THE MAZES OF WORDS AND IDIOMS

...a project almost abandoned any number of times, as the fruits of victory seemed impossible of attainment...

...The OED, like the contemporaneous Dictionary of National Biography, was an act of creation, of consummate devotion, which reminds us how distant Victorian England was, not only from ourselves, but also from the caricature we often make of it...

...Despite Murray's mastery of scores of languages, and despite our view of OED as mainly a literary tool, Murray did not see himself as a man of letters but rather, he wrote, as "a man of science . . . interested in that branch of Anthropology which deals with the history of human speech...

...None the less, it is to Commonweal: 55...

...and various collaborating scholars, most notably Frederick Furnivall, were eager to cut corners so that they would live to see the book done...

...It would be wrong to say that OED wouldn't exist had James Murray never lived, and K. M. Elisabeth Murray does not say that in her enchanting biography of her "Grandfather Dictionary," but she does make it clear that he alone assured it would .become, in the promotional yet accurate words of the Oxford Press, "the supreme authority" on the language, "without a rival...

...James A. H. Murray, a largely self-educated Scotsman, was editor and then (when the press of words led to assigning some letters to other philologists) editor-in-chief of OED from 1879 until his death in 1915...

...Objecting to the failure of others to view the work with proper seriousness, he wrote, "If literary men and students of English in any department, had the faintest conception of the amazing and enormous light which the Dictionary is going to throw upon the history of words and idioms, they would work with enthusiasm to hasten its appearance...

...Deeply religious, he saw himself also as a servant of God, who chose him for the Dictionary and sustained him in its pursuit: "Many a time . . . when absolutely at the end of my own resources in dealing with entangled & difficult words . . . I have . . . thrown myself on the floor absolutely on God's help, and asked him to use me as an instrument to do what He knew to be right...

...BOOKS THE MAZES OF WORDS AND IDIOMS NARK TAYLOR Caught in the Web of Word*: James Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary K. M. ELISABETH MURRAY Yale, $15 A Dictionary of Catch Phrases ERIC PARTRIDGE Stein and Day, $17.95 The Philological Society of London and the Delegates of the Oxford University Press came to contract in 1879 for publication of the great work that, when its first part (A to ANT) appeared in 1884, would be known formally as A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles and more familiarly as the Oxford English Dictionary, or OED...

...he got to the end of T, and was personally responsible for 7,207 of the work's final 15,487 pages...

...To those willing to compromise —to settle for generalities and approximations—he said, "Every fact faithfully recorded, and every inference correctly drawn from the facts, becomes a permanent accession to human knowledge . . . part of eternal truth, which will never cease to be true...

...Long before, in 1857, the Philological Society had begun soliciting, from interested readers everywhere, slips of quotations illustrating word usage from the thirteenth century on, so when OED was finally completed (except for its later supplements) in 1928, it had been in official production for half a century, and more loosely a work in progress for a generation before that...

...It is easy now to appreciate OED's significance, and to be grateful for its every citation, but at a time when English studies had just begun in the Universities, only Murray bad the vision to set it in the future...

...Like some Continental philologists, but before almost all of his countrymen, Murray understood, in Elisabeth Murray's words, that "colloquial, socalled illiterate forms of speech were as important to the science of comparative historical philology as the study of dead and existing languages on which the science had hitherto been built...

...For considei a project able to enlist the labors of thousands of men and women, most of them—the army of volunteer readers—unpaid and all but anonymous...

...The history of OED sounds less like a publishing enterprise in any normal sense than a protracted campaign, and it is perhaps by military analogy that we can most easily comprehend the scope of the whole effort...

...subscribers wanted some tangible reward for their faith and patience...

...and a project, finally, that was always an expression of national pride and purpose: is it not extraordinary how remote such projects appear from the ordinary, workaday world...

...a project in which whole lives were consumed, since those around at the beginning were not there at the end...

...a project able to mobilize the energies of professional scholars, hardheaded businessmen, and enthusiastic amateurs...

...Everyone else involved in the venture would have been satisfied with a lesser thing: the Delegates came to worry over expenditures that had been unforeseen at the beginning...