Life is our dictionary-
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A few months ago, the google doodle popped up the picture of Samuel Johnson on his 308th birth anniversary . Samuel, arguably the pioneer among lexicographers. Lexicographers, the gentlemen who compiled big fat books, called dictionaries. There are not many uses of a dictionary other than to find meaning, usage, pronunciation and origin of words - and sometimes to leave a peepal leaf and wait to see it fossilize into a neatly patterned veinal skeleton.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
But my first use for dictionary was for something that children of today would find it unbelievably absurd. It was a thick Chambers Dictionary my maternal grandfather had gifted to my mother when she resumed her studies after three childbirths. When heat or rain outside held back stepping out for a game, and one was fed up with board or card games, it was the big fat Chambers Dictionary which would come to our rescue as we opened and closed, at random, the fat tome and wrote down scores from the even numbered pages of Chambers - 2, 4 6. 0 was out while 8 counted as one run. Not exactly random if you ask me, because it was my job to open the dictionary after every run or wicket , and I had mastered the art of ‘fixing’. Gavaskar never got out without a century, and England never won ! This was called Book Cricket, and when I played it , you could call it the Art of Book Cricket.
It was such fond memories of Chambers Book Cricket matches that the Google Doodle reignited . And now having moved on in years, I reflected at the immense effort that would have gone behind compiling dictionaries, and that , too, in English, whose present form holds no great vintage , whose evolution was haphazard. A dictionary is not a book which you can write with a plot in mind. Compiling dictionaries was a humongous task. To begin with, it was difficult to know as to how large was the English language. How big is the English language? Samuel Johnson’s dictionary contained 43,000 words.The revised Oxford English Dictionary of 1989 had 615,000 entries. However, if we calculate at the rate of one word one meaning, the numbers could be much more.
One reason is that English is prodigiously polysemic, that is, one word with a multitude of meanings. Shouldn’t mouse be counted as two separate entities? Man,mole, bank, book? What about fine - it has fourteen definitions as an adjective, six as a noun and two as adverb? Further, the language has a large number of contronyms- words having opposite meanings- you can sanction funds as well impose sanctions against release of funds; and a horse could bolt through a door bolted just a while ago.
The other challenge to lexicographers of English has been catachresis or constant change in meanings of words - like shifting dunes ever since Creation you could say. What earlier meant a legitimate copy came to be known as counterfeit; brave once implied cowardice. And the task of denoting pronunciation must have been no less arduous - in Loughborough, the first ough sounds as in cuff while the second rhymes with thorough, and that Leveson- Gower could be 'loosen gore'.
But despite these challenges, the English -speaking world has the finest dictionaries.
Samuel’s was actually not the First. From Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall in 1604 ( a compendium of 3,000 words with incorrect alphabetization), there had been a dozen popular dictionaries, including the fairly distinguished and containing more words , the Universal Etymological Dictionary by Nathaniel Bailey in 1721. However, Samuel’s Dictionary of the English Language, published in two volumes in 1755 after nine years of painstaking research, from an attic room off Fleet Street , containing definitions to 43,000 words, embellished with more than 114,000 quotations is a masterpiece ( it ranks 86th in English non-fiction) and gave to the language the dignity it deserved- though in the process he must have become fairly bored . The boredom surfaces , for example , when he gives an example of the world dull: “Not exhilarating;not delightful;as, to make dictionaries is dull work.”
But Johnson’s monumental accomplishment was quickly eclipsed by a fussy schoolteacher/lawyer half a world away in Connecticut- Noah Webster after whom the Dictionary Day is celebrated. His Elementary Spelling Book, 1788, went through 300 editions between 1788 and 1829, and with the possible exception of Bible, it is probably the best selling book in American history- though to many it should come as a surprise that Americans took to being civilized and educated with such fervour! His dictionary was the most complete of its age, with 70,000 words . Webster is commonly credited with changing American spelling , his work was informed by ardent patriotism, but it is not usually appreciated that his views oscillated more than sometimes a simian would on a swing.
He insisted on such radical spellings as soop, bred, fugitiv, tuf , yet stood firmly against American tendency to drop the u from colour and humour but nevertheless acknowledged the American affection to transpose the British re in theatre and centre. In terms of pronunciation, he is responsible for American schedule rather than the British shedjulle , the American lewtenant against the British lefftenant and even accepted a number of clearly ungrammatical usages like ‘it is me’, ‘we was’ and ‘them horses’.
The Chambers Dictionary (TCD) with whose copy I had played Book Cricket was first published in 1872. It was used by British crossword solvers and setters, by Scrabble players ( though it is no longer the official Scrabble dictionary) and was known for its wryly humorous definitions as in” eclair: a cake , long in shape but short in duration”.
A dictionary which gave me company during the dozen or so years of mofussil posting starting from Tumlook - as I opened envelopes sealed with lac to check my daily dak, moved from one dakbunglow to the other, handed out bucksheesh and inaums, wore my khakhee, monitored moccadamas, rounded up the budmaash, learnt sherista work in thanas, performed bundabast duties during hurtauls , led teams of darogas and bundook- carrying constables, discovered the world of different musallas in Bengali curry was , you probably guessed it right. Yes, it was Hobson- Jobson of Col.Henry Yule ,R.E., C.E and A.C. Burnell, Ph.D., C.I.E.
Later on, I used the official Scrabble Dictionary a lot during my Scrabble games which were one of the few engrossing engagements in the sedate mofussil postings . But Scrabble is much like golf which permits “local rules”, something which my colleague Anuj learnt with much distress. He is being consistently out scrabbled by his sons who insist on inclusion of words from Urban Dictionary , an online crowd-sourced dictionary and winner of Disruptive Innovations Award in 2013, which spawns with super fecundity a slew of slangs, cultural words and phrases not found in standard dictionaries.
Dictionaries have now gone online and the one to which I look up to most is theFreedictionary.com. The one I find great delight for its compellingly wry humour and satire is the Devil’s Dictionary:”Apologize - to lay the foundation for a future offence ;author(n.): A small plant that requires little nourishment , but lots of trimming”.
A new interest relating to dictionaries I have is what I call Dictionary News - the quarterly announcement of words accepted as legit in Oxford English dictionary. One reason I guess is that speakers of English, despite having a vocabulary of over 2,50,000 words, find themselves lost for words to describe some situations, say for example the experience of hesitating when you are about to introduce a person whose name you don’t quite remember . So the Scottish word tartle has been included. And they had to fall back on a Danish word kaelling to describe a woman who stands on her doorsteps constantly screaming obscenities at her children . The first I have a morbid fear of as I advance with age while the second is a sight almost anywhere in India. To the alphabetically curious , this juggernaut has also pushed back zythum as the last word in OED and given the spit sprayers a field day- the brand new last word is zyzzyva!
The second reason is that English Language is broadbasing its appeal in the countries it has travelled to by the processes of assimilation and co-option of popular languages ( something which Hinduism would do many centuries ago till it lost the plot to a new surge of inward exclusivism) . A few of East Asian new additions include “yum cha” which means a type of Chinese breakfast, “guanxi” for personal connection that aid business and “wah”, a Singaporean word which is an expression of delight ( and you that it was actually a Hindi word meaning the same thing). I,too, find it strange that the OED chaps had to travel to Singapore to pick that word when it was being spoken right here in India for centuries and was recently celebrated in Zakir Hussain’s Wah Taj commercial for a brand of tea!
However, to be fair to the OED, it continues to incorporate Indian words, and not just the language from the cowbelt - abba, anna, jugaad, achcha,dadagiri , timepass, funda, chamcha, natak and chup are just a few examples. This is an admission of distinctiveness of Indian English, an acknowledgement to not just the “highly specific vocabulary( of Indians) with no direct equivalents in English”, but also to “to the shared history between Britain and India that has left behind a legacy of loanwords and other lexical innovations”. It is clear then that change is rampant even at the the foundation or base of the English language - and emblematic of this change is the choice of Aadhaar as the most popular Hindi word chosen by Oxford Dictionaries for 2017 !
