Quote:
Originally Posted by dreams
I read The Professor and the Madman (P.S.) (aka The Surgeon of Crowthorne) by Simon Winchester
Spoiler:
From Wikipedia
The Surgeon of Crowthorne: A Tale of Murder, Madness and the Love of Words is a book by Simon Winchester that was first published in England in 1998. It was retitled The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary in the United States and Canada.
It tells the story of the making of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and one of its most prolific early contributors, Dr. W. C. Minor, a retired United States Army surgeon. Minor was, at the time, imprisoned in the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, near the village of Crowthorne in Berkshire, England. The 'professor' of the American title is the chief editor of the OED during most of the project, Sir James Murray. Murray was a talented linguist and had other scholarly interests, and he had taught in schools and worked in banking. Faced with enormous task of producing a comprehensive dictionary, with a quotation illustrating the uses of each meaning of each word, and with evidence for the earliest use of each, Murray had turned to an early form of crowdsourcing (a word not coined until the 21st century)— enlisting the help of dozens of amateur philologists as volunteer researchers.
and found the whole story extraordinary. I had never even thought about how a dictionary was actually made or even how it was done. The "madman's" knowledge and the vast amount of information he provided was amazing. |
Yes, he gets coverage in
The Meaning of Everything. In fact, I'm very tempted now to read
The Professor and the Madman.