The Professor and the Madman
I started reading this book in the beginning of last year as a recommendation from one of my favorite authoress Lois McMaster Bujold. Its a book about the origins of The Oxford English Dictionary, and more specifically, about one of the major contributors of it.
Having once or twice in my life had to consult the OED, and baffled by the usage of it, this sparked a bit of a small interest in me, and I started reading it last year. Well, the first chapter practically put me to sleep, and I promptly dropped the reading of it. This year, I found the audio book, and it allowed me to actually finish it, once again making me think my patience for reading non-fiction is relatively low but my tolerance for listening to them is high.
The book itself is mildly interesting, mostly focusing on the life of William Chester Minor, a US army doctor who through some trauma and probably some family genetics, found himself to be plagued by mental illness. This probably wouldn’t be of much cause for concern, except that during one of his episodes of hallucinations, he shot and killed an innocent man and was then interred in an insane asylum for the vast majority of his years.
During this period of time, the OED also started its journey towards documenting all the worlds in the English Language, and the method by which they did so was to have readers read all the books of the time and submit in quotes and page number the words where they found interesting usage. W.C Minor, being in an asylum, and still having some means of his own, managed to find the call for help and contributed well over 12,000 quotes, most of which were actually used and significant.
The book is very well researched and the author plainly loves the subject matter. The prose is beautifully written as well, and reminds me of the well loved Victorian prose that most folks are familiar from Jane Austen’s works. An example is a letter he wrote to the head of the OED project:
Pray pardon the liberty I take, to enclose you a postal payable to your order—that I thought might add in a small way against unexpected demands upon your means. Even a millionaire may feel satisfaction to find he has a sovereign more than he thought for, though himself a republican, and we less gifted people have a right to a like satisfaction when the chance permits. Building a house and going on a journey are much the same, in costing more than one expects; and in any case I am sure you can make this useful. Now I will say goodbye to you both, with best wishes for your welfare, and in its uncontracted form also, God be with you, W. C. Minor
Such lovely use of language!
The book does cover the life and death of both W.C Minor and Dr. Murray, the head of the project, chronicling how they met and how they interacted together. Its a loving work of scholarship, but its also a fairly niche subject.
I recommend it only if you’ve any interest in how the OED came to be, and one of the major contributors to it.