1. Progression or advancement through a process, a sequence of events, a period of time, etc.; movement towards an outcome or conclusion.
The omissions: class, sex, propriety: The Dictiornary of Lost Words: A Novel; Progress and the first edition, 1896-1928
The omissions: class, sex, propriety: The Dictiornary of Lost Words:
The Australian writer Pip Williams premised her novel around the word bondmaid, meaning slave-girl, which was omitted from the first edition of the OED because the its slips were misplaced, one of the very few failures of Murray's careful filing system. The main character, Esme, is the daughter of a lexicographer, a single parent who must bring her to the Oxford Scriptorium, where she sits under the sorting table. One day the bondmaid slip, discarded by one of Murray's assistants in the novel's version of things, falls under the table. She keeps it and placed it in a trunk in the bedroom of Lizzie, the Murrays' servant girl, who is Esme's part-time caretaker and lifelong friend. Esme continues to collect discarded slips (and sometimes ones she shouldn't take). As she grows up she becomes a valued assistant to the project but keeps the collection of lost words, which she adds to with words she learns from Lizzie and the lower-class, sometimes homeless people she meets when she goes with Lizzie to the market. The words end up in her Dictionary of Lost Words.
Here are some of them and their fate in the OED:
bondmaid Esme's slip:
BONDMAID
"Bonded for life by love, devotion or obligation, "I've been a bondmaid to you since you were small, Essymay, and I've been glad for every day of it."
Lizzie Lester, 1915
Williams p 339
OMITTED FROM 1st EDITION, DEFINED AS "SLAVE-GIRL" WITH REFERENCE TO BIBLICAL ACCOUNT OF HAGAR
morbs:
"a sadness that comes and goes":
NOT DEFINED (does appear in a quotation used for two other words)
knackered:
"I get up before dawn to make sure everyone in the big house will be worm and fed when they wake, and I don't go to sleep till they is snoring. I feel knackeered half the time, like a worn-out horse."
Lizzie Lester, 1902
Williams, p. 102
IN 1st EDITION; To kill; to castrate; usually in weakened sense, to exhaust, to wear out. So as an imprecation.
shaft
The homeless Mabel in response to why she whittles: "Naught else to do with me 'ands now no one wants 'em round their shaft." . . . Lizzie refused to tell me the meaning of shaft, but she nodded or shook her head in response to my guesses.
Williams, p. 109
IN 1st EDITION, as possible interpretation (unstated) of some quotations in subsense f. "figurative"
There are many more, including the f- and c- words we encountered last week. The novel, Williams says, "began as two simple questions: Do words mean different things to men and women? And if they do, is it possible that we have lost somethiing in the process of defining them?" (p. 361). Later she says that while the the first edition "was a flawed and gendered text. . . . it was also extraordinary, and far less flawed and gendered than it might have been in the hands of someone other than James Murray" (p. 364). The novel presents a good story that gives a vivid sense of what it might have been like to work in Murray's Scriptorium. (Williams acknowledges her debt to the books on our bibliography).
Here are some more examples from the book: bostin, mairt, codswallop, dollymop. If you're interested, we can look them up at the end of the hour.
The issues of race, class, and sex we glanced at last time are explored in Mugglestone's history Lost for Words. For example, the entry for white man changed dramatically. At one point a sense definition said, "A man of honourable character such as one associates with a European (as distinguised from a negro)," while the entry for negro emphasized "black woolly hair, flat nose and thick protruding lips " (pp. 163-4). Even in what might seem a neutral word, cabin, class and racial assumptions appeared: "A permanent human habitation of rude construction. Applied esp. to the mud or turf-built hovels of slaves or impoverished peasantry, as distinguished from the more comfortable 'cottage' of working men, or from the 'hut' of the savage" (165-166). Consider this element of the definition of too: "an emotional feminine colloquialism . . . to signify 'very, exceedingly'" and horrid as "especially frequent as a feminine term of strong aversion" (p. 167). All one can hope is that to some extent our generations have avoided recording the prejudices of which we are unaware.
Progress and the first edition, 1896-1928
The controversies between the Oxford Press Delegates and the editors about scale and time of completion faded away after the near cancellation of the Dictionary in 1896. The prestige of the project made it into something of a national treasure, and despite the vast expense and limited return, the Press and the University were committed to the New English (soon to become the Oxford English) Dictionary. The commitment was considerable, as these figures suggest:
Expenditure In 1904 pounds in 2023 pounds in 2023 dollars
£101,254 £ 15,751,072 $ 19,688,840
Return from sales £ 33,186 £ 5,162,414 $ 6,401,394
Loss £ 68,068 £ 10,550,540 $ 13,188,175
By 1900 progress wa steady, and the degree to which the dictionary exceeded its American benchmark became a point of pride rather than concern. One Press Delegate went so far as to say that the project is "an undertaking . . . in which one might almost say the national honour of England is engaged" (Mugglestone, p. 183). As the timeline below shows, the dictionary progressed steadily. The head of the Press, Charles Cannan, said, "The dictionary . . . must now be the largest single engine of research working anywhere in the world" (Mugglestone, p. 188). While the procedures for producing entries had become standardized and efficient, Murray, already nearing old age, felt immense pressure to finish, even working 80-hour weeks when his family and associates urged him to take better care of his health. He worked steadily up until his death in 1915.
The First World War slowed the advance of the dictionary. While most of the staff were too old for service, the new fourth editor, C.T. Onions (1873-1965), appointed in 1914 after several years working with Bradley, spent two years in the war effort. The greatest slowdown was the enlistment of much of the Press staff in the military, as well as shortages of material.
Several factors slowed the post-war progress of the dictionary. The death of Murray in 1915 removed the most experienced, most skilled person, and the removal of materials from his Scriptorium to the quarters in the University Press created difficulties. The death of Bradley in 1923, Craigie's acceptance of a position at the University of Chicago, and other commitments undertaken both by Craigie and Onions slowed the journey through the end of the alphabet. Another problem was the age of the prewar staff, many of whom had retired or died, to be replaced by untrained beginners (who, by the way, knew they did not have a long-term commitment from the Press). But the end was reached in 1928, and celebrated at the great dinner mentioned a few weeks ago, when the female contributors were relegated to a balcony, from which they heard the speeches and watched the men eat.
A timeline and some numbers:
First edition
Vol I A and B, 1888;
Vol II C, 1893;
Vol III D and E, 1897;
Vol IV F and G, 1901;
Vol V, H to K, 1902;;
Vol VI, L, M, N, 1908
Vol VII, O and P, 1909
Vol VIII, Q, R, S-Sh 1914
Vol IX, Si-Su, Th, 1919
Vol X, Ti-Z, 1928
10 Volumes (originally issued in 128 fascicles), 15,490 pages, 252,200, entries for 414,800 defined words, about 2,000 volunteer readers who contributed about 5,000,000 quotations (from about 4,500 works by approximately 2,700 authors), of which 1,861,200 were used
A resource of some importance is the page from which I drew the statistics above—the history of the editions of the OED. It includes tie prefaces to each volume of the first edition and, sometimes more interesting, the prefaces to the individual fascicles.
Here's the preface to the letter W:
The letter C raised complex issues for Murray in 1893:
