John Simpson (2)

This took me nearly two months to read, which is unheard of for me. It is so much more dense than I anticipated, and lacked a firm narrative pull in the first half to keep me moving. But still, this is so fascinating to watch the OED move online and understand the process of updating the dictionary. I read a similar book about the Merriam-Webster dictionary right before this, and the different approaches to language and record they take are notable. I enjoyed the thread here about his non-verbal daughter as well, an irony in his life he grappled with for a long time.… (mer)

Interesting and fun! Basically a history of the OED from when it was still filing cabinets full of citation cards up to the dictionary moving fully into the digital age. The occasional brief dips into the histories and etymologies of particularly interesting individual words also give a good sense of the development of the English language.

In general, Simpson's enthusiasm about lexicography makes the whole things a delight to read. I also have a fondness for his writing style-- his many dashes and parentheses and other diversions seem well-suited to the dictionary-making mentality.… (mer)

There are a few of us for whom a memoir by a lexicographer sounds like fascinating stuff, and for us few John Simpson's “The Word Detective” (2016) is a winner.

Hired in the 1970s by the Oxford English Dictionary, after first being turned away, Simpson found a career as a "word detective" a perfect fit for him. He gradually rose through the ranks until he became its chief editor, overseeing the transformation of the OED from a giant, multi-volume reference found mostly in libraries to a valuable online resource available on anyone's phone or computer.

The phrase "word detective" seems apt, for the work of a lexicographer involves such tasks as discovering the many meanings of a particular word at various points in the expanding English-speaking world, accounting for different spellings and pronunciations and, perhaps most difficult of all, determining the earliest use of this word. "At the time," Simpson writes, "I couldn't imagine anything that was as much fun as doing this: working fast, assimilating insightful but sometimes mistimed comments, taking a good entry and making it as perfect as possible."

Throughout his book Simpson uses such words as crowdsourcing and transpired, then in an aside explains something about that particular word's history and meaning, thus not just telling us how he worked but showing us the actual results of word detecting.

Sometimes Simpson gets personal, never more so than when he writes about Ellie, his now adult daughter who can neither speak nor understand language. It's a tragic irony — the man in charge of the world's greatest English dictionary having a wordless daughter with whom he cannot communicate.

More than a memoir, “The Word Detective” is also a modern history of the OED, with a lot of its early history thrown in. Simpson is now retired yet, through his memoir, is still serving the old firm well.… (mer)