most comprehensive and most important English dictionary before Johnson's. It lacks much of the charm of Johnson's, but entries like this are delicious:

ABRACADAʹBRA, this Word is a Spell or Charm, which is still in Use and Esteem with some superstitious Persons, who pretend to do Wonders by it in the Cure of Agues and Fevers, which is to be written in the Form of a Triangle, decreasing one Letter every Line till it comes to a Point; and the Illiterate write the Letters in English Characters in the same Form.

א  ר  ב  א  ד  א  כ  א  ר  ב  א
ר  ב  א  ד  א  כ  א  ר  ב  א
ב  א  ד  א  כ  א  ר  ב  א
א  ד  א  כ  א  ר  ב  א
ד  א  כ  א  ר  ב  א
א  כ  א  ר  ב  א
כ  א  ר  ב  א
א  ר  ב  א
ר  ב  א
ב  א
א

No One Could See Him

Entry of the Day:
Dwarfs in Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable

Brewer, E. Cobham. Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, Giving the Derivation, Source, or Origin of Common Phrase, Allusions, and Words That Have a Tale to Tell. London, 1870.

Dwarfs. The most remarkable are:
    Phileʹtas, a poet (contemporary with Hippocʹratës), so small ‘that he wore leaden shoes to prevent being blown away by the wind.’ (Died B.C. 280.)
    Nicephʹorus Calistus tells us of an Egyptian dwarf not bigger than a partridge.
    Arisʹtratos, the poet, was so small that Athenæʹos says no one could see him.
    Sir Geoffrey Hudson, born at Oakham, in Rutlandshire, at the age of thirty was only eighteen inches in height. (1619–1678.)
    Owen Farrel, the Irish dwarf, born at Caʹvan, hideously ugly, but of enormous muscular strength. Height, three feet nine inches. (Died 1742.)

Swan-Embroydered?

Entry of the Day:

Stream in Poole's English Parnassus

Poole, Joshua. The English Parnassus; or, A Helpe to English Poesie: Containing a Collection of All Rhyming Monosyllables, the Choicest Epithets, and Phrases: With Some General Forms upon All Occasions, Subjects, and Theams, Alphabetically Digested. London, 1657.

In addition to providing a very early rhyming dictionary (“INDE | Binde | Blinde | In-clin’d | De-clin’d | Din’d | Finde | Grinde | Be-hinde | Lin’d | Kind | Minde | Pin’d | Rinde | De-sign’d | Re-sign’d | Shin’d | En-shrin’d | Twin’d | Winde | Whin’d | Whrin’d”), Poole offered a set of "the choicest epithets" that might produce satisfying poetry: you might call Aaron "Sacred, mitred, holy, blessed, grave, priestly, pious"; an abbey can be "Rich, wealthy, cloysterd, monkish, religious, old, ancient. | Abbot. | Old, antient, religious, cloysterd, recluse, mitred, reverend, regular, grave, humble, devotious, retired, zealous, abtemious, monkish"; use "Obedient, aged, old, prudent, faithfull, blessed, wise, devout, pious, godly, religious, reverend, sage, grave, holy" with Abraham; and so on.

You might also need the “Formes of protesting. | By all the oathes sacred religion knowes. | By all oathes made in reverential fear | Of heaven, and her inhabitants. | By your self, that is all thats good.”

Here's a typical set of adjectives that collocate with stream, in case you're eager to write painfully clichéd seventeenth-century poetry:

Stream.

Winding, curled, purling, foaming, silver, christal, writhing, wriggling, snaky, sweeping, hurrying, silent, chiding, impetuous, resistlesse, enraged, flowing, fruitful, fishie, gorgling, running, gliding, slippery, soft, whispering, wandering, roaring, stragling, gushing, cleansing, drenching, whirling, rushing, glassie, pearly, silver-brested, rolling, swelling, wheeling, spreading, gently-sliding, glancing, ranging, tumbling, incensed, shower-enhanced, dancing, vaulting, borned, careering, azure, wavie, rustling, amorous, angry, boyling, bustling, surgie, murmuring, murtering, rumbling, frothy, bank-courting, uxorious, sliding, hasty, swift-pac’d, swan-embroydered.

No One Could Even Read Them

Entry of the Day:

"Qui multa scripserunt" in Isidore's Etymologies

Those who have written many things (Qui multa scripserunt) 1. Among Latin speakers, Marcus Terentius Varro wrote innumerable books. Among the Greeks likewise Chalcenterus (i.e. Didumus) is exalted with great praise because he published so many books that any of us would be hard put merely to copy out in our own hand such a number of works by another. 2. From us (i.e. Christians) also Origen, among the Greeks, in his labor with the Scriptures has surpassed both Greeks and Latins by the number of his works. In fact Jerome says that he has read six thousand of his books. 3. Still, Augustine with his intelligence and learning overcomes the output of all of these, for he wrote so much that not only could no one, working by day and night, copy his books, but no one could even read them.

From Isidore, Etymologies, p. 139; VI.vii.1–3

Oh Yes, THOSE Trees

Entry of the Day:

Anatiferous in Johnson's Dictionary

ANATI'FEROUS. adj. [from anas and fero, Lat.] Producing ducks.

If there be anatiferous trees, whose corruption breaks forth into barnacles; yet, if they corrupt, they degenerate into maggots, which produce not them again. Brown's Vulgar Errours.

Just think of the countless times you've been in conversation, searching for an adjective that refers to things that make ducks. Well, now you know.

Take That, George Carlin

Entry of the Day:

Cream-Stick in Farmer & Henley

From Farmer & Henley's Slang and Its Analogues, 2 vols., 1890, s.v. cream-stick:

Aaron's rod, Adam's arsenal, the Old Adam, arbor vitae, arse-opener, arse-wedge, athenaeum, bayonet, bean-tosser, beak, beef, bag of tricks, belly-ruffian, Billy-by-Nag, bludgeon, Blueskin, bracmard, my body's captain, broom-handle, bum-tickler, bush-beater, bush-whacker, butter-knife, catso or gadso, child-getter, chink-stopper, clothes-prop, club, cock, concern, copper-stick, crack-hunter, cracksman, cranny-hunter, cuckoo, cunny-catcher, crimson chitterling, dagger, dearest member, dicky, dibble, dirk, Don Cypriano, doodle, drooping member, drumstick, eye-opener, father-confessor, cunny-burrow ferret, fiddle-bow, o-for-shame, flute, fornicator, garden-engine and gardener (garden = the female pudendum), gaying instrument, generation tool, goose's neck, cutty gun, gut-stick, hair- (or beard-) splitter, hair-divider, Hanging Johnny, bald-headed hermit, Irish root, Jack-in-the-box, Jack Robinson, jargonelle, Jezebel, jiggling-bone, jock, Dr. Johnson, Master John Goodfellow, John Thomas, Master John Thursday, man Thomas, jolly-member, Julius Caesar, knock-Andrew, lance of love, life-preserver, live sausage, Little Davy, lollipop, lullaby, machine, man-root, marrow-bone, marrow-bone-and-cleaver, member for Cockshire, merry-maker, middle-leg, mouse, mole, mowdiwort, Nebuchadnezzar, nilnisistando, Nimrod, nine-inch-knocker, old man, peace-maker, pecker, pecnoster, pego, pestle, pike, pike-staff, pile-driver, pintle, pizzle, plougshare, plug-tail, pointer, poperine pear, Polyphemus, pond-snipe, prick, prickle, privates, private property, privy member, quim-stake, Roger, rolling-pin, root, rudder, rump-splitter, Saint Peter (who "keeps the keys of Paradise"), sausage, scepter, shove-straight, sky-scraper, solicitor-general, spindle, sponge, staff of life, stern-post, sugar-stick, tarse, tent-peg, thing, thumb of love, tickle-gizzard, tickle-toby, tool, toy, trifle, trouble-giblets, tug-mutton, unruly member, vestryman, watch-and-seals, wedge, whore-pipe, wimble, yard, Zadkiel.

Then we run through French (le sansonnet, le glaunt, l'asticot, le jambot), German (Bletzer, Breslauer, Bruder, Butzelmann, Fiesel, Dickmann, Pinke, Schmeichaz, Schwanz), and Portuguese (Pae de todos, porra, virgolleiro, pica, bacamarte, a montholia de Pastor).

If you ask nicely, I may give you the corresponding entries classed under "MONOSYLLABLE."  That goes on for three pages in English, four in French, two in German, and half a page each for Spanish and Portuguese.  Highlights: "best in Christendom," "bower of bliss," "Cockshire," "Cupid's Highway," "happy hunting grounds," "Mount Pleasant," "penwiper," and "vade-mecum."

Pure Ignorance

Blunder of the Day:

Pastern in Johnson's Dictionary

(The first in a continuing, albeit intermittent, series of posts on instances of inattention, foolishness, and incompetence in reference books, leading to booboos, howlers, ghost-words, and screw-ups of every description.)

In his Dictionary of 1755, Samuel Johnson defined a pastern simply as “The knee of an horse.” But the pastern isn't the knee at all; it's actually the part of the foot between the fetlock and the hoof. At least he was forthright about it. “A lady once asked him how he came to define Pastern” that way. Boswell tells us that “Instead of making an elaborate defence, as she expected, he at once answered, ‘Ignorance, Madam, pure ignorance.’”

Ductor in Linguas

Reference Book of the Day:

Minsheu, Ductor in Linguas

Minsheu, John. Ηγημων εις τας γλωσσας· id est, Ductor in Linguas, The Guide into Tongues: Cum Illarum Harmonia, & Etymologijs, Originationibus, Rationibus, & Deriuationibus in Omnibus his Vndecim Linguis, viz: 1. Anglica. 2. Cambro-Britanica. 3. Belgica. 4. Germanica. 5. Gallica. 6. Italica. 7. Hispanica. 8. Lusitanica seu Portugallica. 9. Latina. 10. Græca. 11. Hebrea. London, 1617.

Oh, how I love extravagant sixteenth- and seventeenth-century displays of over-the-top erudition. Things like the Dictionarium Græcolatinum (1568), Ortelius's Thesaurus geographicus (1578), Raleigh's History of the World (1614), Alsted's seven-volume Compendium philosophicum stretching to 2,404 folio pages (1626), Brian Walton's polyglot Bible in six huge folios (1654–57), and Chauvin's Lexicon rationale (1692). These are books that Tony Grafton was reading in his crib, but to the rest of us they're insane compendia of obscure learning that we'll never hope to master.

(I was going to write "people like Tony Grafton," but I realized there are no people like Tony Grafton.)

One of the craziest is Minsheu's Ductor in Linguas. Almost nothing is known of Minsheu himself. He was probably born in 1559 or 1560. The ODNB says he is of "unknown parentage," and provides what little information we have about his family:

He refers to a cousin living in Oxfordshire, John Vesey, who was a self-made man of dubious probity. Minsheu may have resembled him in these two respects: he was educated by extensive travels rather than in a university, and he was described as a rogue by Ben Jonson.

Somewhere he picked up proficiency in Spanish, something that had particular resonance in the age of the Armada. He apparently learned much of his Spanish while he was being imprisoned in Spain.

He published a few works on the Spanish language, beginning with an expansion of Richard Percyvall's Spanish dictionary and following it up with a Spanish grammar. But he found his metier some time around 1611, when he published a two-page prospectus for a

Glosson-etymologicon. (Id est.) the etymologie of tongues; or, A most ample and copiovs dictionary etymologicall, that is, the reasons and erivations, of all (or the most part) of works, in eleuen languages: viz. 1. English, 2. British or welsh, 3. High Dutch (sometime Saxon) 4. Low Dutch, (sometime Danish) 5. French, 6. Italian, 7. Spanish, (sometime Arabick) 8. Portugall, 9. Latine, 10. Greeke, 11. Hebrew, (and sometimes the Chalie and Syriack tongues.) ... In the end also 10. tables most copiovs to find ovt any workd in any of these eleven langvages; whereby it serves for a dictionaie [sic] in all these languages, ... Also diuers other necessary notes, and especiall directions, in this dictionarie, for the speedy obtaining any of these, or other tongues. By the industry, labour, and onely expences of Iohn Minsheu, who for these many yeares, hath maintained many scholars and strangers about his worke, ... A true copy of the hands of certaine learned men, in approbation, and confirmation of this worke.

That work came to fruition in 1617 as Ηγημων εις τας γλωσσας· id est, Ductor in Linguas — the Greek at Latin for "Guide into the Tongues."

The book is organized around an English word-list, and provides translations into ten languages (Welsh, Dutch, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew). It's more than 700 crowded double-columned folio pages. Minsheu was the first to arrange a polyglot dictionary around an English alphabet, which makes sense, given his desire of making foreign languages easier for English-speakers.

Minsheu did much of the work himself, though he did employ native speakers of the modern languages to read through the best writers to collect information.

Modern critics have shown that Minsheu's pedagogical aims were admirable, but his scholarly credentials were shaky at best. He wasn't above plagiarism, and his learning wasn't nearly as deep as it seemed. Critic Jürgen Schäfer delivers the harsh verdict:

Far from being a Renaissance etymologist in the true sense of the word, Minsheu must have compiled his etymologies together with the rest of his material without regard to etymological principles or consistency.

But I'm still in love with the sheer copiousness of the learning, the delight in excess for its own sake, and the passion for what D. W. Jefferson called "learned wit."

The Ententiue Partes of Mannes Vnderstanding

Reference Book of the Day:

Damiano, The Pleasaut and Wittie Playe of Cheasts Renewed

Damiano da Odenara. The Pleasaunt and Wittie Playe of the Cheasts Renewed with Instructions Both to Learne It Easely, and to Play It Well: Lately Translated out of Italian into French: And Now Set Furth in Englishe by Iames Rowbothum. London, 1562.

Not every reference book is strictly utilitarian — not every reference book, in other words, tells its users things they need to know. Many tell them what they simply want to know, and how they might amuse themselves. This explains the abundance of reference works that teach readers to play games.

Among the first guides to a board game in English is a compendium of advice on chess, The Pleasaunt and Wittie Playe of the Cheasts Renewed, by the Portuguese pharmacist Pedro Damião of Odemira. His Questo libro e da imparare giocare a scachi et de li partiti was originally written in Italian in 1512, then translated into French, and finally into English in 1562. The subtitle to the English edition promises “Instructions Both to Learne It Easely, and to Play It Well.”

James Rowbothum, the English translator, thought he was performing an important service to the state. In his dedication to Robert Dudley, Queen Elizabeth’s favorite, he explained the genuine advantages of chess-playing. Chess would help statesmen understand “the graue and waightye affaires of Princes,” he explained, and would also provide some recreation to those who sought a workout not for the body but for the mind: they would find themselves “exercised not with the outward strength of the bodye, but with the inwarde force of witte and intelligence, to the great sharpening of the ententiue partes of mannes vnderstanding.”

Those who take up chess would develop “a certaine studye, pollicie, wit, forcast, memorie, with other properties, to make men circumspect not onelye in playing this game, but also comparing it to a publick gouernement, or more properly a batttel.”

"W00t," "Sexting" Now Officially Real Words

A few weeks ago I did a profile of Webster's Third New International, the most controversial dictionary of the twentieth century.

In this weekend's New York Times Book Review, Geoff Nunberg — a linguist at Berkeley, and one of the few academic linguists who writes well for a lay audience — has his own profile on Webster's Third. The whole thing is worth reading, but he has some particularly good material on a topic of perennial interest, how new words get into "the dictionary":

In retrospect, in fact, the Third seems downright fusty. Word harvesting in Gove’s time hadn’t changed since Samuel Johnson, with readers patiently culling citations from printed works. Now the Internet puts tens of thousands of new words at the lexicographer’s fingertips, the great majority of them technical terms, media stunt words like “Brangelina” and “sexploits,” or what Dr. Johnson would have called the “fugitive cant” of chat rooms, tweets and social networks (think of “meep” and “w00t”). And modern dictionaries don’t keep words waiting in the vestibule long. Over the last year the Oxford English Dictionary has inducted “wassup,” “BFF” and “muffin top” (of the abdominal, not the culinary, variety). The new Chambers Dictionary includes “freegan” and “geek chic,” and Merriam-­Webster has recently added “staycation.” Not that lexicographers will include any word that swims into their ken: so far they’ve drawn the line at “refudiate,” though the editors of the Oxford American chose it for their 2010 Word of the Year. But nowadays the dictionary is about as hard to get into as Sam’s Club.

A lot of these items will expire before your hamster does. But there’s little need for a bouncer at the door once dictionaries go online, where space is effectively limitless. And one can make room in print editions by tossing out last season’s fads, like “yadda, yadda” and “Monicagate,” both of which were proffered as evidence of the up-to-­dateness of the Encarta World English Dictionary when it was published in 1999. (Though it was perhaps rash for the Oxford Concise to squeeze in “jeggings” and “mankini” by dropping “cassette tape,” a word that may yet require elucidation for antiquarians poring over early issues of Rolling Stone.)

Nunberg goes on to observe that "publishers know it’s the pop-culture words that the media will write about, under headings like '"W00t," "Sexting" Now Officially Real Words.' And where critics once railed at dictionaries for including popular slang, now they greet it appreciatively." He goes on to remind readers that lexicographers squirm uncomfortably with this idea of "approving" or "admitting" "real words."

Livres à lire d’une seule main

Reference Book of the Day:

Aristotle’s Master-Piece

[The beginning of the semester, with all the usual attendant craziness, has kept me from this blog for the last two weeks. But now I can get back to it, albeit probably not daily. I’ll make up for the long silence by serving up a particularly juicy one today.]

Aristotle’s Master-Piece; or, The Secrets of Generation Display’d in All the Parts Thereof: Containing 1. The Signs of Barrenness. 2. The Way of Getting a Boy or Girl. 3. Of the Likeness of Children to Parents. 4. Of the Infusion of the Soul into the Infant. 5. Of Monstruous Births, and the Reasons Thereof. 6. Of the Benefit of Marriage to Both Sexes. 7. The Prejudice of Unequal Matches. 8. The Discovery of Insufficiency. 9. The Cause and Cure of the Green Sickness. 10. A Discourse of Virginity. 11. How a Midwife Ought to Be Qualified. 12. Directions and Cautions to Midwives. 13. Of the Organs of Generation in Women. 14. The Fabrick of the Womb. 15. The Use and Action of the Genitals. 16. Signs of Conception, and Whether of a Male or Female. 17. To Discover False Conception. 18. Instructions for Women with Child. 19. For Preventing Miscarriage. 20. For Women in Child-Bed ... To Which Is Added, a Word of Advice to Both Sexes in the Act of Copulation, and the Pictures of Several Monstrous Births: Very Necessary for All Midwives, Nurses, and Young-Married Women. London, 1690.

Probably the most notorious seventeenth-century sex manual bore the strange title Aristotle’s Masterpiece. This book bears a fake author’s name — the Greek philosopher had nothing to do with it — in order to give the work some measure of respectability. The ruse didn’t work; Aristotle’s Masterpiece was banned in Britain until the 1960s. But the prohibition didn’t keep it from circulating: it was one of the most notorious, and widely distributed, sex books in the English language.

The long title page gives little idea of the contents. True, the promised “pictures of several monstrous births” offers a kind of prurient glance at gruesome birth defects. But the book was notorious for other reasons. It wasn’t marketed to midwives, and “nurses and young-married women” were not the real audience. Much of the book was read as pornography, pure and simple.

From a twenty-first-century point of view, the seventeenth-century pornography doesn’t always seem very pornographic. In fact Aristotle’s Masterpiece sometimes reads more like a sermon than a sex guide. “It plainly appears in Holy Writ,” the book declares, “that this glorious Vniverse, bespangled with gaudy Fires, and every where adorned with wonderful objects, proclaiming the Wisdom and Omnipotence of the Great Work-Master, who in Six Days Erected all Things for his Pleasure.” Maybe erected is a dirty pun, but the sentiment is wholesome enough, and the point is that God created sex for humanity’s pleasure — not a heretical belief, but one embraced by the Puritans themselves in seventeenth-century England. “That Marriage is an Honourable State,” writes the author, “ordained by God in Paradice, and since Confirmed by our Blessed Saviour, who wrought his first Miracle at a Wedding, I hope none will deny; therefore it is convenient that Parents well take care of their Daughters Chastity.” No need to blush there.

But once the book gets going, there’s little doubt that the book would be categorized as what Jean-Jacques Rousseau called a “livre à lire d’une seule main,” a “book to be read with one hand.” In fact its very popularity makes it difficult to study today. We’re not even certain when the first edition was printed; few copies of the early editions survive, since most of them have been read (and, no doubt, otherwise used) until they fell apart.

---

This is one that can be read online: an electronic edition includes plain text, HTML, and PDF versions.

Admirable Artifice

Reference Book of the Day:
Napier, Mirifici logarithmorum

Napier, John. Mirifici logarithmorum canonis descriptio ejusque usus, in utraque trigonometria; ut etiam in omni logistica mathematica, amplissimi, facillimi, & expeditissimi explicatio: Authore ac inventore, Ioanne Nepero, Barone Merchistonii, &c. Scoto. Edinburgh, 1614.

Rockin' title-page, huh?

John Napier discovered the logarithm — at least, he was one of several in the early seventeenth century to understand the principles behind logarithms, and the first to publish the fruits of his research in Mirifici logarithmorum.

It's not easy to understand what Napier is saying, and that's not only because (a) it's about logarithms and (b) it's in Latin. No; we also have to reckon with the fact that (c) his definitions aren't at all intuitive for those who've learned modern definitions of exponentiation and logarithms. His definition, for instance, is geometric, not algebraic:

Linea æqualiter crescere dicitur, quum punctus eam describens, æqualibus momentia per æqualia intervalla progreditur.

It comes with a diagram:

And as one historian describes it,

Logarithms, as Napier first understood them, and even logarithms in the later from agreed upon by him and Briggs, did not appear to their inventor in the light in which we now regard them. The modern exponential notation aⁿ was not yet invented, and it was not for more than a hundred years that the idea of a logarithm as the index of the power of the base found a place in works on algebra. Indeed, in the original system of Napier, there is no mention of a base system at all; and in the modified and improved system, though as a matter of fact it does in a sense consist of logarithms to the base 10, no stress is laid upon that point. (Carslaw, “The Discovery of Logarithms,” p. 77)

He also doesn't use the base-10 logarithms that are familiar to those who care about such things today. (Shortly after he published his book, he realized base-10 logs were a better idea, and he published several follow-ups.)

After a theoretical discussion of this new kind of number, he devotes eighty-eight pages to his table:

It seems exceedingly obscure, but Napier's discovery in pure mathematics was absolutely crucial for advances in applied math for centuries to come. As Edmund Wingate put it in Logarithmotechnia; or, The Construction, and Use of the Logarithmeticall Tables (1635),

For as much as amongst many inventions, that concerne the Mathematicks, none can be found comparable to this of the Logarithmes, the worthy labours of those Learned men which have endevoured [sic] to advance it, are to be prized accordingly.

Pierre-Simon Laplace, the nineteenth-century French mathematician and astronomer, marveled at this “admirable artifice which, by reducing to a few days the labour of many months, doubles the life of the astronomer, and spares him the errors and disgust inseparable from long calculations.” A nineteenth-century book on logarithms makes their labor-saving value clear: “This method,” James Mill Peirce writes, “has contributed very powerfully to the modern advance of science, and especially of astronomy, by facilitating the laborious calculations without which that advance could not have been made.”

The Mirifici gives the logs of integers up to 1,000 to eight decimal places; he left it to his successor, Henry Briggs, to work out 30,000 more logarithms to fourteen decimal places: if you're dying to read that, ask your local bookseller to order Arithmetica logarithmica sive Logarithmorum chiliades triginta, pro numeris naturali serie crescentibus ab unitate ad 20,000: et a 90,000 ad 100,000 Quorum ope multa perficiuntur arithmetica problemata et geometrica. Hos numeros primus invenit clarissimus vir Iohannes Neperus baro Merchistonij: eos autem ex eiusdem sententia mutavit, eorumque ortum et vsum illustravit Henricus Briggius, in celeberrima Academia Oxoniensi geometriae professor Savilianus (1624).

Or you can wait for the movie.

---

The best short introduction is an article: H. S. Carslaw, “The Discovery of Logarithms by Napier,” The Mathematical Gazette 8, no. 117 (May 1915): 76–84; no. 118 (July 1915): 115–19. Even more accessible is Jack Oliver, “The Birth of Logarithms,” Mathematics in School 29, no. 5 (Nov. 2000): 9–13. Serious, hard-core geeks, though, will want to work their way through the whole of M. Campbell-Kelly, M. Croarken, R. Flood, and E. Robson, eds., The History of Mathematical Tables: From Sumer to Spreadsheets (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2003). I've not only read it, but have taken ten single-spaced typed pages of notes, just to ensure my nerd credentials are beyond question.

Erya

Reference Book of the Day:
Erya

The Erya (or Erh Ya) — the name means “approaching what is correct, proper, refined,” though it's sometimes translated as The Ready Guide — is the oldest dictionary of the Chinese language. The author is a mystery, and the traditional attribution to the Duke of Chou isn't taken seriously. The date, too, is a puzzler, though “scholars generally agree that it was written by Confucian scholars sometime between the Spring and Autumn period and early Han Dynasty (8th through 2nd centuries B.C.)” (Xue, p. 152). The third century BCE is a pretty good guess.

Erya contains glosses on just over 4,300 words drawn from pre–Qin Dynasty Chinese literature. It's hard to make reliable claims about works this old, but some have called it the first-ever monolingual dictionary in the world. It originally had twenty chapters, though only nineteen survive.

Chinese lacks an alphabet; the logographical system doesn’t have any obvious order. For a long time, Chinese dictionaries have been ordered according to the “radicals” of the Chinese characters, making it possible (though hardly easy) to find them in a reference book. When the Erya was compiled, though, that system had not yet been developed, so the anonymous creator organized his work by subject. This places the work in a middle ground between a dictionary, a thesaurus, and an encyclopedia. The first three chapters cover "common words" (verbs and grammatical function words), and chapters 4 through 19 define words from specialized areas: tools, plants, animals, kinship, the calendar, and so on.

Typical entries (I can't vouch for the diacritical marks, I'm afraid):

A woman calls her husband’s father jìu, and her husband’s mother gū. While alive they are called jūnjìu and jūngū. after their death they are called xiānjìu and xiāngū.

Water feeding into a stream is called xī, feeding into a xī is called gù, feeding into a gù is called gōu, feeding into a gōu is called kùai, feeding into a kùai is called dú.

The fèi fèi (baboon) looks like a human being. It has dishevelled hair, walks rapidly and eats humans. (Xue, p. 153)

National Palace Museum, Taiwan

The Erya's shortcomings — it's a fascinating book, but not especially useful as a practical reference — led to a series of commentaries over many centuries, including Guo Pu's Erya Zhu (Annotations on Erya, early fourth century), Xing Bing's Erya Shu (Explanations of Annotations on Erya, late tenth or early eleventh century), and Hao Yixing's  Erya Zhengyi (Meaning Verification of Erya, late eighteenth century).

During the Song Dynasty (960–1279), Erya was named one of the Thirteen Confucian Classics.

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Some readings: Xue Shiqui, “Chinese Lexicography Past and Present,” Dictionaries 4 (1982): 151–69; Endymion Porter Wilkinson, Chinese History: A Manual, rev. ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Asia Center, 2000); and Heming Yong and Jing Peng, Chinese Lexicography: A History from 1046 BC to AD 1911 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2008).

I Wish I Knew Dutch

Reference Book of the Day:

Komrij’s kakafonie

Komrij, Gerrit, ed. Komrij’s kakafonie, oftewel Encyclopedie van de stront: omvattende de symbolische waarde, de kont, het kakken, de kleur, de stank, de wind, het sanitair, de liefhebbers, satire & nonsens, stront en het boek, lexicografie, enz. enz. Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 2006.

I am, alas, Dutchless. But, from what I can piece together, the title means Komrij’s Cacaphony; or, Encyclopedia of Shit: Comprising Its Symbolic Value, the Ass, Shitting, Color, Smell, Farting, Toilets, Enthusiasts, Satire and Nonsense, Shit and the Book, Lexicography, etc., etc. (Don’t miss the pun on caca in kakaphony.)

It is, if you can believe it, the only book to which the Library of Congress has so far seen fit to award the subject headings Defecation — Encyclopedias, Feces — Encyclopedias, and Toilets — Encyclopedias. (I love the fact that the LoC Cataloging in Publication folks, after careful consideration, decided they needed separate headings for defecation and feces.)

Shockingly, the book is not easily available in the good ol’ US of A, which means I probably won’t get my hands on it. And even if I did, well, I don’t read Dutch. I’ll just have to lament what might have been.

Meanwhile, I beg my Batavophone readers to get to work immediately on an English translation of this work. The lack of an English version is one of the greatest injustices facing the modern world.

Never let it be said this investigation of reference books is anything less than a highbrow intellectual endeavor.

Titles

Some miscellaneous reference books I haven’t seen, and about which I know nothing more than their titles — but what lovely titles they are:

• Encyclopedia of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu
• A Dictionary of the Language of Mota, Sugarloaf Island, Banks’ Islands, with a Short Grammar and Index
• Encyclopedia of Death 
• A Dictionary of Sexist Quotations
• Encyclopedia of Heavy Metal, with a foreword by Ronnie James Dio
• Atlas of Northwestern Elevators
• Encyclopedia of Conditioning Rinse Ingredients
• Arkheologicheskii slovar’ kamennykh orudii (Archaeological Dictionary of Stone Tools) 
• Dung Fungi: An Illustrated Guide to Coprophilous Fungi in New Zealand
• Encyclopedia of Murder & Violent Crime 
• Les seins: Encyclopédie historique et bizarre des gorges, mamelles, poitrines, pis et autres tétons: Des origines à nos jours (Breasts: A Strange and Historical Encyclopedia of Boobs, Mammaries, Chests, Breasts, and Nipples: From the Beginnings to Today)
• Foolish Dictionary: An Exhausting Work of Reference to Un-Certain English Words, Their Origin, Meaning, Legitimate and Illegitimate Use, Confused by a Few Pictures, Executed by Gideon Wurdz
• Encyclopedia Horrifica: The Terrifying Truth! about Vampires, Ghosts, Monsters, and More
• Talkin’ that talk: Le langage du blues et du jazz 
• 1001 Wörter Lkw-Werkstatt: Deutsch, English, français, ʻArabi (1001 Words for Truck Workshop)
• Precancelled Envelopes of the United States
• The Zombie Dictionary (included in  Zombie Code: Keys to Unlocking Your Undead Destiny)
• Atlas of Hair and Scalp Diseases
• 6-sprachiges Süsswarenfachwörterbuch (Six-Language Technical Dictionary of the Confectionery Industry)

Oh, had we but world enough and time!

Noir

Reference Book of the Day:

The Film Noir Encyclopedia

Alain Silver, Elizabeth Ward, James Ursini, and Robert Porfirio, The Film Noir Encyclopedia, 4th ed. (New York: Overlook Press, 2010).

I just discovered this book, but how can you not love it? More than 300,000 words on noir, broadly understood. (For those who don't think in word counts, that officially counts as big.) It's a mixture of extended essays on big topics and short entries on individual works, and is extensively illustrated. Makes me want to put on Miles Davis's soundtrack to L'Ascenseur pour l'echafaud in the small hours.


I'm a little surprised that the Library of Congress is missing this work — that means my usual source for publication details has failed me. From what I can make out from other catalogues, the book began in 1979 as Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style. One of these days I'd be interested to sort through the various editions.

(N.B.: I inadvertently typed "the book began in 1797." Had that been the case, it  would require some serious rethinking of film history.)

Don't confuse it with the Encyclopedia of Film Noir, ed. Geoff Mayer and Brian McDonnell (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2007).

Beach Reading

Reference Book of the Day: 
The Yongle Encyclopedia

The worst insult you can hurl at academics is to say they haven't even read the books they presume to comment on.

A confession: Not only do I have to admit that there are reference books in here that I haven’t read through; in fact, there are very few works that I have read from cover to cover — or, since many are in multiple volumes, from cover to cover to cover to cover to cover....

One work I haven't read is the Yongle Encyclopedia. I think I have pretty good reasons, though, for not reading it: viz.,

1. It's very long;
2. It's in a language I don't read; and
3. It doesn't actually exist.

The Yongle Encyclopedia (1403–8) has been called the world’s longest reference book. With 11,095 volumes, it’s hard to dispute the claim; the Yonglè Dàdian, or “Great Canon or Vast Documents of the Yongle Era,” required the labors of a team of two thousand scholars. (The length is sometimes given as 11,095 volumes, and sometimes as 11,919. I confess I haven't counted.)

The work was commissioned by Emperor Cheng Zu of the Ming Dynasty; at the time it was completed, the Wen Yuan Pavilion was established to serve as an imperial library. The material was collected from more than 7,000 works of Chinese literature, and the resulting compendium was organized by the sounds of the headwords, grouped under phonetic rhymes. Endymion Porter Wilkinson describes its scope and importance:

Yongle dadian ... 22,877 juan plus 60 juan index and preface; 11,095 ce, completed in 1408. The largest leishu ever compiled in China, with an estimated total of 370 million characters. ... Seven to eight thousand works from the Spring and Autumn period to the early Ming were copied into this imperially sponsored attempt to save for posterity the sum total of all Chinese written knowledge.

The problem with a work in eleven thousand volumes — well, let's say one of the problems with a work in eleven thousand volumes — is that it doesn't lend itself to quick and cheap reproduction in many copies. For a very long time only the handwritten original existed; then a single manuscript copy was made. It proved a valuable source: by the eighteenth century, it was the only surviving version of more than 385 books that had been lost to history.

By by the eighteenth century, though, nearly all of the original manuscript of the encyclopedia had been lost, along with about 10 percent of the copy. And then, in the nineteenth century, European explorers began taking away pieces as souvenirs. By 1900, just 60 of the original 11,095 volumes were left.

There's a scholarly edition of the surviving text in ten folio volumes photolithographic facsimile (1959), even though it amounts to only about 3.5 percent of the original. Chinese scholars have been working through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to reconstruct the lost encyclopedia. It's not as hopeless a task as it sounds: other works quoted the Yongle Encyclopedia at length, and by going through them patiently it's possible to restore the text of at least parts of the work.

Maybe I'll read it when they've finished.

---

As you might guess, I've been entirely dependent on secondary sources for this one. The two sources I've found most reliable are Ding Zhigang in Robert Wedgeworth, World Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences, 3rd ed. (Chicago: American Library Association, 1993), s.v. China; and Endymion Porter Wilkinson, Chinese History: A Manual, rev. ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2000).

These Days of Hatlessness

Reference Book of the Day: 
Emily Post's Etiquette

Emily Post, Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home, by Emily Post (Mrs. Price Post) ... Illustrated with Private Photographs and Facsimiles of Social Forms (New York and London, Funk & Wagnalls, 1922).

As Richard Duffy explains in his introduction,

Many who scoff at a book of etiquette would be shocked to hear the least expression of levity touching the Ten Commandments. But the Commandments do not always prevent such virtuous scoffers from dealings with their neighbor of which no gentleman could be capable and retain his claim to the title. ... There is no intention in this remark to intimate that there is any higher rule of life than the Ten Commandments; only it is illuminating as showing the relationship between manners and morals, which is too often overlooked.

That’s what prompted the work of Emily Post — I should say, Mrs. Price Post, since it’s unspeakably vulgar to introduce a woman by her Christian name. In Etiquette in Society, published in 1922, she offers an guide to behavior in “Best Society.”

Don’t accuse her of Old World snobbishness, though. “Our own Best Society,” she writes, “is represented by social groups which have had, since this is America, widest rather than longest association with old world cultivation. Cultivation is always the basic attribute of Best Society.”

We learn valuable lessons right away in chapter one, on how to introduce one person to another — though I see I’ve blundered again by using the word introduce:

The word “present” is preferable on formal occasions to the word “introduce.” ... The correct formal introduction is:

“Mrs. Jones, may I present Mr. Smith?”

or,

“Mr. Distinguished, may I present Mr. Young?”

The younger person is always presented to the older or more distinguished, but a gentleman is always presented to a lady, even though he is an old gentleman of great distinction and the lady a mere slip of a girl.

No lady is ever, except to the President of the United States, a cardinal, or a reigning sovereign, presented to a man.

At least I didn’t commit that most embarrassing introductory faux pas of all: under “Forms of Introduction to Avoid,” the reader is sternly advised, “Do not say: ‘Mr. Jones, shake hands with Mr. Smith,’ or ‘Mrs. Jones, I want to make you acquainted with Mrs. Smith.’ Never say: ‘make you acquainted with’ and do not, in introducing one person to another, call one of them ‘my friend.’ ... Under no circumstances whatsoever say ‘Mr. Smith meet Mrs. Jones,’ or ‘Mrs. Jones meet Mr. Smith.’ Either wording is equally preposterous.” (But of course it is; you didn’t need to be told.)

Curious about “What to Say When Introduced”? This one can be handled in a few words: “Best Society has only one phrase in acknowledgment of an introduction: ‘How do you do?’ It literally accepts no other.”

What about intersex handshake rules? “A gentleman on the street never shakes hands with a lady without first removing his right glove. But at the opera, or at a ball, or if he is usher at a wedding, he keeps his glove on.”

Perhaps you were wondering how to behave in your box at the opera, but I fear the very question marks you as hopelessly déclassé: “New Yorkers of highest fashion almost never occupy a box at the theater. ... A box in these days of hatlessness has nothing to recommend it.”

Post was a careful observer of shibboleths, the verbal habits that mark your class despite your best efforts. “People of position are people of position the world over — and by their speech are most readily known,” she advises. “Appearance on the other hand often passes muster. A ‘show-girl’ may be lovely to look at as she stands in a seemingly unstudied position and in perfect clothes. But let her say ‘My Gawd!’ or ‘Wouldn’t that jar you!’ and where is her loveliness then?”

Post was writing at a time, in Duffy's words, when “We Americans are members of the nation which, materially, is the richest, most prosperous and most promising in the world.” It was also a time when new technologies forced new situations, needing new rules. Telephones, for instance: “Custom which has altered many ways and manners has taken away all opprobrium from the message by telephone, and with the exception of those of a very small minority of letter-loving hostesses, all informal invitations are sent and answered by telephone.” Or what to do with newfangled elevators? “A gentleman takes off his hat and holds it in his hand when a lady enters the elevator in which he is a passenger, but he puts it on again in the corridor. A public corridor is like the street, but an elevator is suggestive of a room, and a gentleman does not keep his hat on in the presence of ladies in a house.”

Other tips, though, seem rather less modern: “The butler never wears the livery of a footman and on no account knee breeches or powder. ... The butler’s evening dress differs from that of a gentleman in a few details only: he has no braid on his trousers, and the satin on his lapels (if any) is narrower, but the most distinctive difference is that a butler wears a black waistcoat and a white lawn tie.” And passages like this are unmistakably from another age:

Unless he is an old-time colored servant in the South a butler who wears a “dress suit” in the daytime is either a hired waiter who has come in to serve a mail, or he has never been employed by persons of position; and it is unnecessary to add that none but vulgarians would employ a butler (or any other house servant) who wears a mustache! To have him open the door collarless and in shirt-sleeves is scarcely worse!

The book is supplemented with “Photographic Illustrations”: “A Bride’s Bouquet,” “A Gem of a House,” “The Personality of a House,” “Consideration for Servants,” “The Afternoon Tea-Table,” “A Formal Dinner,” and so on.

---

The full text of the 1922 edition can be had from Google Books. And the eighteenth edition, thoroughly updated by Peggy Post — Emily’s great-granddaughter-in-law — is the most recent, and it takes up E-mail etiquette, as well as questions like “Should I cover my tattoos and piercings before a job interview?” and “Should I throw a divorce party?” — questions that would have caused the original Mrs. Price Post to plotz. For more, check out the Emily Post Institute.

Anniversary

It’s forty-eight years since King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. What better way to celebrate than a bibliography of reference books?

• Ahmed, M. Mukarram, ed. Rights and Liberties under Islam. Vol. 8 of The Encyclopaedia of Islam. New Delhi: Anmol Publications, 2006.
• Bournier, Isabelle, and Marc Pottier, eds. Le Dico du citoyen. Paris: Librio; Caen: Mémorial de Caen, 2007.
• Bradley, David, and Shelley Fisher Fishkin, eds. The Encyclopedia of Civil Rights in America. 3 vols. New York: Sharpe Reference, 1998.
• Brown, Nikki L. M., and Barry M. Stentiford, eds. The Jim Crow Encyclopedia. 2 vols. Westport, Conn. and London: Greenwood, 2008.
• Carson, Clayborne, et al., eds. The Martin Luther King, Jr., Encyclopedia. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood; Oxford: Harcourt Education, 2008.
• Chagnollaud, Dominique, and Guillaume Drago, eds. Dictionnaire des droits fondamentaux. Paris: Dalloz, 2006.
• Condé, H. Victor. A Handbook of International Human Rights Terminology. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999.
• Finkelman, Paul, ed. Encyclopedia of American Civil Liberties. 3 vols. New York and London: Routledge, 2006.
• Forsythe, David P., ed. Encyclopedia of Human Rights. 5 vols. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
• Furois, Sylvie, ed. Dictionnaire du Citoyen. Toulouse: Milan, 2005.
• Grossman, Mark, ed. The ABC-CLIO Companion to the Civil Rights Movement. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 1993.
• Horne, Gerald, and Mary Young, eds. W. E. B. Du Bois: An Encyclopedia. Westport, Conn. and London: Greenwood Press, 2001.
• Jenkins, Robert L., and Tryman, Donald Mfanya, eds. The Malcolm X Encyclopedia. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2002.
• Langley, Winston, ed. Encyclopedia of Human Rights Issues since 1945. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999.
• Lawson, Edward, ed. Encyclopedia of Human Rights. New York: Taylor & Francis, 1991.
• Lawson, Edward, ed. Encyclopedia of Human Rights. 2nd ed. Washington, D.C.: Taylor & Francis, 1996.
• Levy, Richard S., ed. Antisemitism: A Historical Encyclopedia of Prejudice and Persecution. 2 vols. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2005.
• Lewis, James R., and Carl Skutsch, eds. The Human Rights Encyclopedia. Foreword by Aung San Suu Kyi. 3 vols. Armonk, N.y.: Sharpe Reference, 2001.
• Lowery, Charles D., and John F. Marszalek, eds. Encyclopedia of African-American Civil Rights: From Emancipation to the Present. New York and London: Greenwood Press, 1992.
• Lowery, Charles D., and John F. Marszalek, eds. The Greenwood Encyclopedia of African American Civil Rights: From Emancipation to the Twenty-First Century. Rev. ed. Westport, Conn. and London: Greenwood Press, 2003.
• Maddex, Robert L., ed. International Encyclopedia of Human Rights: Freedoms, Abuses, and Remedies. Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2000.
• Manna, Haytham. Al-iman fi huquq al-insan: mawsuat alamiyyat muhtasarat (Short Universal Encyclopedia of Human Rights: Reflections and Fundamental Texts). 2 vols. Dimashq: Al-ahali, 2000–3.
• Martin, Waldo E., and Patricia Sullivan, eds. Civil Rights in the United States. 2 vols. New York: Macmillan Reference, 2000.
• Meier, Matt S., and Margo Gutiérrez, eds. Encyclopedia of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement. Westport, Conn. and London: Greenwood Press, 2000.
• Olson, James S., ed. Encyclopedia of American Indian Civil Rights. Westport, Conn. and London: Greenwood Press, 1997.
• Robertson, David. Dictionary of Human Rights. 2nd ed. London: Europa Publications, 2004.
• Roche, Georges, ed. L’Education civique aujourd’hui: Dictionnaire encyclopédique. Issy-les-Moulinaux, 2002.
• Schultz, David, and John R. Vile, eds. The Encyclopedia of Civil Liberties in America. Armonk, N.Y.: Sharpe Reference, 2005.
• Stephens, Otis H., Jr., and John M. Scheb II, eds. Encyclopedia of American Civil Rights and Liberties. Westport, Conn. and London: Greenwood, 2006.

You Cataracts and Hurricanoes!

Reference Book of the Day:

A Treatise on Meteorology:

From the Encyclopedia Metropolitana

Harvey, George. A Treatise on Meteorology: From the Encyclopedia Metropolitana. London, 1834.

I focus not on a reference book but on a single entry today — still, it's large enough to be published as a substantial book in its own right. This is George Harvey's entry on meteorology for the Encyclopedia Metropolitana — what Tom McArthur calls "the grand but ill-fated Encyclopaedia Metropolitana."

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was involved in the planning, though he backed out as soon as it began appearing in 1818, as did most of the others who started it. A total of thirty quarto volumes, stretching to more than 22,000 pages and 565 plates, appeared over the next twenty-eight years.

This was an encyclopedia on the grand scale. The entry on meteorology alone is 174 pages; plates take it to more than 200. It was therefore published as a standalone volume, as was the case with a number of the large entries. In honor of Hurricane Irene, passing up the east coast today, I reproduce this paragraph:

(By the way, a single encyclopedia entry of 174 pages is long, no doubt, but nowhere near the record. The biggest I've come across so far appears in the Allgemeine Encyclopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste, which began publishing in 1818. In 1889, the 167th volume had appeared, but that represented only about half the alphabet; the work was left incomplete. The entry in that work for Greece took up eight volumes, a total of 3,668 pages.)

The Infamous W3

Reference Book of the Day:
Webster's Third New International

Gove, Philip Babock Gove, gen. ed. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged. Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam Co., 1961.

The “Webster’s” brand is the most distinguished in American lexicography, and it stretches all the way back to Noah Webster himself. Webster compiled several reference books, the most important of which was An American Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1828.

Now these are the generations of Webster: Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language (1828) begat a Second Edition (1840); the Second Edition begat a New Revised edition (1847); the New Revised edition begat a Royal Quarto Edition (1864); the Royal Quarto Edition begat Webster’s International Dictionary (1890); Webster’s International Dictionary begat Webster’s New International Dictionary (1909); Webster’s New International Dictionary begat a Second Edition (1934); that second edition begat Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (1961), popularly known as Webster’s Third or just W3.

And then civilization as we know it came to an end. Bands of marauders roamed a post-apocalyptic hellscape, and the living envied the dead.

That, at least, is the impression you’d get from the press at the time of its release. WEBSTER’S LAYS AN EGG, declared Richmond’s News Leader. The Chicago Sun-Times declared ANARCHY IN LANGUAGE. The Washington Post looked back to W2 in 1934, advising, KEEP YOUR OLD WEBSTER’S. Science betrayed anxiety: SAY IT “AIN’T” SO. The New Republic tried the same ploy: IT AIN’T RIGHT. The Atlantic was the bluntest: SABOTAGE IN SPRINGFIELD.

Springfield, Mass., was the home of G. & C. Merriam Co, which was where Philip Babcock Gove had worked for decades on the dictionary that attracted so much contempt.

And boy was there a lot of contempt. “Small wonder,” the Washington Sunday Star editorialized, “that our English-speaking world, when it thus tolerates the debasement of its language, is having trouble with creatures like beatniks — not to mention Nikita Krushchev and his kind — who are developing a style of writing that may best be described as literary anarchy, to use a polite word.”

The Sunday Star wasn’t the only paper to invoke the Red Menace: many reviewers looked at the title, Webster’s Third New International, and punned on the Third International of the Bolsheviks in 1919. In the Detroit News, for instance, the Rt. Rev. Richard S. Emrich saw in Webster’s Third the breakdown in values that led to the social unrest of the early sixties: “The bolshevik spirit,” he wrote, “is to be found everywhere, not just in Russia.” His rhetoric rises to the level of an Evangelical sermon:

Wherever our standards are discarded in family life, the care of the soul, art, literature, or education, there is the bolshevik spirit. Wherever men believe that what is, is right; wherever the discard discipline for an easy short-cut, there is bolshevism. It is a spirit that corrupts everything it touches.

As a result of this corrupting spirit, “the greatest of all American dictionaries has been corrupted at center.”

What did Gove do to warrant such responses? Did he deliver the nuclear launch codes to the Russians? Was he using the dictionary business as a front for a kiddie-porn ring? Did he shoot a man in Reno just to watch him die?

Gove’s great crime was this statement:

The function of grammars and dictionaries is to tell the truth about language. Not what somebody thinks ought to be the truth, nor what somebody wants to ram down somebody else’s throat, nor what somebody wants to sell somebody else as being the “best” language, but what people actually do when they talk and write. Anything else is not the truth, but an untruth.

The fight was over the proper role of a dictionary. Gove believed — as just about all serious linguists believed, and as many lexicographers believed even then — that the lexicographer’s job was to describe the language as it was. His rivals believed that the lexicographer's job was to prescribe the language as it should be.

That tension has been working behind the lexicographical scenes since at least the eighteenth century — it’s the dilemma in the title of my book — but it boiled over as never before in 1961. It's a subject to which I'll return often in this blog.

---

Webster's Third is one of the few reference books I’ll talk about here that’s still easily available in bookshops, though it’s big and not cheap. Most of the copies available now are reprints, lightly updated from the original edition of 1961, but substantially the same book. You can also use the more recent abridged versions derived from W3, the Collegiates, available in print and in a very handy online version.

The most extensive study of the dictionary is Herbert C. Morton, The Story of Webster’s Third: Philip Gove’s Controversial Dictionary and Its Critics (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994), which is part biography of Gove and part chronicle of his life’s work. You can also read a lot of the early reviews in Dictionaries and That Dictionary: A Casebook on the Aims of Lexicographers and the Targets of Reviewers, ed. James Sledd and Wilma R. Ebbitt (Chicago: Scott, Foresman, 1962).

And there’s a whole chapter on W3 in my own Lexicographer’s Dilemma, which you should run out and buy immediately. (Already have one? Buy two; they make great gifts.)

Harris's List & the Linen-Lifting Tribe

Reference Book of the Day:

Harris’s List of Covent-Garden Ladies

Harris’s List of Covent-Garden Ladies; or, New Atlantis for the Year 1761: To Which Is Annexed, The Ghost of Moll King; or, A Night at Derry’s; Harris’s List of Covent-Garden Ladies; or, Man of Pleasure’s Kalendar, for the Year 1773: Containing an Exact Description of the Most Celebrated Ladies of Pleasure Who Frequent Covent-Garden, and Other Parts of This Metropolis; Harris’s List of Covent-Garden Ladies; or, Man of Pleasure’s Kalender, for the Year, 1788: Containing the Histories and Some Curious Anecdotes of the Most Celebrated Ladies Now on the Town, or in Keeping, and Also Many of Their Keepers.

It’s a common enough problem: you’re a young buck newly arrived in the big city, you’re eager to find a prostitute, but you don’t know where to start — you don’t want to be ripped off and you don’t want to come down with a disease.

Enter Jack Harris, the “Pimp General of All England,” with his eminently useful reference book: a guide to London’s strumpets, their specialties, and their fees. Even though prostitution was illegal, both the author and the users would have taken comfort in the fact that there was no organized law enforcement to do anything about it.

Harris’s List wasn’t the first such book; there had been examples in England through the Restoration, like the Wandering Whore, which appeared in five issues in 1660–61, and A Catalogue of Jilts, Cracks & Prostitutes, Nightwalkers, Whores, She-Friends, Kind Women and Other of the Linnen-Lifting Tribe (1691), which wins my award for the most inventive title.

But Harris’s List lasted from 1757 to 1795, and was quite the publishing phenomenon. (Only a few copies from a few years survive; most of the books were apparently read until they fell apart, and never made it into libraries.) The actual author of the List in the early days may have been Samuel Derrick, though details are sketchy, and someone must have taken over from him after his death in 1769.

Whoever was responsible for it, Harris’s List was a remarkable reference, a guide to all the well-known prostitutes of London. Some come off pretty well. “Miss Kitty W-ll-s, alias D---e,” for instance, is praised:

This lady was born of English parents, at Brussels; speaks very good French, has a natural gaiety of temper, genteel in her deportment and behaviour. ... She is much indebted both to beauty and fortune; to the former for a very lovely skin, beautiful eyes, of a dark brown, fine carnation in her cheeks, a lovely pair of pouting lips, fine teeth, an agreeable forehead, and dark brown hair. Some pretend to say she is too lusty, but ’tis not our province to determine in these matters.

But “Miss Tamer G-rd-n” fares less well. True, “She has a fine round face” and “a pleasing figure” — but “here her qualifications cease, for in the rites of Venus she is as cold as a Dutch woman.”And poor Miss A—ms gets it even worse:

Come forward, thou dear, drowsy, gin-drinking, suff-taking Miss A—ms: what in the name of wonder could influence you to leave a profession in which you was bred, for one to which you do not appear to have the least pretensions. I must own, I cannot say what hidden charms you may possess. Don’t you think those arms and hands of yours had better stuck [sic] to their original calling, cleaning of grates, scrubbing of floors, and keeping a house neat and clean, than drinking arrack-punch, getting drunk, and setting up for a fine lady? But soft; we are finding fault with the wrong person; ’tis your admirers who are to blame, that are so blind not to distinguish between the girl of beauty and merit, and a drunken snuffy drab.

We learn that Miss A—ms “is rather under the middle size, fair hair, gray eyes, tolerable good skin, pock-marked a little, and may easily be known by the quantity of Scotch snuff she takes, particularly when she is in liquor. ... Her breath, from drinking, has acquired a very disagreeable smell: how her friend reconciles this, we cannot say.”

---

Those who want to know more can get a readable selection of entries in Harris's List of Covent Garden Ladies, ed. Hallie Rubenhold (Stroud: Tempus Publishing, 2005). Or you can read a very smart article by friend Liz: Elizabeth C. Denlinger, “The Garment and the Man: Masculine Desire in Harris’s List of Covent-Garden Ladies, 1764–1793,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 11, no. 3 (2002): 357–94.

Johnson's Dictionary

See full-size image.

Reference Book of the Day:

Johnson’s Dictionary

Johnson, Samuel. A Dictionary of the English Language; in Which the Words are Deduced from Their Originals and Illustrated in Their Different Significations by Examples from the Best Writers: To Which Are Prefixed, a History of the Language, and an English Grammar: By Samuel Johnson, A.M.: In Two Volumes. London, 1755.

This is the work that got me started on my current obsession with reference books. I did some work with the Dictionary in my first scholarly book, The Age of Elizabeth in the Age of Johnson, and since then it’s been the center of a lot of my research and writing.

Johnson’s Dictionary is famous for being the first dictionary of English, which is perfectly true, except for the 663 dictionaries published in England in the two and a half centuries before Johnson. It does, however, have a claim to being the first “standard” dictionary of English, at least if we take the time to define what we mean by that (as I try to do in this conference paper from 2005). It’s also one of the few reference books that can be read seriously as a work of literature.

Johnson agreed to write the Dictionary in 1746; he contracted to deliver it in three years. Friends thought he was insane: the Académie Française, with its staff of forty scholars, spent forty years on a dictionary of a similar scope. Johnson was confident he could do better, observing that “This is the proportion. Let me see; forty times forty is sixteen hundred. As three to sixteen hundred, so is the proportion of an Englishman to a Frenchman.”

He didn’t deliver it in three years; it took him nine. Still, sixteen hundred to nine isn’t a bad proportion.

The Dictionary appeared on 15 April 1755 in two folio volumes, a total of 2,300 pages. It contained around 43,000 headwords, which put it among the more comprehensive dictionaries of its day, but not the most: Nathan Bailey’s most recent dictionary contained around 60,000 headwords. But Johnson’s treatment was much more thorough. First, he included around 115,000 illustrative quotations from great British writers from Chaucer to his own day, and they turn the book into one of the greatest anthologies of English literature ever compiled. (I discuss the quotations at some length in another paper from 2004.)

He also paid more attention to the minute distinctions of meaning than anyone who came before him. No English lexicographer had ever done anything comparable to his meticulous discrimination of meanings. Even Bailey, who gave the most common English words more attention than most, dispensed with the word take in a mere 362 words. Johnson’s entries for take, with 133 numbered senses and 363 quotations, run to more than 8,000 words.

All told, though his Dictionary didn’t define the most words, it was far and away the largest dictionary that had ever appeared in English — as large, in fact, as the first seven English dictionaries put together. The full text runs to around 3.5 million words, more than forty times the length of Paradise Lost, or seven times the length of War and Peace. Its original price was £4 10s. at a time when a middle-class family could live comfortably for a year on £50; it’s no surprise, then, that the first edition didn’t sell very well.

When it began appearing in abridged editions, though, it caught on as no other dictionary ever had. Long after his death, Johnson’s name was synonymous with “authoritative.” It was Johnson’s Dictionary that Coleridge complained about in Biographia Literaria, that Dickens mentioned in “Mrs. Lirriper’s Legacy” and that Robert Browning read from cover to cover to “qualify” himself to be a poet. It was Johnson’s “Dixonary” that Becky Sharp threw out of the carriage window in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. It was the dictionary for writers like Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, the Brontës, Arnold, Trollope and George Eliot. When Henry Tilney questions Catherine Morland’s use of a word in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Eleanor warns, “You had better change it as soon as you can, or we shall be overpowered with Johnson.”

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My own abridgment — Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary: Selections from the 1755 Work that Defined the English Language — came out from Levenger in 2002, Walker & Company in 2003, and Atlantic Books in 2004. Linguist David Crystal did his own abridgment shortly after mine and, while it pains the money-grubber in me to promote my competition, it’s a fine piece of work, well worth reading. I’ve also co-edited a collection of scholarly essays with Anne McDermott called Anniversary Essays on Johnson’s “Dictionary” for those who really want to get their hands dirty with the Dictionary.

Surveying the Territory

You Could Look It Up has a modest little purview: all reference books in all genres in all languages from the beginning of time to yesterday. (The subtitle, The Reference Shelf from Babylon to Wikipedia, hints at the range.)

Just how many reference books are there? No one knows, but the number is vast — far more than most people imagine. Major research libraries have entire rooms devoted to tens of thousands of reference books. There’s even a category called “bibliographies of bibliographies” — and, since the Library of Congress Catalog now features 1,038 works labeled “bibliography of bibliographies,” it may be time for a bibliography of bibliographies of bibliographies.

No one has ever compiled a complete catalogue of all of the world’s reference books, and the task won’t be easy. Not all the world’s libraries have been catalogued; not all the library catalogues are available in electronic form; not all the electronic catalogues can be searched from a central location. And sometimes the query is too much for the catalogue. The Library of Congress Online Catalog, when asked to display all its holdings with the word dictionary in the title, comes back with an error message: “Your search retrieved more records than can be displayed. Only the first 10,000 will be shown.” The same thing happens when you search for encyclopedia.


But we can get a rough idea of the magnitude of the task by searching a few major library catalogues. The General Catalogue of the British Library, one of the world’s great collections, sports 35,650 titles that contain the word dictionary; the Catalogue Général of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France contains 42,162 works with dictionnaire in their titles; the Deutsche National Bibliothek in Leipzig features 41,892 titles with the word Wörterbuch; the Rossiiskaia Gosudarstvennaia Biblioteka in Moscow has 16,124 titles with словарь (slovar’); Spain’s Biblioteca Nacional de España has 12,563 titles with diccionario; the Italian Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze has 7,760 titles with the word dizionario. We get similar figures for encyclopaedia (18,482 in the British Library), encyclopédie (24,273 titles in the Bibliothèque Nationale), Enzyklopädie (8,549 in the Deutsche National Bibliothek), and so on.

The closest thing to a comprehensive library catalogue may be WorldCat, the combined catalogues of 71,000 libraries from 112 countries, though even WorldCat is far from complete. There a search for dictionary comes up with an overwhelming 311,602 books, 35,756 separately catalogued articles, 15,051 Internet resources, 2,637 computer programs, 1,859 periodicals, 824 sound recordings, 659 visual materials, 239 maps, 238 musical scores, 154 archival records, and 19 “updated resources,” for a total of 369,071 titles. Throw in the words for dictionary in the other major European languages, and the total swells to 727,930. Another 259,724 records for encyclopedia in the major European languages brings the total number of dictionaries and encyclopedias to nearly a million — and that’s in a single catalogue, far from complete, covering only the major languages of Europe. If it were possible to broaden the search further — covering every library; including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Russian, and other languages whose speakers number in the hundreds of millions; and searching not only for dictionaries and encyclopedias, but also atlases, thesauruses, legal references, and so on — the number would be much higher.

The varieties are also innumerable. There are general dictionaries, learners' dictionaries, bilingual dictionaries, polyglot dictionaries, gardeners' dictionaries, legal dictionaries, and biographical dictionaries. There’s a German–Basque dictionary, an Italian–Armenian–Turkish dictionary, and a Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from the Kingdom of Poland. There are general encyclopedias, technical encyclopedias, encyclopedias of the arts, encyclopedias of philosophy, encyclopedias of etiquette, encyclopedias of Altertumswissenschaft. The Star Trek Encyclopedia is now in its fifth edition, and competes with the Encyclopedia of Trekkie Memorabilia. There’s an Encyclopedia of R.F.D. Cancels, 281 pages on the postmarks used on Rural Free Deliveries, and an Encyclopedia of Knots and Fancy Rope Work. Atlases range from the Atlas of South Sarasota County to the Atlas of South Asia to the Atlas of Southern Milky Way.

You Could Look It Up will obviously cover only a tiny number of these reference works. I hope to tell the story of reference books from the beginning of literacy to the present by focusing on a few dozen hugely important reference books, with another few hundred providing context and background.

On this blog I'll be providing snippets of my work-in-progress, focusing on the most amusing and quirky projects I can find. I'll provide a "reference book of the day," and while I can't promise it'll be every day, I do hope to do at least a few posts a week, at least when I'm not traveling.

Introduction

The few people who've bothered to look at the pathetic bloglet I set up a few years ago, Dull in a New Way, will have figured out I'm not the world's most conscientious blogger. The ever-increasing demands on my time make it harder to update the blog regularly, and Facebook and now Google+ have let me get most of the smartassery out of my system.

But I'm working on a new book, You Could Look It Up: The Reference Shelf from Babylon to Wikipedia, and I'm keen to share some of the goodies I've come across in my research. So I'll be profiling some of the weird and wonderful reference books I've discovered in my work.

I hope to be able to update this at least every few days — but can't promise I'll be disciplined. Oh, well. You get what you pay for, right?