You Could Look It Up (24 page)

CHAPTER
9 ½

IGNORANCE, PURE IGNORANCE

Of Omissions, Ambiguities, and Plain Old Blunders

Reference works have a strange authority. Words are words because they are “in the dictionary,” and angry debates are settled after a glance into an encyclopedia. But these books are not infallible—as their compilers will be the first to admit. There is never a question of whether they contain errors, just how many and how embarrassing those errors are.

Still, the notion that reference works are authoritative oracles dies hard. In 1954, one critic advised his readers to stop worshiping the dictionary—too many people “think that every word has a correct meaning, and that dictionaries and grammars are the supreme authority in matters of meaning and usage.” (That was a not-so-subtle dig at the G. & C. Merriam Company, which had been using the phrase “supreme authority” in its advertisements for two decades.) “These people,” the writer complained, “never inquire by what authority the writers of dictionaries and grammars say what they say. It is incredible to see teachers bow down to the dictionary. If a person says, ‘The dictionary is wrong!' he is looked upon as out of his mind.”
1

Actually, dictionaries and encyclopedias are often wrong. Edward Phillips's
New World of Words
(1656) contains some glaring goofs: Phillips defined
gallon
as “a measure of two quarts” (it should be four), and the musical note called a quaver is “half of a crotchet, as a crotchet is the half of a quaver,” which creates a challenging mathematical problem.
2
John Ash's dictionary of 1775 defined
esoteric
and
exoteric
—opposites—as two spellings of the same word. In 1728, Ephraim Chambers tried to anticipate criticism by declaring to the world that his
Cyclopædia
was probably teeming with mistakes: “For
Errors
, they cannot be very few, considering the Hands thro' which most Parts of our Knowledge have
passed, and from whom we are obliged to take our Accounts.” He could only plead that the offense was nearly universal: “What one Author, upon the most particular Subject, will you produce, that has not his share of 'em? and what
Argus
could possibly see, and correct the Errors in all the Authors he had to do with?”
3

The first really great English lexicographer, Samuel Johnson, knew this better than most. Lexicographers, he explained, can never hope for actual praise; the most they can hope for is “to escape reproach”—but “even this negative recompence has been yet granted to very few.”
4
His prediction was accurate: his own dictionary was widely criticized for its mistakes, the most famous of which concerned his definition of the word
pastern
. The pastern is actually the part of a horse's foot between the fetlock and the hoof, but Johnson's entry reads, “The knee of an horse.” At least he was forthright about it. “A lady once asked him how he came to define Pastern” that way, recorded James Boswell. “Instead of making an elaborate defence, as she expected, he at once answered, ‘Ignorance, Madam, pure ignorance.” '
5

Ignorance led Johnson into some of his other errors. Although
windward
and
leeward
are antonyms, for instance, Johnson defined them identically, as “Towards the wind.” But other failures in defining apparently came from his knowing too much. Readers informed that a
cough
is “A convulsion of the lungs, vellicated by some sharp serosity,” or that a
network
is “Any thing reticulated or decussated, at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections,” come away knowing little more than when they began.

Errors come in many varieties. Some entries are bad because they tell us nothing. John Kersey was a master of the non-definition definition: his
New English Dictionary
(1702) defined
fork
as “a well-known instrument,”
cat
as “a well-known creature,” and
dog
simply as “a beast.” Here are two more entries in their entirety:

Ake
, as, my head akes.

An
Apron
, for a Woman, &c.

And while Benedykt Chmielowski deserves full credit for writing the first Polish encyclopedia,
Nowe Ateny albo Akademia wszelkiej sciencyi
pe
ł
na
(
New Athens; or, The Academy Full of All Science
), in 1745–46, his no-nonsense entry for
horse
—“Koń—jaki jest, kaźdy widzi” (“Horse: everyone can see what it is”)—is still proverbial in Polish.

“I'd long wondered,” writer Ammon Shea recently mused, “why it was that people seemingly felt an irresistible urge to write in with corrections for dictionaries—until I began reading the
OED
and realized what a powerful urge I have, when I find a mistake in the dictionary, to share it with someone… . When I find a simple typo, I get a feeling of minor triumph. When I find something more substantial, such as a misspelled word, I begin to think I should set about applying for a professorship somewhere.”
6
A. J. Jacobs felt the same rush when he spotted a lapse in the most important English-language encyclopedia, as he did “maybe once every four hundred pages” when he read the
Britannica
: “I feel like the middling student with a C average who has somehow busted the smartest kid in the class as he was writing an equation on the blackboard. I still remember fondly when I discovered that the entry on Dvur Kralove, a Czech city, had a backward quotation mark.”
7

Many are convinced that Wikipedia, prepared without the benefit of paid and carefully selected experts, is loaded with errors, though the evidence is mixed. Admittedly, “Wikipedia vandals” sometimes intentionally introduce errors out of a mischievous sense of fun: “On January 11, 2008,” Nicholson Baker observes, “the entire fascinating entry on the aardvark was replaced with ‘one ugly animal'; in February the aardvark was briefly described as a ‘medium-sized inflatable banana.' ”
8
When Wikipedia entries begin suffering from too many vandals, as when the late-night television comic Stephen Colbert puckishly urged his viewers to spread the misinformation that wild elephant populations were growing, administrators will “protect” them, and only trusted Wikipedians are permitted to revise them until the vandals have grown bored and turned their attention elsewhere.

Still, people are convinced that an encyclopedia prepared entirely by volunteers will be riddled with howlers. But a study carried out by the journal
Nature
compared Wikipedia to the most recent
Britannica
by surveying scientific articles and found no significant differences in the number of errors.
9
Britannica was not happy. “Almost everything about the journal's investigation,” they said in a press release, “from the criteria
for identifying inaccuracies to the discrepancy between the article text and its headline, was wrong and misleading. Dozens of inaccuracies attributed to the
Britannica
were not inaccuracies at all, and a number of the articles
Nature
examined were not even in the
Encyclopædia Britannica
. The study was so poorly carried out and its findings so error-laden that it was completely without merit.” The debate continues.

CHAPTER
10

GUARDING THE AVENUES OF LANGUAGE

Dictionaries in the Eighteenth Century

By the European Middle Ages, there were dictionaries in great profusion—but hardly any of them addressed the languages people actually spoke. Medieval dictionaries were mostly in Latin, the language of the Church, the language of the law, and the language of scholarship. No one thought a dictionary of Spanish, Swedish, or Dutch worthwhile. By the sixteenth century, though, interest in vernacular languages had begun to grow. Not coincidentally, this was also a time when national identities were coming into focus and the modern nation-state was being invented. People who once thought of themselves as Bourguignons, Lyonnais, or Bordelais started thinking of themselves as French; Prussians, Saxons, and Westphalians were becoming German. These nations defined themselves linguistically: a nation was a group of people sharing a language.

Starting around the year 1500 a few lexicographers began to treat the modern languages, at least tentatively. The
Universal vocabulario en latín y en romance
—Latin entries, Spanish definitions—was published in Seville by Alfonso de Palencia in 1490, and two years later Antono de Nebrija’s important
Diccionarium latinum–hispanum et hispanum–latinum
appeared in Salamanca, making possible translation in both directions between Spanish and Latin. It was a substantial work, with nearly twelve thousand entries. An even more significant work came in 1611, when Sebastián de Covarrubias y Orozco published his
Tesoro de la
lengua castellana o española
.
1
Still, Covarrubias himself did not create a nationwide consciousness of the language; that had to wait until the Spanish Royal Academy published its
Diccionario de la lengua castellana
, better known as the
Diccionario de autoridades
, between 1726 and 1739. It drew its material from the greatest Spanish writers (the
autoridades
, or “authorities”).
2

The process was much the same in Italy. An Italian dictionary,
Memoriale della lingua
, published by Giacomo Pergamini in 1602, has been called “the very first dictionary of definitions dealing with a modern language to be published in Europe.”
3
The most important early seventeenth-century dictionary in Europe, though, was the work of another academy, the Accademia della Crusca, which began work in Florence in 1583. The result of the academicians’ efforts was the five-volume
Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca
in 1612. The
Vocabolario
is self-consciously literary in its orientation: the quotations are drawn from a canon of great Italian writers, especially Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, all from Tuscany, the privileged center of Italianness. No longer a debased modern form of Latin, Italian was now a living language in its own right, capable of expressing everything the classical languages could. The
Vocabolario
became the basis of Italian lexicography for three centuries: new editions continued appearing as late as 1923, and even today the standard Italian dictionary traces its origins back to the Accademia.

The most important academic dictionary of all time, though, was that of the Académie Française, the greatest of the national academies then and now. It had its birth in the informal Paris salons of the early seventeenth century. Some of the most famous were held at the fashionable Hôtel de Rambouillet, near the Louvre, where Mme de Rambouillet established a forum in which men and women could discuss books and politics rather than gossip and scandal. News of these gatherings made their way to Cardinal Richelieu, who thought that the French state should recognize linguistic excellence in some official capacity. In January 1635, therefore, the chancellor of France drew up the letters patent establishing the Académie as an official body. No longer merely
a club of like-minded amateurs, it was now an official body sanctioned by the crown. It has remained in operation, interrupted only by the French Revolution, ever since.
4

The early members had much in common. They were required by charter to be “of good manners, of good reputation, of good spirit, and suitable for academic functions.”
5
Within a few years, the Académie established strict rules for membership. The number of members would be fixed at forty, and they would serve from the time of their appointment until their death—the lifetime term gave them the nickname
les Immortels
. Over the centuries the members of the Académie have been some of the most distinguished French intellectuals. Early members included some of the brightest lights of France. Although the
Immortels
have included a few political radicals, the organization itself has been deeply conservative in its operation. The fair sex were excluded: no woman was admitted as one of the forty
Immortels
until 1980, more than a third of a millennium after the founding of the Académie. Still, the list of members over the centuries is a who’s-who of French cultural life: Pierre Corneille, Jean Racine, François Fénelon, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Alexandre Dumas fils, Victor Hugo, Alexis de Tocqueville, Prosper Mérimée, Louis Pasteur, Paul Valéry, Eugène Ionesco, Fernand Braudel, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jean Cocteau, Jacques Cousteau, Marguerite Yourcenar, and Marc Fumaroli have numbered among the immortals.