Monday 11 July 2011

Jekyll and Hyde: icons of lexicography



My researches into the Jekyll and Hyde manuscript papers pertaining to their collaboration on the Dictionary have uncovered that one of the sharpest disagreements between them (their relationship was not always harmonious) was prompted by their definition of iconic. When Dr Jekyll asked whether Mr Hyde wished to add anything to his own innocuous definition, ‘Of or pertaining to an icon’, the latter replied that, since an icon was defined as a portrait or representation of a sacred personage, an educated man had no more use for the word ‘iconic’ than for ‘portraitic’ and that it had no proper place in a respectable lexicon. When Jekyll, clearly a little exasperated by such truculence, ventured to observe that on such a principle most of Hyde’s definitions were redundant, and that they had resolved to be prescriptive more in the framing of their definitions than in their range of words included, the latter relented and provided the second definition of the entry that I have just added to my excerpts from their Dictionary.