Vol. 25 No. 22 · 20 November 2003
pages 29-30 | 3162 words
‘They got egg on their faces’
Leofranc Holford-Strevens
- The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester
Oxford, 260 pp, £12.99, October 2003, ISBN 0 19 860702 4
Like a Member of Parliament, I must declare an interest: I am employed by the publisher of both the OED and Simon Winchester’s account of its genesis. However, I have had no involvement with the latter, whose author’s qualities are well known to readers of his previous books, most relevantly The Surgeon of Crowthorne, and little with the former, which hardly needs my twopenn’orth of praise and whose faults, as revealed over the years, are being addressed in a new edition.
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Letters
Vol. 26 No. 1 · 8 January 2004
From Geoffrey Ridley Barrow
Leofranc Holford-Strevens claims that fuck was 'kept out of not only the OED but all other general dictionaries until Burchfield's A-G volume of 1972' (LRB, 20 November). The Penguin Dictionary of English, compiled by G.N. Garmonsway with Jacqueline Simpson, and first published in 1965, cites the word as 'v/t and i (vulg) (of males) have sexual intercourse (with)'.
Geoffrey Ridley Barrow
Purdue University, Indiana
Vol. 26 No. 2 · 22 January 2004
From Leofranc Holford-Strevens
Geoffrey Ridley Barrow takes me to task for overlooking the Penguin Dictionary of English (Letters, 8 January). So I did, but so too did Robert Burchfield in his introduction to the A-G volume of the OED supplement; I ought to have used quotation-marks. Conversely, I now find that fired in the sense of 'dismissed', though given in quotation-marks, was in fact Simon Winchester's own word, not Henry Sweet's.
Leofranc Holford-Strevens
Oxford
