Anthony Burgess, author of A Clockwork Orange, spoke several languages, from Spanish to Malay, Italian to Maltese, with Urdu puns and Hindi idiom also peppering his books. Even Nadsat, the language he coined for his citric classic, was a hybrid of Russian, Arabic and Cockney slang.
Yet English was his beloved monster, his cradle tongue limber in 33 novels, ten non-fiction works and countless articles. I remember reading Earthly Powers (Hutchison, 1980), all 678 pages when Eurailing, reeling at the surplus of alien words – from odalisque to baldachin. Anthony Burgess spoke English like Beethoven played piano.
Never-ending raggedness – how I love that phrase. It’s why I cherish English and all her nuances.
Which is why Robert Burchfield, the Oxford Dictionary’s chief editor during the 1970s, was sweating bullets. An expat Kiwi, Burchfield had devoted 15 years to updating the original Oxford, issuing some 3000 pages via four supplement volumes, from 1972 to 1986, fretting over how Burgess – the era’s darling linguist – would respond as critic.
He didn’t need to worry. Burgess gushed in his review, applauding the Oxford gnomes for mining the zeitgeist. New words teemed the glossary, across electronics (bar code, dot matrix) and society (herstory, yuppie), food (chocoholic, vegeburger) and politics (mission statement, charm offensive). Burchfield was so relieved he wrote to Burgess in 1986:
“You have a perfect awareness of the never-ending raggedness, stretching away into darkness, of our language at the perimeter of what we can manage to put in our largest dictionaries.”
Never-ending raggedness – how I love that phrase. It’s why I cherish English and all her nuances, the gaps and imprecisions, her muddied ancestry and restless spirit, the exotica and esoterica. How can something so alluvial be so robust? I adore how alchemists like Burgess can turn her ore into awe, while auditors like Burchfield have the right bravado to measure her infinity.
Transputor, lookism, slumpflation – not every supplement entry qualified for the future. But most did. In his own book, Unlocking The English Language (Faber, 1989), Burchfield shares the dilemmas (Pythonesque – yes, but Ibsenity – no), the suffix overload (essayette, poolathon), the grammar pickles and trademark debates.
The correspondences too, from thanking Burgess to helping producers of Agatha Christie’s play, The Mousetrap. Or was it The Mouse-Trap? Or The Mouse Trap? (“Dear Sir, please advise.“) One word, no hyphen, decreed the chief editor, popping his response into the post: another day tidying the endless raggedness.
Al Grassby also appears in Burchall’s memoir. In 1976, as Australia’s commissioner for community relations, Grassby demanded the withdrawal of the Australian Pocket Oxford, due to its inclusion of wog, wop and dago. The argument sat heavily with Burchfield, whose own tomes faced equal flak for definitions of Pakistan or Palestinian. Correction slips could only cover so many ideological slips. Such disputes embody the dictionary paradox, where any lexicon as much a parrot of how people use language as an authority.
Speaking of parrots, Julian Barnes once worked at the Oxford, the eventual author of Flaubert’s Parrot, who quit the gig after three years, owing to a single word. As Barnes recollected: “You know [this word] exists but after three weeks of continuous searching there is still no trace: Germy. It is as if germy had vanished into thin air…”
Search engines and online archives would later accelerate any verbal quest, the same resources set to outdate much of Burchfield’s labour. Only last month the Oxford announced the inclusion of burner phone and vaxxed, demisexual and trigger warning; the raggedness never rests. No matter how diligently the lexicographers hoard, English will continue shape-shifting like bezoomy (Nadsat for crazy). Not a word, not yet – but just wait.
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