November 30, 2023 • 47 mins
The story of the Oxford English Dictionary is really something. From its origin to its crowd-sourced literary quotations. Dive in today to learn all about the best dictionary.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody, we want to let you know that we
are doing our traditional Pacific Northwest Swing for our live
show next year, in fact, the end of January next year,
very early next year, and.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
We're starting out in Seattle, Washington on January twenty fourth
at the Paramount Theater. It's huge, that's right, and then
on to Portland on January twenty fifth at Revolution Hall,
the place we always are. It's kind of our home
away from home in Portland. And then we're gonna wrap
it all up at the thing that started the Pacific
Northwest Tour in the first place all those years back.
(00:34):
SF Sketch Fest will be at the Sydney Goldstein Theater
on Friday, January twenty sixth, right.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
Chuck, that's right, And remember you can go to stuff
youshould Know dot com click on tours in order to
get to the correct ticket link or go to the
venue page only. Do not go to scalper sites.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
That's right, and we'll see you guys in January.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
Okay, welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, there's Chuck.
Jerry's here too, and this is stuff you should know.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
I believe a is an order. Why because we're debuting
a brand new writer.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
Oh yeah, great idea, Chuck, thank you for doing that.
Speaker 1 (01:24):
Yeah, welcome aboard Alison Miller. Alison came to us. This
is by way of Livia, right, is a recommendation.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
Yep, we said, Lvia, you're great, you know and the
other great writer. She said, actually I got one I
can recommend, And here we are.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
Yeah, and Alison Miller did a how it works here
is we do like sort of a test article, and
this is that test article. So it obviously worked. And
Allison is a historian and researcher and just did a
fantastic job. So welcome, Welcome to the fam. Allison.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
Welcome Alison here. I'll coordinate you too. Do do do do?
Speaker 1 (01:56):
Yeah, you do it better than me. So I was
hoping you a chime in.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
I just put some enthusiasm, and I think that's the difference,
that's right. So yeah, we're talking about the OED today,
the Oxford English Dictionary, and I have to say, Alison,
knock this one out of the park. I get the
impression that she may or may not have read significant
portions of the OED in her lifetime.
Speaker 1 (02:17):
I think Alison is smart.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
So and she kind of starts off by talking about
different kinds of dictionaries, which is significant because the OED
the Oxford English Dictionary is a specific kind of dictionary.
It's not a regular, average joe, you know, work at
a dictionary like some other dictionaries. The Oxford English Dictionary
(02:40):
is a historical dictionary, so it not only tells you
the definition of the word, there may even be multiple definitions.
By the way, I don't know if you've ever looked
at a dictionary before, but sometimes one word can have
more than one definition. It's nuts, right, the OED says.
And by the way, here's where that word came from,
(03:00):
and here's examples of its first use to it's probably
most recent use for one of its most recent uses.
So you can see how this specific word in the
English language evolved over time.
Speaker 1 (03:13):
Yeah, I didn't know that.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
It's it's pretty ambitious, it is.
Speaker 1 (03:18):
And historical dictionaries they don't they don't say like, well
that that meaning is not something that people use it
for anymore, like macaroni. Whatever the heck they meant in
that song.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
The Yankee Doodles, They any one, Yeah, I took that
as a reference to pot.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
But my point is they don't say, like, let's get
rid of that old that old definition. Like the whole
idea for the OED is that the English language is alive,
and so the OED is alive, and we're gonna we're
gonna leave it in there and go forward in time.
But if you if you want to look up these
(03:58):
old usages and these old meanings, it's all right there
for you in this massive, massive dictionary that whose aim
was to include every word in the English language and
every usage of that word up until.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
Now, starting in eleven fifty c.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
Yeah, as far as the words go. They didn't start
the dictionary then, but they went back to Middle English
to get what we now have is a third edition,
more than six hundred thousand entries, of which we have
eight hundred and fifty thousand definitions. See three million of
those quotations, which is amazing. And although I think we're
(04:39):
locked in with the beginning in the end because the
first word is a, there's no way you can get
before that in line no, and the last word is ziziva,
and there's no way that someone could create a word
that is after z y zz y va. It would
(05:00):
have to be zz zz.
Speaker 2 (05:02):
Yeah z or zz top. I'm surprised they didn't mention
zz top.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
Yeah. Don't talk to me about cartoons sleep bubbles. So
I think we're locked in it as Actually, Allison has
a great title for this, the OED. Cohen A to Zizia,
I'm sorry, Ziza already messed it up.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
Well, it's a tough word, zyzzyv a. It's fun to
spell out loud because you say it like that with
some oomph, but it's a tough word to say. Did
you define it?
Speaker 3 (05:32):
Uh?
Speaker 1 (05:32):
No, go ahead.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
It's a weavil yeah, and it always was right. So
one thing about the OED You might say, well, like wow,
that's a lot of information packed into one tome. You'd
be right. If you don't know much about the Oxford
English Dictionary, you may at least have the idea that
it's enormous, that it's way bigger than your average dictionary,
(05:55):
because those six hundred thousand entries with eight hundred and
fifty thousand definitions and three million quotations, when you put
them all together, it takes up a lot of space.
In fact, I by my estimate, it takes up something
like an eighth of the entire Internet.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
Right, should we read some of this these fast stats?
Speaker 2 (06:17):
Oh yeah, let's do that.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
So I believe this is the first volume.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
The first Yeah, the whole first edition, I think.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
Yeah, the whole first edition. So this isn't even the
current edition. This is the one that was finished up
in nineteen twenty eight. At the time it had four
hundred and fifteen thousand words, half a million definitions, one
point eight million quotations. But this is the part I
wanted to get to. One hundred and seventy eight miles
of type, fifty million words, four feet of shelf space,
(06:47):
and ten or twenty half volume. So you know that
Encyclopedia Britannica set you grew up with in your hallway,
that's basically what this dictionary is. First edition looked like.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
Yeah, and back in nineteen thirty, nineteen twenty eight, I
guess when it came out, you paid about today's equivalent
of three three hundred and sixty pounds sterling for a dictionary. Yeah,
about four grand in US dollars today, And according to
(07:22):
the Bank of England, that was equal to two hundred
and twenty eight days wages for a skilled worker in
nineteen thirty, imagine spending most of your year's salary on
a dictionary.
Speaker 1 (07:34):
Yeah. I think the point has got to be that
very like you had to be a very well healed
person trying to impress other people by owning a copy
of this thing.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
Back then, right, yeah, or a library, well exactly. So, yeah,
that was the first edition. It's gotten even bigger as
we've seen over time, and so now finally the Internet
was born. I think to howse the third edition of
the Oxford English Dictionary, which is where we're at now,
and one thing that they do, which is pretty sharp.
(08:04):
As the dictionary comes out, new words are being added
to it all the time. They're probably finding less and
less old words that they hadn't included. But you know,
like you said, the English language is living, so it's
expanding and contracting and adding new words to it all
the time. So by the time those things go to
press and that last volume of the edition comes out,
(08:27):
there's words that are left over that are just constantly
being added. So I think on a quarterly basis, they
release supplements essentially that have new words that came out
or were coined since the volume that contained that letter
was published in the latest edition.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
That's right, and we'll get to how those supplements figured
in back then and what they do with those today.
But the other really unique thing about the OED is
that it is a and always has been, from the
very very beginning, a crowd source work. Yeah, right from
the beginning. The editors who we're going to talk about,
the original editors, editors here in a minute. They said, hey, public,
(09:09):
we need help. So if you're into this, you've got
a little time. If you like to read, if you're
a linguist, you're into words, if you love language, go
back to Chaucer, start reading and find these words that
we're looking for. Find usages of these words descend into
us by hand on they call it a slip, a
(09:30):
little four by six sheet of paper and mail it
into us. And you could very well have a hand
in creating the Oxford English Dictionary.
Speaker 2 (09:39):
Yeah, pretty cool. And they got a really great response
to it, and I think still do.
Speaker 1 (09:44):
Today, oh for sure. But that's also explains why you have,
you know, quotes from Chaucer and Shakespeare, and also, as
Alison points out, quotes from like a social media post.
As a usage example of a word.
Speaker 2 (09:59):
Yeah. She also used an example that came from the
most recent quarterly update from September twenty twenty three. Porch
pirate appears in there, and so it's a really good
illustration of what the OED does. They explain that it's
someone who steals packages from doorsteps. Everybody knows that. Yeah,
but did you know that it first came about from
(10:21):
a news segment on kfo R from Oklahoma Cities, one
of their local broadcasting stations.
Speaker 1 (10:28):
Yeah, so they'll have that.
Speaker 2 (10:30):
Wait, you didn't doubt.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
It, No, well no, I said they would have that.
I gotcha as like the example or whatever. And then
if you want to dig deeper and just say, well,
what about this word porch, then they'll take you back
to the thirteen hundreds with the definition of porch and
then examples of these what they call senses like that's
(10:51):
when not a tense, it's a sense. It's like how
the word is used basically.
Speaker 2 (10:56):
Yeah, and it might not be used that way anymore necessary.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
Yeah, but they will have all of them listed and
you can see sort of the evolution of not only
the word porch, but when you eventually get to something
like porch pirate.
Speaker 4 (11:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
So it's pretty neat stuff like, that's what they do.
And they've been doing this for one hundred something years
since they think the first the first volume of the
first edition came out and I think eighteen eighty four.
Speaker 1 (11:23):
Right, Yeah, and those supplements you were talking about, I
promised to kind of explain how they do things now.
They were for many many years. They were released just
like hey, here's this extra thing. But it created a
problem if you're like, well, wait a minute, now I
have to look up a word in two different places
if it has a more modern usage. And so eventually
(11:44):
they started combining them. I think they finally did that
in what nineteen eighty nine, where the supplements were actually
worked into the main addition.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
Yeah, just the first edition.
Speaker 1 (11:56):
Yeah, so they finished that in nineteen eighty nine, and
a couple years before that they had finally put it
on a CD ROM And then, like you said, it
only exists today. Well, I mean you can get copies,
but they're not releasing I don't think print editions any longer.
It's just a online subscription type thing now.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
Yeah, and usually I mean it's pay right, so yeah, subscription,
so usually you can log in through your library pretty neat.
They're also in the midst of putting out a third edition,
so look for that in the next century. That's right,
I say, we take a little break, Charles, and then
we'll come back and talk about the history of the OED.
Speaker 3 (12:29):
How we got here, let's do it.
Speaker 2 (12:52):
So the OED is not the first English dictionary ever.
In fact, the first one ever was from sixteen oh four.
It's called a Table Alphabetical of hard usual English Words
by Robert Kaudrey, and he basically just put this together
to help people, I guess, explain themselves in English better.
(13:14):
He it was I think, words that were commonly used
but not necessarily commonly understood. So that was the first one.
But the I guess the OED really traces its spiritual
roots to a more recent phenomenon that the Brothers Grim
had started, which was essentially a dictionary of a language
(13:35):
in order to show the history of that language, ostensibly
in order to prove how great that language actually was.
Speaker 1 (13:44):
Yeah, we shout out to a couple of great episodes
we did many years ago, one on the Brothers Grim
and was there one on the Just the Fairy Tales?
Speaker 2 (13:54):
Yes, there, it was a two parter, right.
Speaker 1 (13:57):
Yeah, yeah, that was That was a good series, So
go back and listen to that. But Jacob and Wilhelm
Grimm did what you said. They were like, hey, we
want to create a German dictionary from Martin Luther on
which eventually they died before it came out, but it
was called I believe the first Fascicle, and the Fascal
is just the first part, basically like, hey, we finished
(14:19):
a through j or whatever. I think the first fasccal
came out when they were alive, but of the Deutsches
Vertebuch It and I believe they died in the late
eighteen fifty nine, for Wilhelm in eighteen sixty three, and
it finally came out in nineteen sixty one in full,
(14:39):
so they weren't even close. And she points out Alison
that Jacob died at the F's he was working on
the word fruit or di fruit.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:49):
I want to say it was pretty good. Oh you
want to say it.
Speaker 2 (14:52):
I want to say it too. Deutsche's Vertebruk which means
literally German word book, right, yeah, it's more like buch
Deutsche's Vertebuch VerTech.
Speaker 1 (15:05):
Yeah, there you go.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
Yeah, I said it way better. In my head, I
think I tried too hard. So, like I was saying
behind the Grim, the whole initiative is not just like
documenting definitions for German words. They wanted to trace the
history of the German language because they suspected that far
(15:26):
in the distant past, all of these disparate groups of
people who are now members of separate nations were all
members of the same Germanic speaking tribe, and that this
had been like a glorious, amazing civilization that was now fractured,
and maybe if we understand it a little better, it
can come back together and dare I say, take over
(15:47):
the world.
Speaker 1 (15:48):
It's like easy, brothers Grim. Yeah, they had a good idea.
Speaker 2 (15:52):
It got a little perverted along the way, although it
may have been a bad idea from the beginning, you know.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
Yeah, this this does link up very oddly with that
episode that we just recorded on Tectonic Plates.
Speaker 3 (16:03):
It does.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
I think the lesson here is anytime you have a
social or cultural movement, to go back and find how
great your specific culture is or was. That's a red
flag for everybody else.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
Yeah, probably so so the OED it was basically the
same thing, and they're like, well, you've got your German book,
but what's greater than the English language. Let's do that
for ourselves.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
We're going to make an English word book.
Speaker 1 (16:32):
That's what it's called. So the Gentleman scholars, and that's
in quotes from Britain got together to form the Philological
Society in London in eighteen forty two from the Greek
philos love and logos words. So philology is just the
love of words. It's really very plain and kind of wonderful. Yeah,
(16:53):
and it's the study of the language in the written language.
And a lot of philologists will say like Greek and
Latin or what we're concentrating in. But this, at this time,
there were people like, well, wait a minute, English seems
to really be pretty important too. I know it's not
Latin or Greek, but maybe we should look forward and
get down with this English dictionary. And they said yes.
(17:16):
In eighteen fifty seven, after that, that's when it was
that's when the Grims put out their first fascicle. In
fact was around the same time. They said they got
a head start on us, but I think we can
catch up and do a great job as well, And
in fact they did.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
Yeah, and As a matter of fact, word got out
about this and everybody was like, hey, this is a
great project. The members of the Philological Society in England
were kind of celebrated culturally for trying to do this thing,
for documenting the English language and how great it was.
So what they decided to do first was to find
(17:54):
out all the words that weren't already in other dictionaries
of English or any dictionary that contained English words. Unregistered
words is what they called them, and they were going
to make a dictionary of unregistered words to basically complete everything.
And there was a guy, Richard Chenovic's Trench R. C.
Trench who gave some lectures against this idea and essentially said,
(18:18):
rather than patch an existing garment, let's make a brand
new garment from whole cloth, and it's going to be
the most beautiful garment anyone's ever seen. It's gonna well, yeah,
plus sequin shoulder pads, the whole shebang, and to me,
that's that's the height of amazing fashion. So he actually
(18:42):
convinced the Philological Society to veer a different way and
rather than just take, you know, the words that hadn't
been defined and define them and make that take on
the entire English language, going back to eleven fifty forward
and again when you're doing this, So just think about
going into the deep past and saying, Okay, we're going
(19:04):
to do all words from eleven fifty to eighteen fifty.
That's daunting enough. But they were also signing up for
essentially a never ending unfinished work. Yeah, because as we've seen,
every time they put in an addition, there's any number
of new words that have come along or that they
didn't they didn't have before. Like it's an ongoing, never
(19:25):
ending process. They'll never be done with the OED. And
I suspect that probably drives some members of the OED
staff completely mad.
Speaker 1 (19:36):
Maybe. And you also have to keep in mind that
they did this without a publisher secured, and in fact
did work for about two decades without a publisher even.
Speaker 3 (19:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
So they were just working on what was then called
the New English Dictionary, was the I guess the working title,
and their first editor was a dude to name Herbert Coleridge.
And if you're thinking, I wonder if if he was, Yes,
he was. He was the grandson of Samuel Taylor. And
there were several predictions in here. They were all wrong
(20:08):
as to how big this project could be and how
long it would take. But Herbert was the first one
to be way off base and said it'll be about
seven thousand pages and we'll be done in a decade.
Not how it worked out. They started working, They started
building this thing from you from a forward, and they
made a list of books like basically the English Language
(20:30):
Literary Canon, and said, all right, volunteers, you all wrote in,
said you had some time, so start reading. Read these
books and look out for these words, and when you
find them, put them on a slip word for word,
send them in to us. Again, that's a four x
six inch piece of paper. It was all very sort
of regimented, and they said, please read these books. And
(20:55):
we like English literature because the whole point of this
is to talk about how great we were and how
great our works and language is.
Speaker 2 (21:02):
Yeah, so are That's why they first were like, we're
going to look through the great works of English language
only because this is the highest use of these words.
So these are the best examples. These are the quotations
we want to use. And they were very narrow minded
in that sense. They were really until the twentieth century.
They were very much centered on that. That's what they
(21:24):
were going to use to derive their quotes from, because
it would just demonstrate how great the English language was.
Look at how these amazing English writers used it. Right. So,
Herbert Coleridge died in eighteen sixty one. I get the
impression he was only working on it for a few years.
Speaker 1 (21:41):
But he was because he died right, right, but four
years later.
Speaker 2 (21:44):
Yeah, so it was like four years, right. But he
really threw himself into it so much so that he
apparently on his deathbed he had definitions like slips scattered about,
like on the quilt of his deathbed. He died working, Yeah,
and he had contracted tuberculosis. And when the doctor was like,
(22:04):
this is not ever going to get better. It will
get better, but you're going to be dead, That's how
it's going to get better, Herbert Coleridge was like, oh,
I must start Sanskrit tomorrow, which has taken to mean
that he had never learned Sanskrit. He was a polyglot.
He studied all sorts of different languages, and he had
never gotten to Sanskrit. Now that he realized he's going
to die, he needed to start on it tomorrow.
Speaker 1 (22:27):
Yeah, ironically dying of what was then known as Consumption
and later TB. So that's a new usage and a
new entry. Yeah, eighteen seventy nine, we're skipping forward. And
like I said, this is twenty years after they started.
This is when they finally found that publisher. At the time,
they were known another since as Clarendon, later to be
(22:49):
known as DA DA DA the Oxford University Press. And
even though they didn't specifically call it the Oxford English
Dictionary until late I believe the very first publishing in
nineteen twenty eight was called a New English Dictionary on
Historical Principles.
Speaker 2 (23:08):
And so we should mention that after Coleridge died, it
just the whole thing kind of like lost momentum. He
was a real driving force as the first editor. But
you know, a few I think twenty or so years
later it started to pick up again, and it was
thanks to a new editor named James Murray, who I
believe was the third editor of all, and he took
(23:32):
this ball and ran with it, and he is the
person that you can point to as the one who
ultimately got the OED published. He was the true driving
force of it.
Speaker 1 (23:45):
Yeah, absolutely, Murray was Scottish, came from a just sort
of a regular working class, middle class background, was the
son of a tailor. Apparently his father was a very
smart man and known for being a smart and sober person.
And James as a child was a prodigy, was a
language prodigy, learned his ABC's before he was eighteen months,
(24:10):
was apparently reading and writing in Greek by seven, left
school at fourteen, was studying four languages and eventually came
to London to be the headmaster of a school there.
And that is where in London he joined up with
the Philological Society. And like you said, he was the guy.
(24:30):
He was also the guy who had another ten year
completion prediction. He said this will take ten years from now.
And after five years of that ten year prediction, they
had a through ant.
Speaker 2 (24:43):
No yes, wow. I would just see that and be like,
well I quit.
Speaker 1 (24:48):
He's like a lot of that was on boarding, you.
Speaker 2 (24:50):
Understand, jeez man, that's crazy. Yeah, But it also goes
to show how little they actually had gotten done apparently
under Coleridge's command.
Speaker 1 (24:59):
Ye, and was just they wanted jokes about Grandpa. Come on,
tell me what was Sammy really like?
Speaker 2 (25:06):
So the one thing that you said, I think from
the start was that this was a crowdsource project.
Speaker 1 (25:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (25:14):
And it's not like the OED makes a secret about this.
They're very deferential to the volunteers that have worked for
them over the years because they just could not have
done this without them. It was just too big of
an undertaking to for just a small group of people
to have done by themselves. And there were a lot
of different people. There's a book out there called The
(25:37):
Dictionary People.
Speaker 1 (25:40):
What's it about?
Speaker 2 (25:42):
Isn't that what it's called?
Speaker 4 (25:43):
I don't know where is it?
Speaker 2 (25:45):
Yep, The Dictionary People. I think it's fairly new. And
the author had worked at the OED and before she
left she had gotten from the archives. She'd come across
James Murray's address book and it was pretty thick because
it had the names and addresses of a lot of
the volunteer correspondents that were working contributing quotations to the Dictionary.
(26:11):
And so she decided to write a book tracking down
who these people were, and that's what she came up with,
this book called The Dictionary People, and she found some
pretty interesting stuff. For example, about one in six by
her estimate, were women, including James Murray's wife and daughters.
He drafted them and got a lot of support and
(26:32):
help from them. Apparently the editing the OED did not
pay much, but he had dedicated his life essentially to
it and his family supported him in that, which was
pretty great. And a lot of other women contributed to right.
Speaker 1 (26:47):
Yeah, the daughter of Karl Marx, Eleanor Marx, contributed and
it was apparently fired by Murray for not doing the
assignment properly, not sticking to the assignment. And by the way,
Sarah ogilvie Is wrote the Dictionary People. Yeah, nice, I'd
like to check that out. I bet it's a good book. Yeah.
Another writer that Allison found from this book to highlight
(27:08):
his name Marganita Alaski, who's alive from nineteen fifteen to
nineteen eighty eight. Marganita contributed thirteen thousand quotes to twenty
Century Supplements and Marginita was a critic and a journalist
and a novelist and kind of made the rounds on
TV shows and stuff back in the day, starting in
(27:29):
the late fifties and into the sixties. And you know,
when people are volunteering like this, they can sort of
like guide their like have their own path forward and
how they want to tackle the project almost and who
they want to highlight or words they want to highlight.
And at some point Marginita Alaski got into sort of
(27:50):
away from the high brow thing and said, I want
to start, you know, looking at domestic manuals and all
these old ancient cookbooks and you know, modern news newspapers
and famous diaries, and just a really unique approach to
come up with some of those thirteen thousand entries.
Speaker 2 (28:06):
Yeah, and that was a that was a real change. Remember,
I said that they had really kind of had their
blinders on just looking for, you know, the pinnacle of
English literature for quotations. Under James Murray, he was like, no,
we're gonna not only look for new sources, we're also
going to include slang. We're gonna include like vulgar words,
(28:30):
like uh huh. We're like, if it's an English word,
we're going to include it because we're documenting the entire
English language. So that was a huge sea change for
the direction of the dictionary, And apparently he was under
a tremendous amount of pressure to not to not go
that way, to kind of stick with the original plan,
and he said no, he said nine.
Speaker 1 (28:52):
No, he said no, Uh, I mentioned nickers. Is that underwear?
That's what nickers are, right? Okay, So as soon as
I said it was like, wait a minute, did I
say the wrong word?
Speaker 2 (29:04):
You were thinking of Fanny?
Speaker 1 (29:06):
And what's a knickerbocker?
Speaker 2 (29:08):
A knickerbocker is a think. I think it's the short
pants that were like kind of cinched at the knee
that you think of with like a little newsboys.
Speaker 1 (29:16):
So the New York Knicks named after the Knickerbockers. That's
what they were.
Speaker 2 (29:20):
I don't know if they did or not. No, they
were named after the Knickerbocker, like the story club that
Washington Irving was a member of.
Speaker 1 (29:29):
Oh really, are you making homposite?
Speaker 2 (29:31):
No, I'm pretty sure that's correct. I sometimes get things wrong.
Speaker 1 (29:35):
Yeah, but I well, this is off the dome, so
I'll look it up.
Speaker 2 (29:38):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (29:39):
So back to Murray. He's working with his wife eleven
kids at his house mainly, and not only at his house,
but mainly in his little shed that he had built
behind the house in the garden called the Scriptorium, and
they worked on it here a once. They got a
through aunt in eighteen eighty four, he was like, we
(30:00):
need some help here, so they hired a second editor
named Henry Bradley, and then not too long after that
added two more co editors, so you essentially had a
team of four editors at that point. That we're working
with teams and teams of people, so a lot of
people working. Murray at his scriptorium there at home. But
(30:23):
then he moved to Oxford and built another larger scriptorium
there behind his house, and things were getting so busy
the local post put a po box right there by
his little front driveway, by his sidewalk, and it's still there. Yeah,
if you look it up, this beautiful red PO box
with a little placard saying that you know, Murray lived
(30:45):
here and this was the post to gather these slips
that helped create the OED.
Speaker 2 (30:50):
I saw, and actually I was obscure that the placard
doesn't say that. It just says that the guy who
created the OED lived here. And they just walk right
past the post office box, so it's literally in front
of the placard. They don't even mention it.
Speaker 1 (31:04):
The most amazing part of the story.
Speaker 2 (31:05):
It's one of the it's one of the greatest grossest
government oversights in history, so thousands.
Speaker 1 (31:14):
Of people contributing. At this point, Murray is still beating
the drum and like writing open letters to newspapers and stuff, saying, hey,
we were still doing this. We you know, trying to
keep that fire going. And people it wasn't just people
in England. People from all over the world were contributing.
And I think when they finally they had so many
slips because you know, they're filing these as they get
(31:37):
them alphabetically, they're slotting them in and they have these
lexicographers working around the clock as well. When they finally
put out the first supplement in nineteen thirty three, they
still had one hundred and forty thousand slips left over.
Speaker 2 (31:50):
It's so nuts. Again, I would have been like, well
I quit. Yeah, it's just too daunting. I can barely
talk about this stuff.
Speaker 1 (31:58):
Yeah. I think thirty three, that's the first year they
have fecially called it the o ED Okay, but.
Speaker 2 (32:03):
Everyone was kind of calling that anyway, were they really yeah,
okay crazy, So they kind of went with the change.
The English Language changed the name of the dictionary for them.
Speaker 1 (32:15):
Yeah, because whatever that long thing, I a new English
dictionary on historical principles. It was printed by the Oxford
English Press, so everyone was just calling it that anyway.
So yeah, I guess it was a sense plus oed.
Speaker 2 (32:32):
Sounds better than the NED, you know. Yeah, sure, do
you want to take another break and come back and
talk about arguably the most interesting contributor of all Sure?
Speaker 4 (32:44):
Okay?
Speaker 1 (33:05):
So Murray dies of pleurisy in nineteen fifteen. Did not
see the first final edition put out, which is very
sad that would be what thirteen years later, but did
put out most of the fascicles by that point, just
wasn't compiled into the one edition. Different people JRR Tolkien
(33:27):
worked for a year on this in nineteen nineteen. Lots
of volunteers, but as you promised. Oh and Murray was
also knighted in nineteen oh eight. I didn't those troubles.
Speaker 2 (33:35):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (33:35):
Yeah, apparently knighted, but still a bit of an outsider
in the hoity toity Oxford. You know, Literati always felt
like an outsider and wasn't even given an honorary degree
until like the year before he died or something.
Speaker 2 (33:49):
Yeah, and when he walked across the stage, what he
didn't realize is that one of the faculty had taped
a kick me signed to his back, so he didn't
He never understood why the audience is laughing, and he
grabbed his honorary decree. He was very sad he never
got it.
Speaker 1 (34:04):
So you promised to talk of the most interesting, perhaps
most celebrated volunteer, and that is one doctor William Chester Minor.
If you've seen the movie or read the book The
Professor and the Madman, the book was by Simon Winchester,
and the book starred mel Gibson as Murray and Sean
Penn as the quote unquote Madman Chester Minor. I have
(34:27):
not seen it. Apparently it's not very good. And mel
Gibson and the director tried to you know, they didn't
support the movie in the press, and they tried to
get their I don't know if get their name removed,
but they basically disowned it.
Speaker 2 (34:40):
Really, I thought mel Gibson was the one whose movie
it was, whose idea.
Speaker 1 (34:44):
Well it was his production company, yeah, but he apparently
he took him to court because he didn't get final
cut like they said, and he didn't get to shoot
for a week in Oxford like he wanted to. And
he's basically like this thing is garbage because you didn't
let me do what I wanted to. So I'm not
supporting it. John Ben just what.
Speaker 2 (35:01):
That stinks because apparently the book was just amazing. The
professor and the Madman, I know.
Speaker 1 (35:08):
And it's such a great story. But I heard other
people defend it and say, you know, it was pretty good.
I had great acting, and like he just you know,
got his knickers in a wad.
Speaker 2 (35:19):
So where the madman is doctor William Chester Minor, you said, right,
let's references. And the reason that they call him the
mad man is because at the time he was diagnosed
with either dementia prey cox or paranoid schizophrenia, and today
we would call either of those just plain old schizophrenia
(35:40):
spectrum disorder. But this was the mid nineteenth century and
doctor Minor was suffering from this at a time when
they did not understand what they were dealing with. They
just knew that this guy was pretty bad off and
needed care essentially for the rest of his life. He
had started out as a military doctor. I believe he
(36:02):
graduated from Yale Medical School and entered the Civil War
as a military doctor pretty much right off the bat.
And there's some stories about when his symptoms began. Allegedly
it was from things he was exposed to during his
time in the Civil War. One is there's a story
(36:23):
that he supposedly had to brand a deserter, an Irish
deserter from the Union with a D on his face,
and that having to do that to that poor man
just made him snap essentially, or brought his symptoms on
is a different way to say it. Or he was
involved in the Battle of the Wilderness outside of Spotsylvania, Virginia.
(36:48):
Either way, we don't know. We just know that, yes,
this man definitely had schizophrenia. We don't know how it
came on or if there was even any trigger, but
we just kind of join him around the time after
the Civil War when he's still in the army, but
he's really starting to show symptoms.
Speaker 1 (37:05):
Yeah. And also, by the way, this is how we
knew that Alison really has the goods as a researcher
and writer, because Alison was like, hey, be careful with
his stuff because you know, there are a lot of
stories out there, and just don't don't buy up everything
you're reading here right, music to our ears.
Speaker 2 (37:20):
She also told us how to pronounce right, yeah.
Speaker 1 (37:25):
That's true. The first writer to ever include pronunciation it's nice,
so like you said. An army doctor, an army surgeon
working at the US General Hospital in New Haven, Connecticut,
also a flute player, apparently a very ambitious guy. And
because of you know, kind of how his schizophrenia played
(37:48):
out were delusions of persecution, a lot of delusions of
being attacked sexually, and you know, I think that speaks
for itself. They got pretty bad, and he apparently would
wander red light districts of places where he lived. He
said this is because of his disorder. He was sent
to an asylum in Washington while he was still in
(38:09):
the army, although he would get his discharge in eighteen seventy.
While he was still there, he thought he could get
better if he went to the UK and get treatment there,
and so in eighteen seventy two in London, he found
himself in waking from a delusion that he was being attacked,
I think sexually attacked by an Irish Republican, and got
(38:35):
up from bed and ran out to the street like
guns blazing, thinking he was shooting at his tormentor, and
killed an innocent man, a brewery worker named George Merritt,
who was on his way to work that early morning.
Speaker 2 (38:48):
Yes, so that was enough for the British government. He'd
already been discharged from the army. I don't know if
you said or not by the time he made it
to the UK. And in the UK the authorities were like, Okay,
we're going to introduce you to one of our asylums
called broad Moore and in Broadmore. This is the nineteenth century.
You did not want to be in an asylum of
(39:10):
any sort in the nineteenth century. They were horrible, terrible
places where humans were treated like about as bad as
humans can be treated. And yet either he was charming
or wealthy enough, or a combination of both. He was
able to play his flute, he was able to wear
his own clothes, go on walks, and very importantly he
(39:32):
was able to bring his personal library of very rare
books from the seventeenth and eighteenth century with him, and
they actually gave him another cell to serve as his
personal library essentially. And I'll bet Sean Penn playing that
flute is something to see. I mean that, above anything else,
is why I want to see that movie.
Speaker 1 (39:53):
It's like in The Anchor Man, he pulls it from
a sleeve in. Yeah, it's very.
Speaker 3 (39:58):
Fake, Hey aquolog No, no, no.
Speaker 1 (40:02):
Oh no, not again.
Speaker 2 (40:03):
Yep, it just happened.
Speaker 1 (40:06):
He stayed in touch. This is kind of interesting here
that he did stay in touch with the wife, the
widow of the man that he killed, and she brought
him books even, which is amazing and kind of a
nice ending to that story. Yeah. I don't know the
ins and outs. Maybe I don't know. Maybe he did
her a favor. Maybe he was a bad guy.
Speaker 2 (40:25):
No, apparently he wasn't. He was a choking Oh well,
he apparently contacted her and apologized, made some sort of restitution.
I took that to mean like gave her some money.
But she accepted his apologies. She didn't have to do that.
So I think it says a lot about both of them.
Speaker 1 (40:41):
Yeah, for sure. When it came to the OED, he
really poured himself into this as as an avid reader
and had all those rare books, like you said, but
didn't do the thing that they said, which was, hey,
read these books and look for these words. He said, Nope,
here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna read a book
at a time, and i'm gonna start I guess it
(41:03):
says with one letter. I guess he started with the
letter A and just started looking through all the books
for all the letter a's, and then again for the
letter b's, and so on and so on.
Speaker 2 (41:14):
Yeah, and it was a fruitful way to search for
quotations using specific words, because I think within just a
couple of years he had generated and sent in between
five and six thousand slips of quotations to James Murray.
And as the years went on, no one seems to
(41:34):
know how many he sent in, but he I mean
tens and tens of thousands of slips came directly from
doctor Minor during his time abroad.
Speaker 1 (41:45):
More. Yeah, they eventually met in person. I mean this
was a relationship to span a couple of decades. Yeah,
hundreds of quotes a week, and they met in eighteen
ninety one. Finally, apparently the superintendent of the asylum both
men at his house, and they met a few more
times after that. I watched the trailer of the movie today,
(42:06):
and I'm not sure how accurate it is, but it
seems like they'd met here and there over the years.
And in the book, it was like, you know, mel
Gibson doing a pretty bad Scottish accent, saying like you
and I have partners.
Speaker 2 (42:22):
You complete me.
Speaker 1 (42:24):
It was kind of like that, and I'm not really
sure if that was the real case in real life.
Speaker 2 (42:31):
Well so, apparently from what I saw, James Murray considered
it just as a decent human being, he needed to
go support doctor Minor. Whether doctor Minor was contributing or not.
I think it helped that doctor Minor was contributing, but
they did have some sort of friendship or relationship, but
it went beyond just you know, the editor and the
(42:51):
contributor kind of thing.
Speaker 1 (42:53):
Well maybe it wasn't.
Speaker 2 (42:54):
And supposedly doctor Minor kept like finding excuses anytime James
Murray was like, well let's meet, you know, I'm just
across like the city, let's meet for lunch or something,
and doctor Mom would be like, I can't, you know,
I broke my foot, or my sister's coming to visit whatever.
And then finally, I'm not sure how he finally found out,
(43:14):
either doctor Miner admitted to it or James Murray found
out somehow, but he finally did find out that he
was institutionalized, and then he started to go visit him.
Oh okay, pretty neat and then he saw him off
after doctor Minor was released from brob Moore so he
could go back to be institutionalized in America. It was
(43:35):
clear that he wasn't going to be around too many
more years. James Murray saw him off at the docks
and gave him six unpublished volumes of the first edition
that hadn't come out yet.
Speaker 1 (43:46):
Yeah, he had a very sad end to a sad life.
He had those delusions of being sexually violated, and in
December nineteen oh two, he tied a tourniquet around his
penis and he cut it off in what he called
in the interests of morality, because what he believed is
(44:06):
that he had delusions that he was being taking out
of the asylum for years and years at night and
forced to have sex with women all around the asylum
and in town. And so he cut his penis off.
And after that, things really just weren't the same for him.
It seems like things went pretty downhill pretty quickly, although
(44:28):
he died in nineteen twenty so that was, you know,
another eighteen years of suffering.
Speaker 2 (44:32):
Yeah, as far as his contributions, that really went downhill
after that.
Speaker 1 (44:38):
Man, Yeah, very sad, but super super interesting story and
great job Allison. This was really really cool.
Speaker 2 (44:44):
Yeah, thanks a lot, Alison. This is great, great start.
Welcome to the team. And what Chuck? Since I said
welcome to the team, do you think it's time for
listener now?
Speaker 1 (44:54):
I think so?
Speaker 3 (44:55):
Okay, I'm going to call this cost of goods?
Speaker 1 (45:01):
In that episode? What episode was it where you're talking
about the cost of goods?
Speaker 2 (45:05):
I think the Harlem Globetrotters is where it recently came from.
Speaker 1 (45:08):
Yeah, like, wwhy is it so expensive to go to
NBA game these days or get a meal or whatever?
We had a lot of people that write in, so
I don't think we even settled on a final point.
Speaker 2 (45:19):
Yeah, I'm still looking around.
Speaker 1 (45:20):
There were a few different theories, but this one from
Matt I'm going to read, Hey, guys, I have a
partial explanation for the question why does it cost so
much more for a nice meal than it used to
even adjusting for inflation? Bal mal bauml bal Mal's cost
disease might help explain. This refers to the rising costs
associated with service or labor intensive industries over time, despite
(45:44):
no corresponding increase in productivity. So imagine a restaurant in
the nineteen fifties, you have a server, take your order,
chef cooks of food, someone else cleans up after you're done.
Fast forward to today. Despite all the technological advances, you
still need that server stake the order. You still need
the chef, You still need the staff to clean. The
humans have not been replaced by machines or software. In
(46:06):
a lot of these cases, you can't speed up the
chef the way you can double the speed of a
factory machine without sacrificing quality. So if you own a restaurant,
you still need roughly the same number of workers that
you've had that you needed in the fifties. Roughly, Yet
wages for the staff have gone up over the years.
That's a whole other rabbit hole. The restaurant has to
pay its staff more over time without getting more meals
(46:27):
per worker. So what do you do You pass it
on to the customers. By the way, this also explains
why stuff like health insurance and childcare have also gotten
way more expensive relative to other stuff. You still need
the same number of daycare workers per kid and nurses
per patient that you did in past decades. This was
a good one, Matt we got some other ideas and
imagine it's kind of all these things probably, but balml's
(46:50):
cost disease is a great explanation. And that is from
Matt Farmer.
Speaker 2 (46:53):
Yeah, thanks a lot, Matt, though, was a good one.
It's the whole thing's brewing. I don't know what it's
going to turn into. That will definitely be part of it,
for sure.
Speaker 1 (47:03):
Perhaps a Josh Clark solo ten part series The Cost
of Goods with Josh Clark.
Speaker 2 (47:08):
I don't think so. No, no, I'm going to make
you do it with me.
Speaker 1 (47:13):
Oh no, no no. So that was from Matt right, yeah,
Matt Farmer.
Speaker 2 (47:19):
Matt Farmer, thank you very much for that. And if
you want to be like Matt Farmer and show off
your braininess and try to answer a burning question we have.
We love that kind of thing. You can send it
to us via email to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (47:35):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, everybody, we want to let you know that we
are doing our traditional Pacific Northwest Swing for our live
show next year, in fact, the end of January next year,
very early next year, and.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
We're starting out in Seattle, Washington on January twenty fourth
at the Paramount Theater. It's huge, that's right, and then
on to Portland on January twenty fifth at Revolution Hall,
the place we always are. It's kind of our home
away from home in Portland. And then we're gonna wrap
it all up at the thing that started the Pacific
Northwest Tour in the first place all those years back.
(00:34):
SF Sketch Fest will be at the Sydney Goldstein Theater
on Friday, January twenty sixth, right.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
Chuck, that's right, And remember you can go to stuff
youshould Know dot com click on tours in order to
get to the correct ticket link or go to the
venue page only. Do not go to scalper sites.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
That's right, and we'll see you guys in January.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
Okay, welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, there's Chuck.
Jerry's here too, and this is stuff you should know.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
I believe a is an order. Why because we're debuting
a brand new writer.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
Oh yeah, great idea, Chuck, thank you for doing that.
Speaker 1 (01:24):
Yeah, welcome aboard Alison Miller. Alison came to us. This
is by way of Livia, right, is a recommendation.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
Yep, we said, Lvia, you're great, you know and the
other great writer. She said, actually I got one I
can recommend, And here we are.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
Yeah, and Alison Miller did a how it works here
is we do like sort of a test article, and
this is that test article. So it obviously worked. And
Allison is a historian and researcher and just did a
fantastic job. So welcome, Welcome to the fam. Allison.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
Welcome Alison here. I'll coordinate you too. Do do do do?
Speaker 1 (01:56):
Yeah, you do it better than me. So I was
hoping you a chime in.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
I just put some enthusiasm, and I think that's the difference,
that's right. So yeah, we're talking about the OED today,
the Oxford English Dictionary, and I have to say, Alison,
knock this one out of the park. I get the
impression that she may or may not have read significant
portions of the OED in her lifetime.
Speaker 1 (02:17):
I think Alison is smart.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
So and she kind of starts off by talking about
different kinds of dictionaries, which is significant because the OED
the Oxford English Dictionary is a specific kind of dictionary.
It's not a regular, average joe, you know, work at
a dictionary like some other dictionaries. The Oxford English Dictionary
(02:40):
is a historical dictionary, so it not only tells you
the definition of the word, there may even be multiple definitions.
By the way, I don't know if you've ever looked
at a dictionary before, but sometimes one word can have
more than one definition. It's nuts, right, the OED says.
And by the way, here's where that word came from,
(03:00):
and here's examples of its first use to it's probably
most recent use for one of its most recent uses.
So you can see how this specific word in the
English language evolved over time.
Speaker 1 (03:13):
Yeah, I didn't know that.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
It's it's pretty ambitious, it is.
Speaker 1 (03:18):
And historical dictionaries they don't they don't say like, well
that that meaning is not something that people use it
for anymore, like macaroni. Whatever the heck they meant in
that song.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
The Yankee Doodles, They any one, Yeah, I took that
as a reference to pot.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
But my point is they don't say, like, let's get
rid of that old that old definition. Like the whole
idea for the OED is that the English language is alive,
and so the OED is alive, and we're gonna we're
gonna leave it in there and go forward in time.
But if you if you want to look up these
(03:58):
old usages and these old meanings, it's all right there
for you in this massive, massive dictionary that whose aim
was to include every word in the English language and
every usage of that word up until.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
Now, starting in eleven fifty c.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
Yeah, as far as the words go. They didn't start
the dictionary then, but they went back to Middle English
to get what we now have is a third edition,
more than six hundred thousand entries, of which we have
eight hundred and fifty thousand definitions. See three million of
those quotations, which is amazing. And although I think we're
(04:39):
locked in with the beginning in the end because the
first word is a, there's no way you can get
before that in line no, and the last word is ziziva,
and there's no way that someone could create a word
that is after z y zz y va. It would
(05:00):
have to be zz zz.
Speaker 2 (05:02):
Yeah z or zz top. I'm surprised they didn't mention
zz top.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
Yeah. Don't talk to me about cartoons sleep bubbles. So
I think we're locked in it as Actually, Allison has
a great title for this, the OED. Cohen A to Zizia,
I'm sorry, Ziza already messed it up.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
Well, it's a tough word, zyzzyv a. It's fun to
spell out loud because you say it like that with
some oomph, but it's a tough word to say. Did
you define it?
Speaker 3 (05:32):
Uh?
Speaker 1 (05:32):
No, go ahead.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
It's a weavil yeah, and it always was right. So
one thing about the OED You might say, well, like wow,
that's a lot of information packed into one tome. You'd
be right. If you don't know much about the Oxford
English Dictionary, you may at least have the idea that
it's enormous, that it's way bigger than your average dictionary,
(05:55):
because those six hundred thousand entries with eight hundred and
fifty thousand definitions and three million quotations, when you put
them all together, it takes up a lot of space.
In fact, I by my estimate, it takes up something
like an eighth of the entire Internet.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
Right, should we read some of this these fast stats?
Speaker 2 (06:17):
Oh yeah, let's do that.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
So I believe this is the first volume.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
The first Yeah, the whole first edition, I think.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
Yeah, the whole first edition. So this isn't even the
current edition. This is the one that was finished up
in nineteen twenty eight. At the time it had four
hundred and fifteen thousand words, half a million definitions, one
point eight million quotations. But this is the part I
wanted to get to. One hundred and seventy eight miles
of type, fifty million words, four feet of shelf space,
(06:47):
and ten or twenty half volume. So you know that
Encyclopedia Britannica set you grew up with in your hallway,
that's basically what this dictionary is. First edition looked like.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
Yeah, and back in nineteen thirty, nineteen twenty eight, I
guess when it came out, you paid about today's equivalent
of three three hundred and sixty pounds sterling for a dictionary. Yeah,
about four grand in US dollars today, And according to
(07:22):
the Bank of England, that was equal to two hundred
and twenty eight days wages for a skilled worker in
nineteen thirty, imagine spending most of your year's salary on
a dictionary.
Speaker 1 (07:34):
Yeah. I think the point has got to be that
very like you had to be a very well healed
person trying to impress other people by owning a copy
of this thing.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
Back then, right, yeah, or a library, well exactly. So, yeah,
that was the first edition. It's gotten even bigger as
we've seen over time, and so now finally the Internet
was born. I think to howse the third edition of
the Oxford English Dictionary, which is where we're at now,
and one thing that they do, which is pretty sharp.
(08:04):
As the dictionary comes out, new words are being added
to it all the time. They're probably finding less and
less old words that they hadn't included. But you know,
like you said, the English language is living, so it's
expanding and contracting and adding new words to it all
the time. So by the time those things go to
press and that last volume of the edition comes out,
(08:27):
there's words that are left over that are just constantly
being added. So I think on a quarterly basis, they
release supplements essentially that have new words that came out
or were coined since the volume that contained that letter
was published in the latest edition.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
That's right, and we'll get to how those supplements figured
in back then and what they do with those today.
But the other really unique thing about the OED is
that it is a and always has been, from the
very very beginning, a crowd source work. Yeah, right from
the beginning. The editors who we're going to talk about,
the original editors, editors here in a minute. They said, hey, public,
(09:09):
we need help. So if you're into this, you've got
a little time. If you like to read, if you're
a linguist, you're into words, if you love language, go
back to Chaucer, start reading and find these words that
we're looking for. Find usages of these words descend into
us by hand on they call it a slip, a
(09:30):
little four by six sheet of paper and mail it
into us. And you could very well have a hand
in creating the Oxford English Dictionary.
Speaker 2 (09:39):
Yeah, pretty cool. And they got a really great response
to it, and I think still do.
Speaker 1 (09:44):
Today, oh for sure. But that's also explains why you have,
you know, quotes from Chaucer and Shakespeare, and also, as
Alison points out, quotes from like a social media post.
As a usage example of a word.
Speaker 2 (09:59):
Yeah. She also used an example that came from the
most recent quarterly update from September twenty twenty three. Porch
pirate appears in there, and so it's a really good
illustration of what the OED does. They explain that it's
someone who steals packages from doorsteps. Everybody knows that. Yeah,
but did you know that it first came about from
(10:21):
a news segment on kfo R from Oklahoma Cities, one
of their local broadcasting stations.
Speaker 1 (10:28):
Yeah, so they'll have that.
Speaker 2 (10:30):
Wait, you didn't doubt.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
It, No, well no, I said they would have that.
I gotcha as like the example or whatever. And then
if you want to dig deeper and just say, well,
what about this word porch, then they'll take you back
to the thirteen hundreds with the definition of porch and
then examples of these what they call senses like that's
(10:51):
when not a tense, it's a sense. It's like how
the word is used basically.
Speaker 2 (10:56):
Yeah, and it might not be used that way anymore necessary.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
Yeah, but they will have all of them listed and
you can see sort of the evolution of not only
the word porch, but when you eventually get to something
like porch pirate.
Speaker 4 (11:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
So it's pretty neat stuff like, that's what they do.
And they've been doing this for one hundred something years
since they think the first the first volume of the
first edition came out and I think eighteen eighty four.
Speaker 1 (11:23):
Right, Yeah, and those supplements you were talking about, I
promised to kind of explain how they do things now.
They were for many many years. They were released just
like hey, here's this extra thing. But it created a
problem if you're like, well, wait a minute, now I
have to look up a word in two different places
if it has a more modern usage. And so eventually
(11:44):
they started combining them. I think they finally did that
in what nineteen eighty nine, where the supplements were actually
worked into the main addition.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
Yeah, just the first edition.
Speaker 1 (11:56):
Yeah, so they finished that in nineteen eighty nine, and
a couple years before that they had finally put it
on a CD ROM And then, like you said, it
only exists today. Well, I mean you can get copies,
but they're not releasing I don't think print editions any longer.
It's just a online subscription type thing now.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
Yeah, and usually I mean it's pay right, so yeah, subscription,
so usually you can log in through your library pretty neat.
They're also in the midst of putting out a third edition,
so look for that in the next century. That's right,
I say, we take a little break, Charles, and then
we'll come back and talk about the history of the OED.
Speaker 3 (12:29):
How we got here, let's do it.
Speaker 2 (12:52):
So the OED is not the first English dictionary ever.
In fact, the first one ever was from sixteen oh four.
It's called a Table Alphabetical of hard usual English Words
by Robert Kaudrey, and he basically just put this together
to help people, I guess, explain themselves in English better.
(13:14):
He it was I think, words that were commonly used
but not necessarily commonly understood. So that was the first one.
But the I guess the OED really traces its spiritual
roots to a more recent phenomenon that the Brothers Grim
had started, which was essentially a dictionary of a language
(13:35):
in order to show the history of that language, ostensibly
in order to prove how great that language actually was.
Speaker 1 (13:44):
Yeah, we shout out to a couple of great episodes
we did many years ago, one on the Brothers Grim
and was there one on the Just the Fairy Tales?
Speaker 2 (13:54):
Yes, there, it was a two parter, right.
Speaker 1 (13:57):
Yeah, yeah, that was That was a good series, So
go back and listen to that. But Jacob and Wilhelm
Grimm did what you said. They were like, hey, we
want to create a German dictionary from Martin Luther on
which eventually they died before it came out, but it
was called I believe the first Fascicle, and the Fascal
is just the first part, basically like, hey, we finished
(14:19):
a through j or whatever. I think the first fasccal
came out when they were alive, but of the Deutsches
Vertebuch It and I believe they died in the late
eighteen fifty nine, for Wilhelm in eighteen sixty three, and
it finally came out in nineteen sixty one in full,
(14:39):
so they weren't even close. And she points out Alison
that Jacob died at the F's he was working on
the word fruit or di fruit.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:49):
I want to say it was pretty good. Oh you
want to say it.
Speaker 2 (14:52):
I want to say it too. Deutsche's Vertebruk which means
literally German word book, right, yeah, it's more like buch
Deutsche's Vertebuch VerTech.
Speaker 1 (15:05):
Yeah, there you go.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
Yeah, I said it way better. In my head, I
think I tried too hard. So, like I was saying
behind the Grim, the whole initiative is not just like
documenting definitions for German words. They wanted to trace the
history of the German language because they suspected that far
(15:26):
in the distant past, all of these disparate groups of
people who are now members of separate nations were all
members of the same Germanic speaking tribe, and that this
had been like a glorious, amazing civilization that was now fractured,
and maybe if we understand it a little better, it
can come back together and dare I say, take over
(15:47):
the world.
Speaker 1 (15:48):
It's like easy, brothers Grim. Yeah, they had a good idea.
Speaker 2 (15:52):
It got a little perverted along the way, although it
may have been a bad idea from the beginning, you know.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
Yeah, this this does link up very oddly with that
episode that we just recorded on Tectonic Plates.
Speaker 3 (16:03):
It does.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
I think the lesson here is anytime you have a
social or cultural movement, to go back and find how
great your specific culture is or was. That's a red
flag for everybody else.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
Yeah, probably so so the OED it was basically the
same thing, and they're like, well, you've got your German book,
but what's greater than the English language. Let's do that
for ourselves.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
We're going to make an English word book.
Speaker 1 (16:32):
That's what it's called. So the Gentleman scholars, and that's
in quotes from Britain got together to form the Philological
Society in London in eighteen forty two from the Greek
philos love and logos words. So philology is just the
love of words. It's really very plain and kind of wonderful. Yeah,
(16:53):
and it's the study of the language in the written language.
And a lot of philologists will say like Greek and
Latin or what we're concentrating in. But this, at this time,
there were people like, well, wait a minute, English seems
to really be pretty important too. I know it's not
Latin or Greek, but maybe we should look forward and
get down with this English dictionary. And they said yes.
(17:16):
In eighteen fifty seven, after that, that's when it was
that's when the Grims put out their first fascicle. In
fact was around the same time. They said they got
a head start on us, but I think we can
catch up and do a great job as well, And
in fact they did.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
Yeah, and As a matter of fact, word got out
about this and everybody was like, hey, this is a
great project. The members of the Philological Society in England
were kind of celebrated culturally for trying to do this thing,
for documenting the English language and how great it was.
So what they decided to do first was to find
(17:54):
out all the words that weren't already in other dictionaries
of English or any dictionary that contained English words. Unregistered
words is what they called them, and they were going
to make a dictionary of unregistered words to basically complete everything.
And there was a guy, Richard Chenovic's Trench R. C.
Trench who gave some lectures against this idea and essentially said,
(18:18):
rather than patch an existing garment, let's make a brand
new garment from whole cloth, and it's going to be
the most beautiful garment anyone's ever seen. It's gonna well, yeah,
plus sequin shoulder pads, the whole shebang, and to me,
that's that's the height of amazing fashion. So he actually
(18:42):
convinced the Philological Society to veer a different way and
rather than just take, you know, the words that hadn't
been defined and define them and make that take on
the entire English language, going back to eleven fifty forward
and again when you're doing this, So just think about
going into the deep past and saying, Okay, we're going
(19:04):
to do all words from eleven fifty to eighteen fifty.
That's daunting enough. But they were also signing up for
essentially a never ending unfinished work. Yeah, because as we've seen,
every time they put in an addition, there's any number
of new words that have come along or that they
didn't they didn't have before. Like it's an ongoing, never
(19:25):
ending process. They'll never be done with the OED. And
I suspect that probably drives some members of the OED
staff completely mad.
Speaker 1 (19:36):
Maybe. And you also have to keep in mind that
they did this without a publisher secured, and in fact
did work for about two decades without a publisher even.
Speaker 3 (19:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
So they were just working on what was then called
the New English Dictionary, was the I guess the working title,
and their first editor was a dude to name Herbert Coleridge.
And if you're thinking, I wonder if if he was, Yes,
he was. He was the grandson of Samuel Taylor. And
there were several predictions in here. They were all wrong
(20:08):
as to how big this project could be and how
long it would take. But Herbert was the first one
to be way off base and said it'll be about
seven thousand pages and we'll be done in a decade.
Not how it worked out. They started working, They started
building this thing from you from a forward, and they
made a list of books like basically the English Language
(20:30):
Literary Canon, and said, all right, volunteers, you all wrote in,
said you had some time, so start reading. Read these
books and look out for these words, and when you
find them, put them on a slip word for word,
send them in to us. Again, that's a four x
six inch piece of paper. It was all very sort
of regimented, and they said, please read these books. And
(20:55):
we like English literature because the whole point of this
is to talk about how great we were and how
great our works and language is.
Speaker 2 (21:02):
Yeah, so are That's why they first were like, we're
going to look through the great works of English language
only because this is the highest use of these words.
So these are the best examples. These are the quotations
we want to use. And they were very narrow minded
in that sense. They were really until the twentieth century.
They were very much centered on that. That's what they
(21:24):
were going to use to derive their quotes from, because
it would just demonstrate how great the English language was.
Look at how these amazing English writers used it. Right. So,
Herbert Coleridge died in eighteen sixty one. I get the
impression he was only working on it for a few years.
Speaker 1 (21:41):
But he was because he died right, right, but four
years later.
Speaker 2 (21:44):
Yeah, so it was like four years, right. But he
really threw himself into it so much so that he
apparently on his deathbed he had definitions like slips scattered about,
like on the quilt of his deathbed. He died working, Yeah,
and he had contracted tuberculosis. And when the doctor was like,
(22:04):
this is not ever going to get better. It will
get better, but you're going to be dead, That's how
it's going to get better, Herbert Coleridge was like, oh,
I must start Sanskrit tomorrow, which has taken to mean
that he had never learned Sanskrit. He was a polyglot.
He studied all sorts of different languages, and he had
never gotten to Sanskrit. Now that he realized he's going
to die, he needed to start on it tomorrow.
Speaker 1 (22:27):
Yeah, ironically dying of what was then known as Consumption
and later TB. So that's a new usage and a
new entry. Yeah, eighteen seventy nine, we're skipping forward. And
like I said, this is twenty years after they started.
This is when they finally found that publisher. At the time,
they were known another since as Clarendon, later to be
(22:49):
known as DA DA DA the Oxford University Press. And
even though they didn't specifically call it the Oxford English
Dictionary until late I believe the very first publishing in
nineteen twenty eight was called a New English Dictionary on
Historical Principles.
Speaker 2 (23:08):
And so we should mention that after Coleridge died, it
just the whole thing kind of like lost momentum. He
was a real driving force as the first editor. But
you know, a few I think twenty or so years
later it started to pick up again, and it was
thanks to a new editor named James Murray, who I
believe was the third editor of all, and he took
(23:32):
this ball and ran with it, and he is the
person that you can point to as the one who
ultimately got the OED published. He was the true driving
force of it.
Speaker 1 (23:45):
Yeah, absolutely, Murray was Scottish, came from a just sort
of a regular working class, middle class background, was the
son of a tailor. Apparently his father was a very
smart man and known for being a smart and sober person.
And James as a child was a prodigy, was a
language prodigy, learned his ABC's before he was eighteen months,
(24:10):
was apparently reading and writing in Greek by seven, left
school at fourteen, was studying four languages and eventually came
to London to be the headmaster of a school there.
And that is where in London he joined up with
the Philological Society. And like you said, he was the guy.
(24:30):
He was also the guy who had another ten year
completion prediction. He said this will take ten years from now.
And after five years of that ten year prediction, they
had a through ant.
Speaker 2 (24:43):
No yes, wow. I would just see that and be like,
well I quit.
Speaker 1 (24:48):
He's like a lot of that was on boarding, you.
Speaker 2 (24:50):
Understand, jeez man, that's crazy. Yeah, But it also goes
to show how little they actually had gotten done apparently
under Coleridge's command.
Speaker 1 (24:59):
Ye, and was just they wanted jokes about Grandpa. Come on,
tell me what was Sammy really like?
Speaker 2 (25:06):
So the one thing that you said, I think from
the start was that this was a crowdsource project.
Speaker 1 (25:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (25:14):
And it's not like the OED makes a secret about this.
They're very deferential to the volunteers that have worked for
them over the years because they just could not have
done this without them. It was just too big of
an undertaking to for just a small group of people
to have done by themselves. And there were a lot
of different people. There's a book out there called The
(25:37):
Dictionary People.
Speaker 1 (25:40):
What's it about?
Speaker 2 (25:42):
Isn't that what it's called?
Speaker 4 (25:43):
I don't know where is it?
Speaker 2 (25:45):
Yep, The Dictionary People. I think it's fairly new. And
the author had worked at the OED and before she
left she had gotten from the archives. She'd come across
James Murray's address book and it was pretty thick because
it had the names and addresses of a lot of
the volunteer correspondents that were working contributing quotations to the Dictionary.
(26:11):
And so she decided to write a book tracking down
who these people were, and that's what she came up with,
this book called The Dictionary People, and she found some
pretty interesting stuff. For example, about one in six by
her estimate, were women, including James Murray's wife and daughters.
He drafted them and got a lot of support and
(26:32):
help from them. Apparently the editing the OED did not
pay much, but he had dedicated his life essentially to
it and his family supported him in that, which was
pretty great. And a lot of other women contributed to right.
Speaker 1 (26:47):
Yeah, the daughter of Karl Marx, Eleanor Marx, contributed and
it was apparently fired by Murray for not doing the
assignment properly, not sticking to the assignment. And by the way,
Sarah ogilvie Is wrote the Dictionary People. Yeah, nice, I'd
like to check that out. I bet it's a good book. Yeah.
Another writer that Allison found from this book to highlight
(27:08):
his name Marganita Alaski, who's alive from nineteen fifteen to
nineteen eighty eight. Marganita contributed thirteen thousand quotes to twenty
Century Supplements and Marginita was a critic and a journalist
and a novelist and kind of made the rounds on
TV shows and stuff back in the day, starting in
(27:29):
the late fifties and into the sixties. And you know,
when people are volunteering like this, they can sort of
like guide their like have their own path forward and
how they want to tackle the project almost and who
they want to highlight or words they want to highlight.
And at some point Marginita Alaski got into sort of
(27:50):
away from the high brow thing and said, I want
to start, you know, looking at domestic manuals and all
these old ancient cookbooks and you know, modern news newspapers
and famous diaries, and just a really unique approach to
come up with some of those thirteen thousand entries.
Speaker 2 (28:06):
Yeah, and that was a that was a real change. Remember,
I said that they had really kind of had their
blinders on just looking for, you know, the pinnacle of
English literature for quotations. Under James Murray, he was like, no,
we're gonna not only look for new sources, we're also
going to include slang. We're gonna include like vulgar words,
(28:30):
like uh huh. We're like, if it's an English word,
we're going to include it because we're documenting the entire
English language. So that was a huge sea change for
the direction of the dictionary, And apparently he was under
a tremendous amount of pressure to not to not go
that way, to kind of stick with the original plan,
and he said no, he said nine.
Speaker 1 (28:52):
No, he said no, Uh, I mentioned nickers. Is that underwear?
That's what nickers are, right? Okay, So as soon as
I said it was like, wait a minute, did I
say the wrong word?
Speaker 2 (29:04):
You were thinking of Fanny?
Speaker 1 (29:06):
And what's a knickerbocker?
Speaker 2 (29:08):
A knickerbocker is a think. I think it's the short
pants that were like kind of cinched at the knee
that you think of with like a little newsboys.
Speaker 1 (29:16):
So the New York Knicks named after the Knickerbockers. That's
what they were.
Speaker 2 (29:20):
I don't know if they did or not. No, they
were named after the Knickerbocker, like the story club that
Washington Irving was a member of.
Speaker 1 (29:29):
Oh really, are you making homposite?
Speaker 2 (29:31):
No, I'm pretty sure that's correct. I sometimes get things wrong.
Speaker 1 (29:35):
Yeah, but I well, this is off the dome, so
I'll look it up.
Speaker 2 (29:38):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (29:39):
So back to Murray. He's working with his wife eleven
kids at his house mainly, and not only at his house,
but mainly in his little shed that he had built
behind the house in the garden called the Scriptorium, and
they worked on it here a once. They got a
through aunt in eighteen eighty four, he was like, we
(30:00):
need some help here, so they hired a second editor
named Henry Bradley, and then not too long after that
added two more co editors, so you essentially had a
team of four editors at that point. That we're working
with teams and teams of people, so a lot of
people working. Murray at his scriptorium there at home. But
(30:23):
then he moved to Oxford and built another larger scriptorium
there behind his house, and things were getting so busy
the local post put a po box right there by
his little front driveway, by his sidewalk, and it's still there. Yeah,
if you look it up, this beautiful red PO box
with a little placard saying that you know, Murray lived
(30:45):
here and this was the post to gather these slips
that helped create the OED.
Speaker 2 (30:50):
I saw, and actually I was obscure that the placard
doesn't say that. It just says that the guy who
created the OED lived here. And they just walk right
past the post office box, so it's literally in front
of the placard. They don't even mention it.
Speaker 1 (31:04):
The most amazing part of the story.
Speaker 2 (31:05):
It's one of the it's one of the greatest grossest
government oversights in history, so thousands.
Speaker 1 (31:14):
Of people contributing. At this point, Murray is still beating
the drum and like writing open letters to newspapers and stuff, saying, hey,
we were still doing this. We you know, trying to
keep that fire going. And people it wasn't just people
in England. People from all over the world were contributing.
And I think when they finally they had so many
slips because you know, they're filing these as they get
(31:37):
them alphabetically, they're slotting them in and they have these
lexicographers working around the clock as well. When they finally
put out the first supplement in nineteen thirty three, they
still had one hundred and forty thousand slips left over.
Speaker 2 (31:50):
It's so nuts. Again, I would have been like, well
I quit. Yeah, it's just too daunting. I can barely
talk about this stuff.
Speaker 1 (31:58):
Yeah. I think thirty three, that's the first year they
have fecially called it the o ED Okay, but.
Speaker 2 (32:03):
Everyone was kind of calling that anyway, were they really yeah,
okay crazy, So they kind of went with the change.
The English Language changed the name of the dictionary for them.
Speaker 1 (32:15):
Yeah, because whatever that long thing, I a new English
dictionary on historical principles. It was printed by the Oxford
English Press, so everyone was just calling it that anyway.
So yeah, I guess it was a sense plus oed.
Speaker 2 (32:32):
Sounds better than the NED, you know. Yeah, sure, do
you want to take another break and come back and
talk about arguably the most interesting contributor of all Sure?
Speaker 4 (32:44):
Okay?
Speaker 1 (33:05):
So Murray dies of pleurisy in nineteen fifteen. Did not
see the first final edition put out, which is very
sad that would be what thirteen years later, but did
put out most of the fascicles by that point, just
wasn't compiled into the one edition. Different people JRR Tolkien
(33:27):
worked for a year on this in nineteen nineteen. Lots
of volunteers, but as you promised. Oh and Murray was
also knighted in nineteen oh eight. I didn't those troubles.
Speaker 2 (33:35):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (33:35):
Yeah, apparently knighted, but still a bit of an outsider
in the hoity toity Oxford. You know, Literati always felt
like an outsider and wasn't even given an honorary degree
until like the year before he died or something.
Speaker 2 (33:49):
Yeah, and when he walked across the stage, what he
didn't realize is that one of the faculty had taped
a kick me signed to his back, so he didn't
He never understood why the audience is laughing, and he
grabbed his honorary decree. He was very sad he never
got it.
Speaker 1 (34:04):
So you promised to talk of the most interesting, perhaps
most celebrated volunteer, and that is one doctor William Chester Minor.
If you've seen the movie or read the book The
Professor and the Madman, the book was by Simon Winchester,
and the book starred mel Gibson as Murray and Sean
Penn as the quote unquote Madman Chester Minor. I have
(34:27):
not seen it. Apparently it's not very good. And mel
Gibson and the director tried to you know, they didn't
support the movie in the press, and they tried to
get their I don't know if get their name removed,
but they basically disowned it.
Speaker 2 (34:40):
Really, I thought mel Gibson was the one whose movie
it was, whose idea.
Speaker 1 (34:44):
Well it was his production company, yeah, but he apparently
he took him to court because he didn't get final
cut like they said, and he didn't get to shoot
for a week in Oxford like he wanted to. And
he's basically like this thing is garbage because you didn't
let me do what I wanted to. So I'm not
supporting it. John Ben just what.
Speaker 2 (35:01):
That stinks because apparently the book was just amazing. The
professor and the Madman, I know.
Speaker 1 (35:08):
And it's such a great story. But I heard other
people defend it and say, you know, it was pretty good.
I had great acting, and like he just you know,
got his knickers in a wad.
Speaker 2 (35:19):
So where the madman is doctor William Chester Minor, you said, right,
let's references. And the reason that they call him the
mad man is because at the time he was diagnosed
with either dementia prey cox or paranoid schizophrenia, and today
we would call either of those just plain old schizophrenia
(35:40):
spectrum disorder. But this was the mid nineteenth century and
doctor Minor was suffering from this at a time when
they did not understand what they were dealing with. They
just knew that this guy was pretty bad off and
needed care essentially for the rest of his life. He
had started out as a military doctor. I believe he
(36:02):
graduated from Yale Medical School and entered the Civil War
as a military doctor pretty much right off the bat.
And there's some stories about when his symptoms began. Allegedly
it was from things he was exposed to during his
time in the Civil War. One is there's a story
(36:23):
that he supposedly had to brand a deserter, an Irish
deserter from the Union with a D on his face,
and that having to do that to that poor man
just made him snap essentially, or brought his symptoms on
is a different way to say it. Or he was
involved in the Battle of the Wilderness outside of Spotsylvania, Virginia.
(36:48):
Either way, we don't know. We just know that, yes,
this man definitely had schizophrenia. We don't know how it
came on or if there was even any trigger, but
we just kind of join him around the time after
the Civil War when he's still in the army, but
he's really starting to show symptoms.
Speaker 1 (37:05):
Yeah. And also, by the way, this is how we
knew that Alison really has the goods as a researcher
and writer, because Alison was like, hey, be careful with
his stuff because you know, there are a lot of
stories out there, and just don't don't buy up everything
you're reading here right, music to our ears.
Speaker 2 (37:20):
She also told us how to pronounce right, yeah.
Speaker 1 (37:25):
That's true. The first writer to ever include pronunciation it's nice,
so like you said. An army doctor, an army surgeon
working at the US General Hospital in New Haven, Connecticut,
also a flute player, apparently a very ambitious guy. And
because of you know, kind of how his schizophrenia played
(37:48):
out were delusions of persecution, a lot of delusions of
being attacked sexually, and you know, I think that speaks
for itself. They got pretty bad, and he apparently would
wander red light districts of places where he lived. He
said this is because of his disorder. He was sent
to an asylum in Washington while he was still in
(38:09):
the army, although he would get his discharge in eighteen seventy.
While he was still there, he thought he could get
better if he went to the UK and get treatment there,
and so in eighteen seventy two in London, he found
himself in waking from a delusion that he was being attacked,
I think sexually attacked by an Irish Republican, and got
(38:35):
up from bed and ran out to the street like
guns blazing, thinking he was shooting at his tormentor, and
killed an innocent man, a brewery worker named George Merritt,
who was on his way to work that early morning.
Speaker 2 (38:48):
Yes, so that was enough for the British government. He'd
already been discharged from the army. I don't know if
you said or not by the time he made it
to the UK. And in the UK the authorities were like, Okay,
we're going to introduce you to one of our asylums
called broad Moore and in Broadmore. This is the nineteenth century.
You did not want to be in an asylum of
(39:10):
any sort in the nineteenth century. They were horrible, terrible
places where humans were treated like about as bad as
humans can be treated. And yet either he was charming
or wealthy enough, or a combination of both. He was
able to play his flute, he was able to wear
his own clothes, go on walks, and very importantly he
(39:32):
was able to bring his personal library of very rare
books from the seventeenth and eighteenth century with him, and
they actually gave him another cell to serve as his
personal library essentially. And I'll bet Sean Penn playing that
flute is something to see. I mean that, above anything else,
is why I want to see that movie.
Speaker 1 (39:53):
It's like in The Anchor Man, he pulls it from
a sleeve in. Yeah, it's very.
Speaker 3 (39:58):
Fake, Hey aquolog No, no, no.
Speaker 1 (40:02):
Oh no, not again.
Speaker 2 (40:03):
Yep, it just happened.
Speaker 1 (40:06):
He stayed in touch. This is kind of interesting here
that he did stay in touch with the wife, the
widow of the man that he killed, and she brought
him books even, which is amazing and kind of a
nice ending to that story. Yeah. I don't know the
ins and outs. Maybe I don't know. Maybe he did
her a favor. Maybe he was a bad guy.
Speaker 2 (40:25):
No, apparently he wasn't. He was a choking Oh well,
he apparently contacted her and apologized, made some sort of restitution.
I took that to mean like gave her some money.
But she accepted his apologies. She didn't have to do that.
So I think it says a lot about both of them.
Speaker 1 (40:41):
Yeah, for sure. When it came to the OED, he
really poured himself into this as as an avid reader
and had all those rare books, like you said, but
didn't do the thing that they said, which was, hey,
read these books and look for these words. He said, Nope,
here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna read a book
at a time, and i'm gonna start I guess it
(41:03):
says with one letter. I guess he started with the
letter A and just started looking through all the books
for all the letter a's, and then again for the
letter b's, and so on and so on.
Speaker 2 (41:14):
Yeah, and it was a fruitful way to search for
quotations using specific words, because I think within just a
couple of years he had generated and sent in between
five and six thousand slips of quotations to James Murray.
And as the years went on, no one seems to
(41:34):
know how many he sent in, but he I mean
tens and tens of thousands of slips came directly from
doctor Minor during his time abroad.
Speaker 1 (41:45):
More. Yeah, they eventually met in person. I mean this
was a relationship to span a couple of decades. Yeah,
hundreds of quotes a week, and they met in eighteen
ninety one. Finally, apparently the superintendent of the asylum both
men at his house, and they met a few more
times after that. I watched the trailer of the movie today,
(42:06):
and I'm not sure how accurate it is, but it
seems like they'd met here and there over the years.
And in the book, it was like, you know, mel
Gibson doing a pretty bad Scottish accent, saying like you
and I have partners.
Speaker 2 (42:22):
You complete me.
Speaker 1 (42:24):
It was kind of like that, and I'm not really
sure if that was the real case in real life.
Speaker 2 (42:31):
Well so, apparently from what I saw, James Murray considered
it just as a decent human being, he needed to
go support doctor Minor. Whether doctor Minor was contributing or not.
I think it helped that doctor Minor was contributing, but
they did have some sort of friendship or relationship, but
it went beyond just you know, the editor and the
(42:51):
contributor kind of thing.
Speaker 1 (42:53):
Well maybe it wasn't.
Speaker 2 (42:54):
And supposedly doctor Minor kept like finding excuses anytime James
Murray was like, well let's meet, you know, I'm just
across like the city, let's meet for lunch or something,
and doctor Mom would be like, I can't, you know,
I broke my foot, or my sister's coming to visit whatever.
And then finally, I'm not sure how he finally found out,
(43:14):
either doctor Miner admitted to it or James Murray found
out somehow, but he finally did find out that he
was institutionalized, and then he started to go visit him.
Oh okay, pretty neat and then he saw him off
after doctor Minor was released from brob Moore so he
could go back to be institutionalized in America. It was
(43:35):
clear that he wasn't going to be around too many
more years. James Murray saw him off at the docks
and gave him six unpublished volumes of the first edition
that hadn't come out yet.
Speaker 1 (43:46):
Yeah, he had a very sad end to a sad life.
He had those delusions of being sexually violated, and in
December nineteen oh two, he tied a tourniquet around his
penis and he cut it off in what he called
in the interests of morality, because what he believed is
(44:06):
that he had delusions that he was being taking out
of the asylum for years and years at night and
forced to have sex with women all around the asylum
and in town. And so he cut his penis off.
And after that, things really just weren't the same for him.
It seems like things went pretty downhill pretty quickly, although
(44:28):
he died in nineteen twenty so that was, you know,
another eighteen years of suffering.
Speaker 2 (44:32):
Yeah, as far as his contributions, that really went downhill
after that.
Speaker 1 (44:38):
Man, Yeah, very sad, but super super interesting story and
great job Allison. This was really really cool.
Speaker 2 (44:44):
Yeah, thanks a lot, Alison. This is great, great start.
Welcome to the team. And what Chuck? Since I said
welcome to the team, do you think it's time for
listener now?
Speaker 1 (44:54):
I think so?
Speaker 3 (44:55):
Okay, I'm going to call this cost of goods?
Speaker 1 (45:01):
In that episode? What episode was it where you're talking
about the cost of goods?
Speaker 2 (45:05):
I think the Harlem Globetrotters is where it recently came from.
Speaker 1 (45:08):
Yeah, like, wwhy is it so expensive to go to
NBA game these days or get a meal or whatever?
We had a lot of people that write in, so
I don't think we even settled on a final point.
Speaker 2 (45:19):
Yeah, I'm still looking around.
Speaker 1 (45:20):
There were a few different theories, but this one from
Matt I'm going to read, Hey, guys, I have a
partial explanation for the question why does it cost so
much more for a nice meal than it used to
even adjusting for inflation? Bal mal bauml bal Mal's cost
disease might help explain. This refers to the rising costs
associated with service or labor intensive industries over time, despite
(45:44):
no corresponding increase in productivity. So imagine a restaurant in
the nineteen fifties, you have a server, take your order,
chef cooks of food, someone else cleans up after you're done.
Fast forward to today. Despite all the technological advances, you
still need that server stake the order. You still need
the chef, You still need the staff to clean. The
humans have not been replaced by machines or software. In
(46:06):
a lot of these cases, you can't speed up the
chef the way you can double the speed of a
factory machine without sacrificing quality. So if you own a restaurant,
you still need roughly the same number of workers that
you've had that you needed in the fifties. Roughly, Yet
wages for the staff have gone up over the years.
That's a whole other rabbit hole. The restaurant has to
pay its staff more over time without getting more meals
(46:27):
per worker. So what do you do You pass it
on to the customers. By the way, this also explains
why stuff like health insurance and childcare have also gotten
way more expensive relative to other stuff. You still need
the same number of daycare workers per kid and nurses
per patient that you did in past decades. This was
a good one, Matt we got some other ideas and
imagine it's kind of all these things probably, but balml's
(46:50):
cost disease is a great explanation. And that is from
Matt Farmer.
Speaker 2 (46:53):
Yeah, thanks a lot, Matt, though, was a good one.
It's the whole thing's brewing. I don't know what it's
going to turn into. That will definitely be part of it,
for sure.
Speaker 1 (47:03):
Perhaps a Josh Clark solo ten part series The Cost
of Goods with Josh Clark.
Speaker 2 (47:08):
I don't think so. No, no, I'm going to make
you do it with me.
Speaker 1 (47:13):
Oh no, no no. So that was from Matt right, yeah,
Matt Farmer.
Speaker 2 (47:19):
Matt Farmer, thank you very much for that. And if
you want to be like Matt Farmer and show off
your braininess and try to answer a burning question we have.
We love that kind of thing. You can send it
to us via email to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (47:35):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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Chuck Bryant
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