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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.