“An end to timidity – the replacement of the philologically tentative by the lexicographically decisive.”

You’d think in a non-fiction book about a professor, a madman and the dictionary, that the driest parts would be about the dictionary. Instead, those parts fascinated me while the biographical information about its two main creators bored me to tears.

“In the sixteenth century in England, dictionaries such as we would recognize today simply did not exist. If the language that so inspired Shakespeare had limits, if its words had definable origins, spellings, pronunciations, meanings—then no single book existed that established them, defined them, and set them down.”

It’s hard to imagine a world with dictionaries, but that was pretty much the case until the Oxford English Dictionary came around in the 1880s. Prior to that point, a few collections of definitions did exist, but tended to contain only unusual or highly specialized words. It wasn’t until the Philological Society set out to create a list of every single word, with standardized spellings and meanings, that the dictionary as we know it know began to exist.

In charge of this project was Professor James Murray. He had dozens of people working beneath him, who all collected and sorted definitions that anyone could send in to be published. Their main requirement was a line of text from an actual published work to back up the definition. The madman in the title of this book was W.C. Minor, a “criminal lunatic” who sent in tens of thousands of words.

The parts about the dictionary — the way it came about, how words get defined, how it impacted society — were really interesting, but the book on the whole was very dry, and focused way too much on Murray and Minor.