You Could Look It Up (50 page)

Brewer excluded most Greek and Latin fables because they were too well known, focusing instead on “Scandinavian and other mythology, bogie-land and fairy-land, ghouls and gnomes, and a legion of character-words, such as
Bumbledom
and
Podsnappery
,
Lilliputian
and
Utopian
.”
14
Biblical allusions feature regularly: “Mammon. The god of this world. The word in Syriac means riches.”
Sowing wild oats
(alphabetized under
oats
) was explained as “He has left off his gay habits and is become steady.” The entries often underscored the origin of familiar phrases:
A1
, for instance, “means first-rate—the very best. In Lloyd’s Register of British and Foreign Shipping, the character of the ship’s hull is designated by
letters
, and that of the anchors, cables, and stores by figures. A 1 means hull first-rate, and also anchors, cables, and stores; A 2, hull first-rate, but furniture second-rate.” Always concerned about utility, Brewer provided guides to pronunciation, indicating accented syllables to save the inexperienced from embarrassment: “Bar´ becue (3 syl.). A West Indian dish, consisting of a hog roasted whole, stuffed with spice, and basted with Madeira wine. Any animal roasted whole is so called.”

The glory of the book is its marvelous heterogeneity—it packed with information of every sort. Why do we call the time after marriage a honeymoon? “So called from the practice of the ancient Teutons of drinking honey-wine (
hydromel
) for thirty-days after marriage. Attila, the Hun, indulged so freely in hydromel at his wedding-feast that he died.” If you come across “O.H.M.S.,” turn to Brewer and discover it means “On Her Majesty’s Service.” The derivation of the phrase “drinking out of the skulls of your enemy” makes sense of a gruesome-sounding
practice: actually, “This promise of our Scandinavian forefathers is not unfrequently misunderstood. Skull means a cup or dish; hence a person who washes up cups and dishes is called a scullery-maid.” Brewer enjoyed “reduplicated words”: “Chit-chat, click-clack, clitter-clatter, dilly-dally, ding-dong, drip-drop, eye-peep, fal-lal, fiddle-faddle, flip-flop,” and so on, through “higgledy-piggledy,” “namby-pamby,” “pell-mell,” “roly-poly,” “tip-top,” and “wishy-washy.” Regarding dwarfs, he wrote:

The most remarkable are:

Phile´tas, a poet (contemporary with Hippoc´ratës), so small “that he wore leaden shoes to prevent being blown away by the wind.” (Died B.C. 280.)

Niceph´orus Calistus tells us of an Egyptian dwarf not bigger than a partridge.

Ariśtratos, the poet, was so small that Athenæ´os says
no one could see him
.

Sir Geoffrey Hudson, born at Oakham, in Rutlandshire, at the age of thirty was only eighteen inches in height. (1619–1678.)

Owen Farrel, the Irish dwarf, born at Ca´van, hideously ugly, but of enormous muscular strength. Height, three feet nine inches. (Died 1742.)

The reviews were gratifying. The
Daily Telegraph
declared that it “fills a decided gap in our instructive literature.” The
Standard
declared it “intrinsically good” and called it “a most valuable accession to every library.” The
Manchester Examiner
found it “well calculated to afford much pleasant and profitable employment.” Like the good Victorians they were, they often put the emphasis on utility: the
Daily Telegraph
called it “really a most useful volume”; the
Daily News
said it was “extremely useful and judiciously compiled”; the
Sheffield Independent
praised its “vast amount of useful information.”

Brewer planned his
Dictionary
as the first part of a trilogy, and he wrote two follow-ups at ten-year intervals: the
Reader’s Handbook
in 1880 and the
Historic Note-Book
in 1890. Both did well enough, but neither entered the pantheon of classic reference books. The
Dictionary
, though, did exceptionally well. After a number of so-called editions that
were really no more than reprints, Brewer released a revised edition in 1894, in which he got to restore some of the material he had left on the cutting-room floor—this time the book was a third longer than the first edition. By this year, sales of the
Dictionary
had passed a hundred thousand copies, and soon editions began being advertised as “110th Thousand,” “129th Thousand,” and so on, like the classic “Billions Served” signs at McDonald’s.

The high-minded purpose of these high-Victorian works comes through on every page. Bartlett and Brewer saw their works in nobly educative terms: they were bringing enlightenment to the masses. These books testify to the increasing prominence of an aspiring middle class—literate in a way their grandparents may not have been, able to buy at least a few improving books, but lacking the refinement and educational privilege of the to-the-manner-born aristocracy. Both Bartlett and Brewer were devout Christians, but they carried out their missionary endeavors with a Bible in one hand and a reference book in the other.

CHAPTER
19 ½

READING THE DICTIONARY

I have defined a reference book as one nobody reads from start to finish. The thought of
reading
a dictionary or encyclopedia strikes many as the height of absurdity, an emblem of futility. Business writer George S. Day, a professor at the Wharton School of Business, offers advice on “Converting Information into Strategic Knowledge,” and he begins by warning executives that “Simply packing the shared knowledge base with undigested information is about as useful as reading an encyclopedia cover to cover.”
1
Are You a Geek?
asks Tim Collins, offering
10
³
Ways to Find Out
. One of the signs: “You've read a dictionary cover to cover for pleasure.” (Worse still: “It was an Elvish or Klingon dictionary.”)
2
And yet some people, not all of them geeks,
have
read dictionaries and encyclopedias from cover to cover—or, since many of these works are in multiple volumes, from cover to cover to cover to cover to cover to cover …

Some people have to read them. When Robert Burchfield was commissioned to supplement the
Oxford English Dictionary
, he began by reading the whole thing through—all thirteen volumes, all 15,490 pages, all 1,827,306 quotations, all 178 miles of type. It is more text than many people will read in a lifetime, but the only way Burchfield could prepare himself to be editor.

Others read dictionaries and encyclopedias when they have time on their hands. George Eliot's idealistic young doctor Tertius Lydgate, for instance, was such a passionate reader in his youth that he would go through “any sort of book that he could lay his hands on: if it were Rasselas or Gulliver, so much the better, but Bailey's Dictionary would do,” and when bored “he took down a dusty row of volumes with gray-paper backs and dingy labels—the volumes of an old Cyclopaedia.”
3
And Bertolt Brecht, in his
Threepenny Novel
, wrote of the ridiculous George Fewkoombey, who amuses himself with a tattered volume of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
he found in a lavatory.

Others have even more time—time that has been forced upon them. When Nicolas Fréret, an eighteenth-century French scholar, was confined in the Bastille, he “was permitted only to have Bayle for his companion”—Pierre Bayle's
Dictionnaire historique et critique
.
4
Two centuries later, while Malcolm X sat in prison, he, too, read a dictionary. Frustrated by his limited vocabulary—“Every book I picked up had sentences that contained anywhere from one to nearly all the words that might as well have been in Chinese”—he resolved to do something about it. “I saw that the best thing I could do was get hold of a dictionary.” After two days of “riffling uncertainly through the dictionary's pages,” he

began copying. In my slow, painstaking, ragged handwriting, I copied into my tablet everything printed on that first page, down to the punctuation marks.

I believe it took me a day. Then, aloud, I read back, to myself, everything I'd written on the tablet. Over and over, aloud, to myself, I read my own handwriting.
5

The next day he moved on to the next page, and before he knew it he had reached the end of the letter
A
and the end of his notebook. Rather than stopping, he found another tablet and kept going. “That was the way,” he wrote, “I started copying what eventually became the entire dictionary.”

And some read dictionaries for the intellectual challenge. Historian William Robertson, a friend of Samuel Johnson, was a fan of his largest book; Johnson was “pleased … to be told by Dr. Robertson, that he had read his Dictionary twice over.”
6
When the young Robert Browning “was definitely to adopt literature as his profession,” wrote a nineteenth-century biographer, “he qualified himself for it by reading and digesting the whole of Johnson's Dictionary.”
7
Later he told James Murray that he planned to do the same with the
Oxford English Dictionary
—but Browning died not long after
A
was published.

Many great writers have been great readers of reference books. Walt Whitman was “an avid reader of dictionaries, which he realized were the compost heap of all English-language literature, the place where all the elements of literature, broken down, were preserved… . The nation's unwritten poems lay dormant in that massive heap of words.”
8
Leo Tolstoy loved encyclopedias, and his diary included a resolution in February 1851: “To rise at 9; to occupy myself with the Encyclopædia of Law”—Constantine Alexeyevich Nevolin's
Encyclopædia of Jurisprudence
, which he read every morning from eight until noon and again from six until nightfall. His letters and diaries are full of dictionaries, encyclopedias, and Greek lexicons. The Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti “went through
Webster's Unabridged Dictionary
, cover to cover, with particular attention to etymologies.”
9
No reader of Jorge Luis Borges, creator of the fantastic “Chinese encyclopedia” called
Celestial Empire of Benevolent Knowledge
, will be surprised by his reminiscence of reading
Britannica
and “the German encyclopedias of Brockhaus or of Meyer” when he was a child,
10
and Vladimir Nabokov kept a dictionary on his bedside table, passing insomniac nights by turning its pages.
11
Aldous Huxley was another
Britannica
reader; he took a complete twelfth edition with him on holiday. Bertrand Russell recalled, “It was the only book that ever influenced Huxley. You could always tell by his conversation which volume he'd been reading. One day it would be Alps, Andes and Apennines, and the next it would be the Himalayas and the Hippocratic Oath.' ”
12
Even young Bill Gates read the 1960 edition of
The World Book Encyclopedia
nearly all the way through,
13
and Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales fondly remembers reading his parents' copy of
World Book
.
14

A few readers have simply been curious to the point of masochism; others have read for the sake of reading. The
Encyclopaedia Britannica
office routinely received letters along the lines of “Dear Sir, You will be interested to know that I have just finished reading every word in all the 24 volumes of the
Britannica
. I believe I am the first person who has ever done this.”
15
Making clear the magnitude of that task, A. J. Jacobs read the complete
Britannica
in a single year, and he reported on the experience in his book
The Know-It-All
. When the parcel arrived, Jacobs was overwhelmed by

the magnitude of my quest. I'm looking at 33,000 pages, 65,000 articles, 9,500 contributors, 24,000 images. I'm looking at thirty-two volumes, each one weighing in at a solid four pounds, each packed with those giant tissue-thin pages. The total: 44 million words.
16

To put 44 million words in perspective,
War and Peace
is only around 560,000 words, Shakespeare's collected works weigh in at 900,000 words, and you could read from Genesis to Revelation fifty-three times in a row in the time it would take you to read
Britannica
. As Jacobs immersed himself in the text, “the mind-blowing diversity of everything” made the biggest impression.
17
“It's the perfect book for someone like me,” he wrote, “who grew up with Peter Gabriel videos, who has the attention span of a gnat on methamphetamines. Each essay is a bite-sized nugget. Bored with Abilene, Texas? Here comes abolitionism. Tired of that? Not to worry, the Abominable Snowman's lurking right around the corner.”
18