Words of Our Fathers

...Though he was unable to get a more congenial job at the British Library, he was able to continue his research into Scottish dialects by interviewing London bobbies, many of whom came from the far north...

...So Murray, with his pursuit of perfection, on a preposterously low salary yet having to pay for much assistance out of his own pocket, found himself often alone in the middle...

...it will make you add James Murray to your personal Pantheon...

...Murray, the son of a poor Scottish tailor, was born in 1837 in the border village of Denholm...

...Maggie died of consumption, and James married Ada Ruthven, the daughter of a fellow amateur geologist...

...O tempora, O Murrays...

...It was at Hawick as well that James developed his interests in lecturing to social groups, newspaper writing and participating in liberal politics...

...For decades the project hung in the balance...

...but once, horribly, there is even a "their's...

...It is, first, a Victorian novel of success, in the manner of H. G. Wells or Arnold Bennett, only more intellectual: Underprivileged boy makes good in the highly cerebral and academic dictionary business...

...With equal frequency the Press was on the verge of abandoning this project that looked more and more quixotic...

...He was one of the founders of the Hawick Archeo-logical Society and, through archeology, became interested in philology...

...the rest was done by his extraordinary intelligence, application and memory...

...Alongside his bank work, the tireless Murray, pressed into service by Furnivall, started editing volumes for the EETS so assiduously that he was once locked overnight into the Edinburgh Library...

...It was up to the boy to teach himself what would earn him a university scholarship, while also having to earn his keep...

...By age 14, he had assimilated everything the parish schools had to offer and there was no money for further schooling...

...Furnivall, who was to be Murray's greatest encourager, slave driver, helper, and hinderer, was also very much involved in a projected major dictionary of the English language—on the model of the American "Webster," only larger and more historical—which the Philological Society was sponsoring, conducting preliminary research on, and dickering about with various publishers...

...Less importantly perhaps, the great Hungarian patriot Kossuth becomes repeatedly Kussuth...

...Lastly, there is implicit in the book a philosophical puzzle...

...It was to become almost 16,000 pages instead, cost an enormous sum, be finished only in 1928 (13 years after Murray's death), and pay no royalties either to its editor-in-chief or his descendants...

...Still more compelling is what might be called the intellectual suspense-story level—how the Dictionary was put together technically...

...How the 8 million slips for individual words and their semantic transformations were collected, sent in, classified, edited—and sometimes damaged or lost—makes a nerveracking novel of crime and detection...

...When, at last, Murray sought him out, he found him to be an inmate of Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum...

...On the train between home and office, James continued his study of languages, including Hindustani and Achaemenian inscriptions...

...There was the great problem, too, of hosts of unpaid readers and subeditors, scattered around the world, who devoted years to gathering, screening and ordering quotations on a preliminary basis, bringing to their work sometimes astounding competence, and more often spectacular incompetence...

...Soon he had taught himself four languages, classical and modern, with the help of books he was buying and borrowing everywhere...

...But she commits some astonishing errors, too...

...after the death of a baby, London seemed urgently indicated...

...From here on, Elisabeth Murray's biography—engaging, lively and informative all along—takes on new dimensions...

...Reviewed by John Simon Would you expect the biography of a man who edited a dictionary to be absorbing, heart-warming, thrilling, riotously amusing, deeply touching, and absolutely unforgettable...

...There were the vexed questions of etymology, phonetics, historical methodology, even typography, many without precedent...

...Eventually, he married a frail young woman whose health required a milder climate...

...The Press was shooting for a work of about 7,000 pages, to appear within a few years from 1879, when the contract was signed...

...It is the account of unending warfare between the Delegates of the Oxford University Press, headed ex officio by the Vice-Chancellor and a specially appointed Secretary (offices that kept changing hands) op one side, and the Philological Society and its chief activist, the mercurial Furnivall, on the other...

...Yet how is one not to speculate about the future of language when one considers some of the linguistic lapses in this otherwise deeply deserving book...

...He added philately to his repertoire and got from it taxonomical skills...

...This was erected first at Mill Hill, then at Oxford, whither the Murrays found it expedient to move in 1885, six years after James assumed the editorship of the OED...

...Next, Caught in the Web of Words is a kind of Aubrey's Brief Lives crossed with Strachey's Eminent Victorians...

...What follows can and should be read on several levels...

...After the death of its then editor, Herbert Coleridge, from the consequences of sitting through a meeting of the Philological Society in wet clothes, and after Henry Nicol's health disqualified him, a casual remark of Murray's gave Furnivall the idea that James was the man for the task...

...What, for all the existence of the monumental OED and its four-volume supplement now in the making, is the future of the English language—indeed of language in general in a world where barbarity and linguistic barbarisms seem to be not only on the increase but also supported and fostered by the new approaches to linguistics...

...The early English texts were to be an indispensable tool for such a venture, affording readers for the Dictionary ready access to the major documents for the study of words in the infancy and adolescence of the English language...

...this presented problems about getting a junior teaching job, the natural future for the unusually talented James...

...In a sense, then, the book is also a collection of vignettes about those remarkable maniacs of genius, of whom Victorian Britain seems to have produced a greater number and variety than any nation in history...

...Extension is repeatedly spelled "extention," bygones "byegones...

...We come upon bastard words such as "finalised" and bad usage such as "of the two, E was the worst," "pressure was less," "his regular attendance himself" and "insist that they came with him...

...He discovered Anglo-Saxon, and began researches into Scottish Border dialects...

...On another level, the book is a tragicomedy of the highest order...

...He could have become headmaster and pursued a teaching and writing career (he did finally get a BA from London), had the Dictionary not been, as it were, lying in wait for him...

...His courage, ability, endurance, and idealism finally triumphed, but only after an endless chain of disruptive incidents, near-tragic or positively ludicrous...

...the stakes—the fate of the greatest dictionary in any language—are high enough for any thriller...

...If not, I suggest that you pick up this modest, charming, wise, and humane book...

...By now he had acquired, too, some knowledge of tongues as diverse as Hebrew and Tongan, Russian and Kaffir—and could, as he later wrote, "read in a sort of way 25 or more languages...

...Miss Murray, an Oxford graduate and retired university teacher and principal of a college of education, writes mostly the good English that was current among all Murray children (who earned their pocket money working on the Dictionary) and, evidently, some of their children...

...Usually, he would acquire a Bible in a given language and, if possible, a grammar...

...In Edinburgh, he took a summer course in elocution with Professor Melville Bell...

...Often, crossed by the Press, he was ready to quit...

...Through A. J. Ellis, whom he had gotten involved with, James became a member of the Philological Society...

...W. C. Minor, an American living in England, who contributed thousands of quotations slips to the Dictionary, but refused the invitation to the great Dictionary Dinner at Oxford...

...And the book comes from the Yale University Press, publisher of what was once the OED's chief rival, The Century Dictionary...

...Work hours were never fewer than 12 a day, sometimes even 15...

...The most spectacular case is that of Dr...

...Worse yet, Murray's own team, the Philological Society, could cause him more hardships than the Press, usually through Furnivall's disastrous changeability and lack of tact...

...Exploratory walks and mountain climbing helped, as did some kindly educated adults living in the area...

...at 17, he managed to get a post as assistant master in the somewhat larger neighboring industrial town of Hawick...

...Bell was impressed by the youth and invited him to his house, where James introduced Bell's son to the wonders of electricity...

...What is to become of us...

...Murray was soon collaborating with Ellis on dialect research, made more difficult by the fact that English phonetics was still in a very tentative and chaotic state...

...from his forays into archeology, he learned never to leave what he read in a book unchecked—resulting in investigations that frequently turned up factual errors...

...This is not the place to go into the complex issue of prescriptive versus descriptive linguistics, though it may come as a surprise that Murray himself did not conceive of the Dictionary as establishing standards of "right" or "wrong...

...The work proceeded immeasurably more slowly than anyone had predicted...

...almost all became bones of contention over which the project came close to abandonment...

...only because he was strong of body and swift of mind was James able to become the great athlete of words, the master and, in a sense, martyr of the Dictionary...

...What is a dictionary for and about, and what, given the way of our world, can be its life expectancy...

...Negotiations with Macmillan's did not work out, but Oxford University's Clarendon Press was seriously interested...

...Clearly, he was a prodigy...

...Murray was to slave at it till his death at age 78...

...In later years, that son, Alexander Graham Bell, was to refer to Murray as the "grandfather of the telephone...

...At 18 months, he knew his alphabet...

...The Continent was financially out of the question...

...For a while he worked at menial jobs...

...The Philological Society itself was run by men who, however distinguished in other academic fields, were mostly amateurs in English philology...

...James and his Maggie arrived there in 1864, and he took up work in a bank...

...The marriage was to prove perfect...

...On this level, it is an extraordinary tale of hard and cogent work, of sacrificing very much, though not all, of Victorian family life and healthily outdoor, muscular Christianity to toiling away in a corrugated-metal shack, the Scriptorium...

...The study of English language and literature was then a beginning academic discipline, with Oxford and Cambridge lagging far behind the University of London...

...There were to be three co-editors, more or less under Murray, who was himself the final author of roughly half the work...

...This question was raised by Christopher Ricks in his perspicacious review of Miss Murray's biography, and I can only echo it and develop it a bit further...

...At last, Murray obtained a job as schoolmaster at Mill Hill Grammar School, where he was to spend the serenest years of his life as a beloved teacher, and where the older of his 11 •children were born...

...Melville Bell, meanwhile, introduced James to the Philological Society in London, leading to his editing the Oxford English Dictionary...

...At Hawick United School he proved an unqualified success, and started developing his talents as a teacher, which, in one way or another, he was to remain all his life...

...Murray, usually with the support of the Society, was holding out for perfection or as close to it as possible, however long it would take or much it would cost...

...The gallery of characters contains many of those marvelous eccentrics on the borderline between genius and madness, between exceptional efficacy and irrelevant fanaticism, between extreme, heartbreaking loneliness and farcical public entanglements...

...If yes, you have probably already rushed to and read Caught in the Web of Words, K. M. Elisabeth Murray's biography of her grandfather, James Murray, the editor-in-chief of the New (or Oxford) English Dictionary, abbreviated NED or OED...

...Here the new member—and it was to Murray's credit that he was accepted without any university credentials?met the likes of Henry Sweet (the model for Shaw's Professor Higgins), W. W. Skeat (the future author of the etymological dictionaries of English) and, above all, F. J. Furnivall, that odd mixture of scholar and flighty enthusiast, who was then, among other things, founder and editor of the crucially important Early English Text Society (EETS...

...In his obscure burgh, he was teaching himself botany, geology, archeology, astronomy, and a number of other subjects...

...The Murrays, though deeply religious, were not members of the Established Church of Scotland...