Honoring Ernest Weekley
This is the second and last post on Ernest Weekley, an excellent scholar and engaging writer. The “installment” a week ago dealt with the history of Standard English through the eyes of the inimitable Mrs. Gamp. I am aware of three essays Weekley wrote for popular periodicals. One (celebrating Mrs. Gamp) appeared in The Cornhill Magazine, two others in The Atlantic Monthly (vol. 133, 1924, 782-91, and 153, 1954, 347-54). Their respective titles are “On Dictionaries” and “Words, Words, Words: Forty Years of Growth.” It is mainly the earlier of them that will interest us today. The second is devoted to the history of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), and I suspect that Weekley was commissioned to write it for the benefit of the transatlantic public, because in it, he mainly discussed the huge number of American words that went into the OED’s additions and supplement. He reminded his readership that “Murray, in his Presidential Address to the Philological Society in 1880, spoke very cordially of ‘the kindness of our friends in the United States, where the interest taken in our scheme, springing from a genuine love of our common language, its history, and a warm desire to make the Dictionary worthy of the language, has impressed me very much’.”
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Indeed, Murray had a huge enthusiastic following in the United States. In his essay, Weekley, most wisely, refrained from mentioning the fact that the hot-tempered Murray almost ruined the collaboration with the United States, when he learned about the project to publish The Century Dictionary (he feared that the new venture would compete and interfere with his great enterprise). And when the American dictionary began to appear, he attacked, with what seems today quite unnecessary vigor, the etymology of Cockney in Volume 1. He had his own idea on that score and wrote a nasty article about the ignorant Americans. An article by Anthony L. Mayhew to the same tune added insult to injury. It took Dwight Whitney a great effort to prevent a fatal rupture. Incidentally, the origin of the word Cockney is still partly debatable. The storm abated and finally blew itself out. Decades later, the picture looked idyllic. Such is a good deal of history in retrospect.
I would like to quote Weekley’s passing observation, which seems to be very much to the point. He noted that the word caption was old but had not become universally known till reintroduced with American films. He wrote: “Our ancestors drew their stock of metaphor from man’s essential occupations. Our descendants will draw theirs largely from mechanized life.” Today, we should add sports to mechanized life and essential occupations. Other than that, modern dictionaries (now, nearly all online) tend to become larger and larger, while the vocabulary of the speakers shrinks like Balzac’s La Peau de chagrin / the skin of shagreen. A single beloved epithet with three asterisks in the middle serves all purposes very well. It certainly reflects people’s essential occupation.
In the first essay, Weekley surveyed the history of English dictionaries, and this survey is a pleasure to read. We trust dictionaries, and this is a proper attitude. Only lexicographers know “how easily a mistaken explanation, an incorrect form, or even a nonexistent word may be handed down from one compiler to another.” And yet our reverential attitude toward dictionaries never changes. In the section on usage appended to the first (1969) edition of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, we read: “One of the commonest phrases is ’look it up in the dictionary.’ (Not any particular dictionary; just ‘the dictionary.’).” And this is a proper attitude. In litigation, dictionaries are always consulted, to check the correct sense of this or that word. And in everyday life, where else can we find all answers?
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To be sure, today’s “lexicons” are much more reliable than they were four, three, and even two hundred years ago. Weekley reminded his readership that the earliest dictionaries aimed at explaining the more difficult words in the language. “Nowadays every dictionary contains, no doubt inevitably, nineteen twentieth or perhaps ninety nineteen-nine hundredths of unnecessary matter. Who, for instance, wants to know that… twenty is ‘twice ten’…?” Weekley quotes the detailed (and therefore hilarious) definition of kiss from the great Oxford English Dictionary, “a piece of erudition usually acquired by the youngest and least experienced without lexicographical help.” And yet, a dictionary has to include twenty and kiss! Weekly realized the problem only too well.
It appears that Weekley had his own copies of all the earlier dictionaries. Where did he keep them? His private life has been pawed over in quite unnecessary detail (even Wikipedia could not resist this temptation), but I have not been able to find a description of his library. To him every old lexicographer was like a personal acquaintance. He gave a sympathetic description of John Minsheu, the author of the first etymological dictionary of English (Minsheu’s name often appears in this blog). “[Minsheu] seems to have led an adventurous life abroad, wandering for long years from land to land in his eager quest for knowledge. He may have been a rogue, but he was certainly an enthusiast.” And here is Weekley’s portrait of a typical dictionary maker. “He is as irritable as a poet and as full of his own importance as a film star. He accuses his predecessors of incompetency and his contemporaries and successors of plagiarism…. Naturally[,] each lexicographer proclaims his own wares to be superior to all others.” Well, lexicographers are also human.
Most people will have heard about Samuel Johnson’s dictionary. Johnson was brilliant and judgmental. Weekley found many of his outbursts Boythornian. I will not highlight this epithet and let our readers find out its meaning for themselves. Johnson’s contemporaries believed that seventeenth-century English had reached a state of near-perfection. Weekly showed how untenable this idea was but could not resist the temptation of airing his own pet idea (see the previous post): “…the only people who now speak English with any approach to historical correctness are the few surviving agricultural laborers who are old enough to have escaped the devastating effects of the [1870] Elementary Education Act.” Weekley, as one can see, did not escape it.
And here are a few concluding flourishes. Weekley writes: “It is in accordance with poetic justice that the great dictionary makers of the age that followed Johnson should belong chiefly to the two races for which he professed a burlesque abhorrence: the Americans and the Scots.” The end of the essay is also worth quoting: “An imaginary conversation between Boswell and Johnson was once composed—perhaps by Sir James Murray himself, for all the best stories against the Scotch are due to Scotsmen. The Doctor and his adoring biographer are strolling in the Elysian Fields, when Boswell asks: ‘What would you say, Sir, if you were told that the task of editing the great English Dictionary which is to supersede all others had been entrusted to a Scotch Presbyterian?’ to which the Doctor replies: ‘Sir, it is possible to be facetious without being indecent’.” Hear, hear!
Featured image by mrpolyonymous. CC by 2.0, via Flickr.