The Professor and the Madman

I read interesting books, and some of my friends and “Journeys” subscribers don’t read nonfiction, so I thought it might be fun to tell you about what I’ve been reading lately. Besides, the business trips seem to be getting more boring and I’d like to keep writing between trips . I realize you signed up for “Journeys of a Business Traveller,” so I’ll rationalize this by calling it “what I’m reading in flight” even though I’ve read some of these books on the ground. Honestly, though, in-flight reading is a big part of my business travel. Drop me a line and let me know if you’d like more of this or if you’re just hitting the “delete” key.

My first introduction to the Oxford English Dictionary was at my friend Harris’s house. He owned a two-volume set printed in minuscule type and equipped with a massive magnifying glass. It was a come-on offer from a book club, and though Harris was a good poet, I think he used the OED largely to cheat at Scrabble. I’ll never forget the time he used “ka” to get two triple word scores and the bonus for using up all his tiles. It turns out that the “ka” is one aspect of the human spirit worshipped by the ancient Egyptians. It’s in the OED, and sometimes it seemed to me that any combination of letters that can be pronounced is in there, too.

Whatever Harris’s motives for purchasing the dictionary, I spent many hours perusing it. I was awed by it, but I never knew what a remarkable book it was until I read “The Professor and the Madman” by Simon Winchester. At the height of the Victorian era, a bunch of Brits filled with the hubris of empire decided that they could write a definitive dictionary that would define and provide citations for every word in the English language. The editors relied on thousands of volunteers, who sent in slips of paper, each with a “target” word and a citation. Boiled down to its essence, the job of these readers was to read every book written in English since 1250 and find a quotation for every word in that book. Yes, every word. It sounds like something out of the fantastic stories of Borges but they did it. It took more than 70 years and several tons of paper slips, and resulted in twelve volumes, almost two million quotes, and 178 miles of hand-set type. The last word, Winchester tells us, was “zyxt,” a Kentish-argot tense of the word “to see.”

But this book isn’t about the OED, it’s about two men: Professor James Murray who was the editor of the OED, and Dr. William Chester Minor, an American, a Civil War veteran, and one of most learned and prolific contributors the the project. Minor was also completely insane, probably a mixture of schizophrenia and what we now call post-traumatic shock syndrome. During one of his delusional states he had killed a man, and all the time he contributed to the book he lived in an asylum for the criminally insane. He constantly complained of Irishmen conspiring to poison him, people hiding under the floorboards who came out at night to molest him and others who would abduct him by airplane, whisk him off the the Middle East, and make him perform unspeakable acts with young girls.

It’s too good a story for me to give away much more, and Winchester tells it like a pro, while also debunking a mythologized version of the story that was circulated in many American newspapers. I learned a lot from the book: The bravery of the Irish Brigade in our Civil War and how so many of them hoped to return to Ireland and continue fighting, how the cheeks of Civil War deserters were branded and the technique used by Dr. Minor to successfully perform on himself (while incarcerated) the operation that Lorena Bobbit tried to perform to her husband.