The Professor and the Madman
March 5th, 2006
The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of The Oxford English Dictionary — By Simon Winchester
This is one of those books that I’ve been so familiar with for so long that it was rather a surprise to me when I realized that I had never actually read it.
The subtitle describes the story. Dr. William Minor, an American surgeon who served in the Civil War, commits a senseless and random murder in London, and is locked away in an institution for the criminally insane. He happens upon the opportunity to contribute to the Oxford English Dictionary, a massive intellectual project that requires the work of many volunteers to read through English literature harvesting useful quotations to illustrate the meanings of words. Minor has the intellectual interest and plenty of time, and he is, perhaps surprisingly, allowed to accumulate an impressive library at the institution. He becomes the most prolific and useful contributor, and wins the sympathetic admiration of James Murray, editor of the project, and others.
This book is interesting as a study of the life and sad circumstances of the mentally ill Dr. Minor, and in the surprisingly humane treatment he receives. But I must say that for me, the most interesting thing is the methodology of the making of the OED, with all those thousands of slips of paper and all that laborious hand-copying of quotations, most of which are never even used!
It reminded me a lot of work on the Wikipedia, with all those volunteers. With the Wikipedia, we have excellent software support so that anyone can add and edit anything instantly, while with the OED, the intellectual content was more tightly controlled but the the process was incredibly slow. And you’ve got to wonder how many errors crept into those quotations transcribed from all those handwritten slips!
