The Oxford English Dictionary (OED)
Whether I am teaching a class in literature, or a creative writing class, or an EN class, my advice on the first day to students is invariable: that the single most useful resource in their university careers will be a good dictionary – whatever their major, whatever their interests. I recommend most highly the Oxford English Dictionary (the OED) as it is a truly great historical dictionary; I try to explain why knowing what a word means today is not sufficient, or at least not sufficient if one wishes to talk and write in more than clichés; we need to know what a word or a concept has meant over the ages. I guarantee students that if they take this historical approach to words and concepts, this will be noted and appreciated by their professors, in all disciplines.
When I was an undergraduate, back in the 1970s, I saved up to buy the micrographically reduced OED. Some bright spark at Oxford University Press twigged that the 20-something-volume full edition of the OED was well beyond the pockets (and shelf space) of most academics, and came up with the idea of reducing each page so that four pages fitted on a single page. The resulting two-volume edition, printed on bible paper and with a magnifying glass provided, seemed like a great idea, and like many of my peers I invested in it. Actually using this edition proved a challenge, however, and most copies ended up as doorstops or props for bookshelves (the magnifying glass still crops up on colleagues’ desks). The problem was that, so radically reduced, the writing was hard to read; the books weighed a ton; and double-barrelled words or words with multiple spellings could require a lot of time in detection. It could take ten minutes to find a single definition.
I’m not a great fan of some aspects of modern technology, but one truly splendid addition has been the OED online. It can be kept more easily up to date, it is so easy to use that within seconds one has access to the word one was seeking, to its history, to the frequency of its use… And all this thanks to the AUP library which, blessedly, subscribes to it on our behalf.
This summer I was asked to present my work as an editor to the inaugural session of the Mediterranean Artists Project, a new foundation set up in the south of France. As I often do when writing something new, I followed my own advice, and turned to the OED, starting with the word “editor” – I thought I knew what it meant, and its origins, but did I really?
A person who prepares an edition of written work by one or more authors for publication, by selecting and arranging the contents, adding commentary, etc.
And the etymology of the word edition:
< classical Latin ēditiōn-, ēditiō action of bringing into existence, publication (of books, writings), published version of a work, statement < ēdit-, past participial stem of ēdere to put forth, publish
And while I was at it, I also consulted the great French dictionary, Le Grand Robert, which gives something similar for its first meaning, the one that tends to dominate is its second:
Le fait d'éditer (2.), de reproduire et de diffuser (une œuvre écrite).➙ Publication. C'est un libraire, c'est l'auteur même, c'est une société (➙ Éditeur, 2.) qui se charge de l'édition de cet ouvrage. Procéder à la première édition, à une nouvelle édition (➙ Réédition) d'un livre. Édition numérique. Souscrire à l'édition d'un livre d'art, d'un dictionnaire. Contrat d'édition. Édition à compte d'auteur d'un recueil de poèmes.
I immediately knew how to frame my talk: through the notion of “putting forth”, of “bringing into existence”.
I have been hard at work in recent years, editing both AUP’s Cahiers Series, and preparing a two-volume edition of The Letters of Muriel Spark (the first volume of which will be published this summer). Editing can at times appear as a somewhat uncreative or technical activity; the OED served to remind me that editors also have their creative role, bringing forth works which would, otherwise, not exist at all.
And as my mind flitted further around the word “edit” and Muriel Spark, I was reminded of some notable lines from Spark’s most famous novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. In this novel the protagonist, Jean Brodie, is a schoolteacher at a girl’s school in Edinburgh (much like the one Spark herself attended in the 1920s); she is both a benign and a malign influence on her pupils, enlightening them but at the same time threatening their existence. She refuses to follow the standard curriculum imposed by the school authorities, preferring her own highly unconventional approach, which she justifies in the following passage:
I follow my principles of education and give of my best in my prime. The word “education” comes from the root e from ex, out, and duco, I lead. It means a leading out. To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil’s soul
And so, of course, I found myself back in the OED, reading the definitions and etymology of education and its cognates.
The only problem with my OED affection (which may be an addiction, if I’m honest) is that an hour or a morning can pass, as I pass in turn from one word to another; until I look up and realise how far I have travelled far from where I intended, and that now I need to get back on track.
Resources cited:
Grand Robert de la Langue Française by
Oxford English Dictionary by
The prime of Miss Jean Brodie, the girls of slender means ; the driver's seat : the only problem by
The Letters of Muriel Spark (Volume 1) by
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