Even the Delegates of the Oxford University Press - those who held the purse strings - were men. all the editors were men, most of the volunteers were men and most of the literature, manuals and newspaper articles used as evidence for how words were used, were written by men. … was left with the impression that the Dictionary was a particularly male endeavour. As Pip Williams says in the Author’s Note to The Dictionary of Lost Words, when she had read the Winchester book, she…

And if you check out the Wikipedia entry for the OED, you will see immediately that the entire enterprise appears to have been undertaken by men. So while it was a compelling, fast-paced, and sometimes horrifying story (Minor at one point in his life decides that he's so overwhelmed by his sexual appetites that the only solution is to amputate his own penis with a pen knife, and NYARGH), I wish there'd been more of a discussion about his schizophrenia in modern terms.OED 1st edition (source: Nova Languages*)Īs you can tell from the sexed-up title for the American edition, Winchester’s book focussed on the eccentricity of the dictionary’s most prolific contributor who was an inmate in the Broadmoor Lunatic Asylum, and the third editor, James Murray who did not live to see the project’s completion. And while I understand why he chose to do that, it.really didn't work for me. Winchester doesn't give Minor's modern day diagnosis until the final chapter, instead consistently discussing his mental health problems in nineteenth century terms. The nineteenth century thought he'd been driven mad by what he saw as a surgeon during the Civil War. Minor was a paranoid schizophrenic who spent more than half his life in asylums after murdering someone during an episode.

Minor's history is incredibly sad, and is where the book was a little bit of a let down for me. It's oddly hilarious now to see how quickly they thought the project would be finished, as if defining the entirety of the English language was a walk in the park. James Murray came up with an incredibly unique approach to creating the dictionary, and it's astonishing that he had volunteers all over the world reading any number of books and sending in quotations to represent each word in the English language. Personally, I found the OED stuff the far more interesting of the two. Minor, part history of how the Oxford English Dictionary came to be.

The surgeon of crowthorne review