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February 1999

The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester

A review of

The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester Harper Collins Publishers, New York, 1998 The ceaselessly astonishing fickleness of the American and British reading public has yielded yer another curiousity for our consideration. How, in countries whose best-sellers lists are regularly topped by racy legal thrillers and anything with the words "chicken soup" in the title, has the complicated history of a dictionary been catapulted to a place of such conspicious prominence? The dictionary in question is, no less, the monumetally august, multi-volume Oxford English Dictionary (O.E.D.). The answer to this puzzle lies in the skill in which author Simon Winchester has uncovered the extraordinary story and remarkable men behind it. Winchester, a profilic writer with a taste for the fantastic, has blown a thick layer of dust from the great lexicon's covers to reveal a tale of intrigue, cunning, desperation--and murder. In addition to the expected rarrfied Oxford campus settings, rural Connecticut, Sri Lanka, and an English mental hospital from this surprising tale, as well. William Minor,a Yale-educated American surgeon, was an unlikely murderer, but mental illness and a penchant for rash behavior led him to kill an innocent man while living in London. Minor was hospitalized for being "profoundly and irreversibly mad" and remained so for most of his adult life. Yet behind the mask of madness, Minor retained a frightenlingly sharp mind , as attested to by his contributions to the greateest referance work of the English language. By chance, Minor learned of the vast job by the O.E.D.'s editor, James Murray, and of his efforts to recruit "word foragers" for the dictionary. Even in the high Victorian age, when the Britih flag flew over the world over and English was the acknowledged language of empire, there was still no authoritative dictionary of the language. Under the aegis of Oxford University, Murray embarked upon the singularly unglamorous task of gathering word entries culled from texts by small army of volunterr contributorsof which Minor was most prolific. Begining with "a" on March 1, 1879, and finishing with "zyxt" on December 31, 1927, Murray and his crew of entymologists succeeded in compliling a master lexicon, a history of the English language, a study in Victorian thoroughness, and reference work as all.encompassing as the British Empire itself. Readers of all inclinations are likely to be captivated by the unexpected twists, the gems of word lore, and the suspenseful telling of this extraordinary tale.

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