A return to lexicography

I notice Messrs Jekyll and Hyde have painstakingly added a few more entries to their Dictionary.

A modern lexicographer: James Murray in Oxford



A word on lexicography



Caught in a web of words: James Murray, Oxford lexicographer



It would be a simple task to fill the Jekyll and Hyde Dictionary if the purpose were simply to point to words or phrases that had acquired annoyingly modish and vacuous usages, but that has never been the intention. The Dictionary attempts to identify words that in modern usage have simultaneously opposite or apparently conflicting meanings or connotations, neither of which we would wish to do without, but where we commonly have only one, or the other, in mind at any given time.

In that way it tries to illustrate a little the fascinating inter-relationship between thought and language, the ways in which each constricts or extends the other, and the ways in which we may enrich our thought by keeping alert to all the suggestions of the language we employ.

So the Dictionary is not intended as part of a campaign against annoying modern usages such as ‘going forward’ – and yet there is some area of overlap, and I wonder if it is entirely wise to tilt against some of the more serious examples of linguistic damage.

In a contribution I recently made to a furniture designer-makers’ forum I rather mocked the use of the word ‘iconic’ to describe a certain sort of design as the desired content of a future exhibition. The word has now sunk to the vocabulary of estate agents. It prompted me afterwards to search the Jekyll and Hyde papers and I found I was able to add another entry to my selection on this blog. It may or may not be connected to my mockery (but people are sensitive about these things) that the next post on that forum spoke of ‘major’ not ‘iconic’ pieces of furniture.

I suspect, however, that the contributor still has the same set of ideas in his head: he has merely sanitised his language. Words that embody concepts are used as shorthand, with a web of unarticulated ideas and thought assumptions behind them, mutually shared between author and reader or listener. ‘Iconic’ made a certain web clear, a web that exists, however much we may regret it, as a cultural phenomenon. To mock the word that identifiably expresses such debased thinking and to drive the ideas elsewhere, under cover of a less obviously perverted term such as ‘major’, may make the cultural assimilation of the web more likely.

Modish usages such as ‘iconic’ come with a pre-digested web of allusion; they are ponderous with stale meaning that has not life enough to interact with other words and phrases in the same discourse. That is what makes such terms so wearisome and annoying. Typically one follows another in a leaden accumulation. Such clotted thinking is addictive. At the opposite extreme lies Shakespearean language where startling coinages of words and usage interact with each other like quicksilver, each gaining its meaning from the context of the total expression. Meaning and thought is created by the new expression of language rather than words being press-ganged into the presentation of static and impoverished concepts.

pity, like a naked new-born babe, Striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubim, horsed Upon the sightless couriers of the air…

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.

Jekyll and Hyde Dictionary update



Harmless drudges: lexicographers at work



I continue to add entries I have salvaged from my first edition of this rare work. Anyone interested should look at the separate page on this blog from time to time.

"Globalisation's pull" - or push?

Writing in the New York Times ‘Intelligence’ column, under this title, Roger Cohen argues that ‘more globalisation is coming, whatever the reactions against it’, including those arising from the persistence of the ‘virulent’ nation state.

He cites the very recent suggestion by Jean-Claude Trichet, president of the European central bank, that there will be, in the foreseeable, if not quantifiable, future a European finance ministry empowered to set economic and fiscal policy in the seventeen eurozone states. To describe this, as he does, as a ‘radical’ proposal is to ignore its congruence with a long history of the gradual usurpation of formerly national powers by the EU. He is right to say that the euro was a ‘political project’ aiming to take Europe ‘a step closer to a United States of Europe’, but those propelling such projects have always misjudged their strategy, ignoring the extent to which such covert moves would stoke up resentment at the ‘democratic deficit’ at the heart of the EU and bolster nationalistic sentiments.

Whatever the logic of a European finance ministry to make sense of monetary union, there would seem to be no foreseeable chance of its making headway against not only popular but also governmental resistance. Indeed the tendency would seem to be towards the unravelling rather than the consolidation of monetary union in the EU. How many ‘peripheral’ countries now privately regret not having stood outside the euro like Britain?

Some observers would disagree with Roger Cohen and see the forces of globalisation as more of a virus than those of the nation state – in the speed and covertness with which it has spread, in the damage it has inflicted upon the host body, and in its immunity to antibiotics.

To argue, as he does, that the popular uprisings against corrupt governments in the middle east represent a ‘globalised’ popular sentiment against strictly ‘national’ corruption is surely stretching his thesis to breaking point. The popular movements may have been emboldened by successful uprisings in neighbouring countries, but they do not seem to have seen themselves as having a transnational identity. The idea of pan-Arabism was something fostered by autocrats, whilst they not only bolstered their personal control of the nation’s people and resources, in defiance of nationally accountable institutions, but personally profited to huge and corrupt extent, with the willing collaboration of foreign powers (mainly western democracies), global corporations and finance houses. It was not the people of Saudi Arabia who benefited from the financial ‘arrangements’ with BAE Systems, so nimbly protected from legal scrutiny by Tony Blair.

Most of the popularly driven national political developments in recent decades have been against the tide of supra-national consolidation, towards more ‘national’ states that their peoples feel can be made more answerable to their will and wishes, or that are simply less sclerotic as social organisations – in the UK, the Soviet Union, the former Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, the Sudan, and China itself not immune.

Globalising institutions are of course different beasts to supra-national states, but ultimately they may answer to the same popular demands. Ultimately all systems have to manipulate people. The supranational powers of the IMF, the WTO and even the EU, and the like, have been won covertly without popular consent or even sometimes awareness. They are usually strongly allied in their interests with globalised trade and finance – and so we return to Greece and the eurozone. In many cases these interests and institutions are coming under severe strain from diverging individual national interests, governmental as well as popular and political elites will at some point recognise that their interests do not for ever coincide with those of financial elites.

Finally, I would agree with Roger Cohen that the universal appette for the fruits of technology does promote globalisation, although the picture chosen (perhaps not by him) to illustrate his article, of two women on Segways passing a protest camp in Madrid, is to me suggestive of the thought that such appetite may at some point come to seem relatively feeble.

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde's Dictionary

In his celebrated Dictionary, Dr Johnson famously provided some definitions in which he both exercised his wit and reflected his personal experience. Thus a lexicographer is ‘a harmless drudge’, a patron ‘commonly a wretch who supports with insolence and is paid with flattery’, and a pension ‘is generally understood to mean pay given to a state hireling for treason to his country’.

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, whose lexicographical collaboration is sadly little known, regrettably overshadowed perhaps by their other activities, were never able quite to agree on the legitimacy of such indulgence. They finally resolved their disagreement by dividing their work with Dr Jekyll providing the neutrally accurate definition and Mr Hyde adding to the entries in a way which displayed his more acerbic character, often as much in the choice of particular usages defined as in the definitions themselves.

I have posted on a separate page of this blog some examples of their joint work which I believe have a particular relevance to our own times. I may add to them from time to time.