If a language is, in linguist Max Weinreich's immortal words, "a dialect with an army and a navy", the Oxford English Dictionary is its own supreme authority, a great gothic encrustation of definitions and word origins which famously began in Sir James Murray's garden shed in 1888. Although he died somewhere around M, by the 1930s, the OED had become the atomic clock of dictionaries; synchronising the grammar, semantics and historical nuances of the Englishspeaking world - and sketching the outlines of a former Empire.
Fragmentation now assails modern Oxford, but the commercial wing of Oxford University Press (now subsidising the OED) has just unveiled its ultimate weapon, "Noddy" - informal for NODE, or New Oxford Dictionary of English. According to associate editor and staff lexicographer, Angus Stevenson ("that's Stevenson with a v"), Noddy has number-crunched the current use of the language from vast new databases and redefined every word from scratch.
Produced in six years on a budget of over £3 m, it's a "collegiate"-sized tome of 350,000 definitions; weighing a hefty 3.05 kilos, with sharp edges that could kill from a first floor window. To write it, a hierarchy of editors trawled through the British National Corpus (BNC), the Oxford Reading Programme (ORP), and e-mail from 60-odd consultants; and distilled them into trimmed-down core definitions, subsenses and thumbnail essays on usage. "The point is to keep a sense of proportion, as well as a level of detail, between general editors, science editors, a team for non-scientific technical things - like economics and heraldry - and general editors like myself who do words like come and go and see."
The ORP is a database of 43 million words (growing by 17,000 citations a month); while the BNC, compiled by a number of print and electronic publishers, comprises 100 million word usages: "everything from the serious and technical to the trivial, in a representative sweep of contemporary language. Novels, newspapers, magazines - there's some speech there, as well as things like Richard Dawkin's The Selfish Gene" (Dawkin's elegant neologism, meme, Noddy woodenly, but assiduously, defines).
Science is exhaustively covered by the in- house team, while consultants add the vocabulary of computing, aeronautics, finance, Islam, antiques, winter sports, baseball, etc. Others provide English usages in the US (a huge input), Canada, Australia, South Africa, India, the Caribbean, and Scotland. Staggeringly, there is no Hiberno-consultant, although entries include Giant's Causeway (not the Burren); and reflecting journalistic column miles on the peace process, you get Fianna Fail, Londonderry, Taig and Bloody Sun- day (sense 1, of 3).
But Noddy's biggest paradigm shift is that the split infinitive (e.g., to boldly go) is absolutely kosher - as is ending a sentence in a preposition. It is sterner about the dyslexia surrounding mil- lennium (which, in 10 per cent of cases analysed, is misspelt with only one `n'). Yet Noddy tolerates "Americanisms" like snuck (past tense of sneak). And it's cool (sense 2) to write "ask a friend if they could help" - both in terms of everyday usage and political correctness.
This PC echoes the BNC's quality newspaper origins. To describe someone as black is all right, but not Bantu or Asiatic ("try Asian"). Caucasoid is outdated ("use European, if true, otherwise white"). Off the graph altogether are deaf mute, mongolism, cripple, handicapped, hare-lip, spastic, spinster, squaw, etc. Fireman/chairman is a no-no, to be replaced by firefighter, chairperson, etc. And I kid you not, Noddy lists herstory, as well as history.
Stevenson: "We aren't putting our own views across, we're just reflecting the evidence." But of course every dictionary is a matter of opinion; viewing the language from its own (textual/class/gender/etc) perspective.
Noddy must have swallowed an old copy of Wired UK to fetch up cybercafe, cybernaut and even cybersex (not dildonics), while trash culture is as up-to-date as Tamagotchis, but not Teletubbies. Pop ephemera segues from Pete Seeger (Where have all the flowers gone? 1956) to trip hop and house music. You've even got indie and grunge, but not Kurt Cobain. "He's not in?" puzzles Stevenson. "We certainly considered him . . ."
Noddy even exhaustively lists initials such as SETI and SFX (but not XTC); I/O - input/output; ZPG (zero population growth) and SF, which aside from sci-fi and Finnish car registration plates, is the logo of Sinn Fein. IRA and INLA are simply spelt out, although UDA is also defined as a loyalist paramilitary organisation - as is (woops!) the UDR.
Noddy is also a surprisingly good home medical dictionary, crisply defining hormone replace- ment therapy, seasonal affective disorder, even Gulf War Syndrome. And there's plenty of pharmaceutical brand names: if you feel a tingle and can't spell it, Zovirax.
Noddy often drifts off into druggy West-Coast Bacchanalia; from dated samadhi to evergreen sinsemilla; and adjectives like zonked, as in zonked-out beach-bum; or spacey as in I remember babbling, high and spacey.
But there is hard graft behind the thousands of thumbnail biogs of businessmen, statesmen, scientists, novelists; from Ballard and Burroughs, through both Foucaults, Heaney and Hesisenberg, to Schrodingeer and Sontag - even Leni Riefenstahl and Rupert Murdoch.
"Proper names are part of many dictionaries nowadays, although it can be difficult to make a distinction between enyclopaedic and lexical. Take Orwellian, or Gestapo and Nazi, which have lots of transferred meanings." (None of these are listed).
But does this not put pressure on lesser-used words, whose survival depends on dictionaries? "We only include lexical items that we have evidence for. We don't throw in junk from 300 years ago, which is only good for scrabble."
I'm an old Chambers 20th century man myself. Remember the infamous eclair definition ("long in shape but short in duration . . .")? or extinct gems like taghairm ("n. in the Scottish highlands, divination: esp., inspiration sought by lying in a bullock's hide behind a waterfall"); or gongoristic (adj. a florid, inverted, pedantic style of writing, introduced by the Spanish poet Luis de Gongora, 1561-1627). "Mm, that's a lovely word, but I suspect it's not used a great deal in real situations." Stevenson started toggling and scrolling through his online OED. "I have two citations, 1925 and 1944. Hang on, I'll try the Reading Programme. Yes, I've two gongorisms from the 1920s. Nothing since, so it doesn't match our criteria. We do include historical or archaic terms, but they have to be used by, say, Jane Austen or Thomas Hardy, so . . . hard luck."
But considering the big lexical guns of Oxford, it's hard to find holes in Noddy's astonishing repository, his historic snapshot of the animated, molten pizza-topping of contemporary English. One sometimes gets the feeling that the ideal user is some hyperliterate Martian like Na- bokov, yet Stevenson insists that it's "also for a family audience, bright children . . . I mean you can pick it up comfortably in one hand."
Just about . . .
(New Oxford Dictionary Of English is available from OUP, UK £29.99, or online to AOL sub- scribers)