[Intro: Joshua]
If there is a God of Music
I want to give you a hug of gratitude Hey, ho
Ooh, no
Hey, ho
[Verse 1: DK, Hoshi, Vernon, S.Coups]
A universal language
Different alphabets, but no matter as long as there’s music Wecan’t communicate with words, but with music We can be best friends from now on
We've just met but we can dance together
We can mix it up right, sugar and spice
Brass sound and guitar Anything with four syllables, they say it’s my name
Kung chi pak chi, is that my name, too?
Is this sound also for me?
Kick snare, drum bass, piano, bass line
[Pre-Chorus: Wonwoo, Mingyu, Seungkwan]
What is our happiness
Don’t fret, let’s just dance and sing
This is our happiness
One morе time, hey Music is our breath
No dangеr here, keep taking it in Everybody, let’s listen up
[Chorus: Jeonghan, Dino, THE8]
If there is a God of Music
This is a message for you Gatherone note after the other, mm Dance and sing, this feels amazing
[Post-Chorus: Vernon, Jun]
Kung chi pak chi kung kung chi pak chi yeah
Kung chi pak chi kung kung chi pak chi yeah
Kung chi pak chi kung kung chi pak chi yeah Happiness is now
[Verse 2: Dino, Woozi]
Think about it, even noise is music to us
We each live by our own boom and pow Even the ants’ footsteps march in harmony, ooh
[Pre-Chorus: Jun, Seungkwan, DK]
What is our happiness
Don’t fret, let’s just dance and sing
This is our happiness (One more time, hey) Music is our breath
No danger here, keep taking it in Everybody, let’s listen up
[Chorus: Woozi, Seungkwan, Jeonghan]
If there is a God of Music
This is a message for you Gather every single note, mm Dance and sing, this feels amazing
[Post-Chorus: THE8, Hoshi]
Kung chi pak chi kung kung chi pak chi yeah Kung chi pak chi kung kung chi pak chi yeah
Kung chi pak chi kung kung chi pak chi yeah If there is a God of Music
[Bridge]
SEVENTEEN to the world
The whole world sing in unison
[Outro: S.Coups, Wonwoo]
Kung chi pak chi kung kung chi pak chi yeah
Kung chi pak chi kung kung chi pak chi yeah
Kung chi pak chi kung kung chi pak chi yeah
If there is a God of Music
In 2003, toward the end of John Paul’s pontificate, I received one of the greatest honors in my life.
I never met St. John Paul II personally, although during his visits to my native Poland and at European Youth Day in Italy in 1995 I saw him several times at a close distance. But it never crossed my mind that I would yet “meet” him in a way that I could never have imagined.
John Paul II has always been a part of my life, just like many other Poles born in the 1970s. When we became conscious of the reality around us, he was already pope, and he continued in his papal service until we moved well into adulthood. So on the one hand, we sort of took him for granted; and on the other, we all felt his constant presence in our daily lives. To us, he was not only a messenger of God in his capacity of the successor of St. Peter, and so a spiritual mentor, the highest moral authority, but also a great father figure, beloved by the young and the old alike, and a national hero, respected even by those with little regard for the Catholic Church. When we still struggled behind the Iron Curtain drawn over Poland by Soviet Russia, he was our best advocate in the free world, an advocate also for our liberty — a very successful one, as history proved later.
In 2003, toward the end of the Holy Father’s pontificate, I received one of the greatest honors in my life. I had done some language work for the Polish section of the Secretariat of State at the Vatican, and I was asked to translate the Holy Father’s apostolic exhortation Pastores Gregis (The Shepherds of the Flock). Originally written in Italian, it needed to be rendered into Polish. Later, I was also given the job of translating his “Letter to Priests” for Holy Thursday 2004. The work was not easy, especially in the case of the exhortation, which is a very formal document, but it was most certainly worth every effort.
The “Letter to Priests” was my last translation for the Vatican. In October 2004, I was diagnosed with cancer, and my life changed practically overnight. At the time, I was employed as a translator by the Polish branch of an Italian automotive company and, thankfully, I was allowed to work from home (in those days, home office was rarely considered an option). My treatment, extending over several months and including chemotherapy and radiotherapy, had its ups and downs. I was still in touch with the director of the Polish section at the Vatican, a close cooperator of John Paul II, and at one point he told me that he was going to place a card with my name on the Holy Father’s kneeler, along with other similar intentions. Needless to say, I was speechless. Soon afterward, John Paul II returned to the Father’s House, and, a few months later, I was declared cancer-free.
As I was slowly returning to a more stable daily routine, I wanted to find a way to express my gratitude to the Holy Father. Around that time, “Papal Day” was celebrated in Poland in commemoration of his election to the See of Peter. It is organized annually by the Work of the New Millennium Foundation, created in 2000 as a “living monument” to the Pope, in response to his concern about many families driven into poverty. The foundation aims to help talented young people from low-income families with their education, as well as to promote the Polish pope’s teaching and Christian culture in general.
I wanted to contribute to this great “mosaic” of nationwide help inspired by gratitude toward St. John Paul II, but my financial situation did not allow me to go beyond a modest offering. When I asked a vicar at my parish for advice, he surprised me with an idea that had not occurred to me. Knowing that I had provided private tutoring in English for many years, he suggested that I find some time to offer free lessons to a young person who cannot afford them. I followed his advice; and with his help, I contacted a family in our parish. For more than a year, I was helping two siblings who had English at school but needed extra help. And I experienced the simple truth that a gift often enriches the giver even more than the receiver. To this day, I remember the joy I felt every time my young students showed improvement and brought home better grades.
Nearly 20 years after those events, I am being granted another extraordinary honor. Just like before, it has come along through a chain of amazing and unpredictable “coincidences” or, rather, “God-incidences,” that I am contributing to the National Catholic Register. It is so beautiful to witness how God leads us through the tangled paths of our lives, often through years of failed hopes and broken dreams, and then, in a sudden flash of his grace, we receive something that surpasses those hopes and dreams, and we realize how perfectly all the puzzles of our daily joys and sorrows fit together.
As John Paul II encouraged: “I plead with you – never, ever give up on hope, never doubt, never tire, and never become discouraged.”
I am convinced that St. John Paul II has once again carried me in his prayer.
Kelly Dudek is a passionate philologist, fascinated by the nature of language as well as the language of nature, which makes The Lord of the Rings her all-time favorite book. She received her M.A. in English philology at the Jagiellonian University and complemented it with a course in journalism at the Pontifical University of John Paul II, both in Kraków, Poland. A translator and editor for Carmelite Publishing, she has volunteered at multilingual events like World Youth Day and the European Youth Meeting. Her publications include poetry and prose in the Catholic weekly Niedziela and a weekly column in her parish newsletter. Most recently, she managed international communications for the Family Pastoral Care Foundation, helping Ukrainian refugees.
In 2003, toward the end of John Paul’s pontificate, I received one of the greatest honors in my life.
I never met St. John Paul II personally, although during his visits to my native Poland and at European Youth Day in Italy in 1995 I saw him several times at a close distance. But it never crossed my mind that I would yet “meet” him in a way that I could never have imagined.
John Paul II has always been a part of my life, just like many other Poles born in the 1970s. When we became conscious of the reality around us, he was already pope, and he continued in his papal service until we moved well into adulthood. So on the one hand, we sort of took him for granted; and on the other, we all felt his constant presence in our daily lives. To us, he was not only a messenger of God in his capacity of the successor of St. Peter, and so a spiritual mentor, the highest moral authority, but also a great father figure, beloved by the young and the old alike, and a national hero, respected even by those with little regard for the Catholic Church. When we still struggled behind the Iron Curtain drawn over Poland by Soviet Russia, he was our best advocate in the free world, an advocate also for our liberty — a very successful one, as history proved later.
In 2003, toward the end of the Holy Father’s pontificate, I received one of the greatest honors in my life. I had done some language work for the Polish section of the Secretariat of State at the Vatican, and I was asked to translate the Holy Father’s apostolic exhortation Pastores Gregis (The Shepherds of the Flock). Originally written in Italian, it needed to be rendered into Polish. Later, I was also given the job of translating his “Letter to Priests” for Holy Thursday 2004. The work was not easy, especially in the case of the exhortation, which is a very formal document, but it was most certainly worth every effort.
The “Letter to Priests” was my last translation for the Vatican. In October 2004, I was diagnosed with cancer, and my life changed practically overnight. At the time, I was employed as a translator by the Polish branch of an Italian automotive company and, thankfully, I was allowed to work from home (in those days, home office was rarely considered an option). My treatment, extending over several months and including chemotherapy and radiotherapy, had its ups and downs. I was still in touch with the director of the Polish section at the Vatican, a close cooperator of John Paul II, and at one point he told me that he was going to place a card with my name on the Holy Father’s kneeler, along with other similar intentions. Needless to say, I was speechless. Soon afterward, John Paul II returned to the Father’s House, and, a few months later, I was declared cancer-free.
As I was slowly returning to a more stable daily routine, I wanted to find a way to express my gratitude to the Holy Father. Around that time, “Papal Day” was celebrated in Poland in commemoration of his election to the See of Peter. It is organized annually by the Work of the New Millennium Foundation, created in 2000 as a “living monument” to the Pope, in response to his concern about many families driven into poverty. The foundation aims to help talented young people from low-income families with their education, as well as to promote the Polish pope’s teaching and Christian culture in general.
I wanted to contribute to this great “mosaic” of nationwide help inspired by gratitude toward St. John Paul II, but my financial situation did not allow me to go beyond a modest offering. When I asked a vicar at my parish for advice, he surprised me with an idea that had not occurred to me. Knowing that I had provided private tutoring in English for many years, he suggested that I find some time to offer free lessons to a young person who cannot afford them. I followed his advice; and with his help, I contacted a family in our parish. For more than a year, I was helping two siblings who had English at school but needed extra help. And I experienced the simple truth that a gift often enriches the giver even more than the receiver. To this day, I remember the joy I felt every time my young students showed improvement and brought home better grades.
Nearly 20 years after those events, I am being granted another extraordinary honor. Just like before, it has come along through a chain of amazing and unpredictable “coincidences” or, rather, “God-incidences,” that I am contributing to the National Catholic Register. It is so beautiful to witness how God leads us through the tangled paths of our lives, often through years of failed hopes and broken dreams, and then, in a sudden flash of his grace, we receive something that surpasses those hopes and dreams, and we realize how perfectly all the puzzles of our daily joys and sorrows fit together.
As John Paul II encouraged: “I plead with you – never, ever give up on hope, never doubt, never tire, and never become discouraged.”
I am convinced that St. John Paul II has once again carried me in his prayer.
Kelly Dudek is a passionate philologist, fascinated by the nature of language as well as the language of nature, which makes The Lord of the Rings her all-time favorite book. She received her M.A. in English philology at the Jagiellonian University and complemented it with a course in journalism at the Pontifical University of John Paul II, both in Kraków, Poland. A translator and editor for Carmelite Publishing, she has volunteered at multilingual events like World Youth Day and the European Youth Meeting. Her publications include poetry and prose in the Catholic weekly Niedziela and a weekly column in her parish newsletter. Most recently, she managed international communications for the Family Pastoral Care Foundation, helping Ukrainian refugees.
If you’re a geriatric millennial, as I am, the news that Lost in Translation is 20 years old will probably make you feel, simply, geriatric. When you think about it, though, the plot feels its age. An overprivileged middle-aged man (grumpy about earning $2m for a week’s work in Japan) having an affair in a five-star hotel with an overprivileged woman half his age (fresh out of Yale, cadging a free ride to Tokyo from her celeb photographer boyfriend) hardly screams Hollywood zeitgeist in 2023. Bill Murray is no longer the cool ironic choice for a younger generation, but a problematic old man, and when Lost in Translation was made, he was 52, feasibly old enough to be Scarlett Johansson’s grandfather; “Charlotte” is placed in her 20s, but the actor was just 17 at the time of filming. Not to mention the scenes in the movie in which Japanese people are mocked and reduced to such an extent I can’t believe director Sofia Coppola let the actors carry them out: “short and sweet – very Japanese”, Murray’s Bob Harris patronises after a brief greeting by his business associates, and, after seeing Charlotte’s bruised toe, suggests serving it up in a restaurant; “in this country? Somebody’s gotta prefer a black toe – haaa brack toe!”. Just a couple of cringey moments amid a litany of “Japanese people are small and can’t pronounce English” jokes.
Lost in Translation is, however, more than the sum of its parts and, try as I might, I cannot un-love it. As a child, I was lifted from a terrace house in Sheffield and transplanted to Tokyo for the best part of a year during its infamous bubble economy of the late 80s, when my dad had a role in the Japanese tour of Starlight Express, and the culture shock in the film rings true. As in Lost in Translation, we were given Japan’s five-star treatment, and surrounded by a veneer of subservience which, actually, concealed a quiet power. “Charm,” as the psychologist and author Kevin Dutton once wrote, “is the ability to roll out a red carpet for those you cannot stand in order to fast-track them, as smoothly and efficiently as possible, in the direction you want them to go.” In the end it’s Harris’s Japanese colleagues who get what they want. The 20th anniversary of Lost in Translation has prompted some grappling with the recent past, taken me down a generational rabbit hole back to the decade in which I came of age, and back to Japan with my Konica 35mm film compact, to peer behind the curtain of Sofia Coppola’s magnum opus.
I’d been keeping an eye on the 2000s for a while, wondering when they would begin to assume a shape, like the 80s, or the 90s, did, and there is now enough distance to recognise the contours of a decade that began with 9/11 and ended in a global financial crisis. Think about the humongous sociopolitical shifts since the film’s UK premiere in October 2003. Back then, MySpace was a month old, Tony Blair was halfway through his second term as prime minister and seven months into the Iraq war, R Kelly’s Ignition (Remix) remained one of the most played tracks in nightclubs, and Vladimir Putin may have been toying with the idea of Russia joining Nato. If I was still subconsciously associating Coppola’s Oscar-winning breakthrough with all things youthful, subcultural and hip, its portentous birthday was my wake-up call. People don’t call things hip any more, for a start, and the hipster, so personified in its proto-iteration by Scarlett Johansson as Charlotte, is a decidedly 00s phenomenon.
Lost in Translation appeared in the first half of a decade in which the left had power and lost touch, and gen Xers who’d modelled themselves as countercultural drifters and ravers in the 90s sold out and bought up east London, to let at inflated prices to the generation who missed the boat, us millennials. Multiculturalism wasn’t a dirty word then, and while the year 2000 promised a new dawn of peace in an increasingly globalised planet, it grossly failed to deliver. By the end of the decade it seemed to me, a young man then in his 20s, that the world was in ruins. The failures in those years, while we were averting our eyes and reading Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist, listening to Chilled Ibiza and Air’s Talkie Walkie, paved the way for the dystopia that was to follow: the crippling age of austerity, Trump, Brexit, the Windrush scandal, Covid, growing awareness of the climate crisis, the war in Ukraine, the fractures on social media, mumble rap.
Conversely, perhaps it’s precisely this sagging weight of 20 disappointing years that makes Lost in Translation as compelling as ever. The late scholar Mark Fisher pinpointed the year he believed the future died as 2003, the year the film was released. “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world,” he wrote, “than the end of capitalism.” According to Fisher, the 2006 film Children of Men, which is set two decades into the future and depicts a society in which no children have been born for 20 years, is really asking: “What happens if the young are no longer capable of producing surprises?” And by the “young”, he means my generation of apolitical, celebrity-obsessed zombies whose only rebellion was to reach outside our era to obscure references of the past and wear them on a T-shirt. Its sterility was summed up well by the critic Mark Greif, who wrote, of the era of the hipster: “It did not yield great literature, but it made good use of fonts.” The thing is, as a generation we knew things were shit (there was even a book published in 2005 called Is It Just MeOr Is Everything Shit?The Encyclopedia of Modern Life), but anything that kicked against the prevailing system was swallowed up by it; the 2000s were the age of “Che [Guevara] chic”, activists jobbing as corporate diversity consultants, and music genres formerly born of protest transfigured into Lily Allen’s ironic, reggae-tinged mockney 50 Cent cover Nan You’re a Window Shopper.
It’s a dramatic and depressing thought, but for me, Lost in Translation represents the death of the future; the last time I remember seeing something that genuinely surprised me. It didn’t scream newness, or protest, but the subtly transgressive configuration of ingredients produced something the world had never seen before. It was the understated apex of a great flourishing of gen X genius that runs through a postmodern collection of films as wide-ranging as Donnie Darko, One Hour Photo, Kill Bill 1 and 2, Fight Club, Memento, anything that Gaspar Noé, Michel Gondry or Spike Jonze made, Amélie, American Beauty and American Psycho. Whatever you think of those films, they turned audience expectations upside down.
The director of photography on Lost in Translation (and Being John Malkovich and Adaptation) was Lance Acord. He tells me that, comparing the amazing array of creativity in cinema in the five years between 1999 and 2004 with the output of the past five years, it’s difficult not to find the current era lacking. “But it’s hard for me to fit Lost in Translation into the context of the early 2000s, or any period, or genre. It’s timeless. For me, as a cinematographer, what was so special about filming it was how Sofia conceived the story visually. When she makes films she has a series of individual images in her head that define the narrative; she doesn’t rely on dialogue or plot devices but communicates what characters are feeling with a specific cinematic language. It is a different form of storytelling, and it was incredibly satisfying to capture one of her visions on film, like the image of Bill Murray sat on a bed in a yukata.”
It’s true that Sofia Coppola used none of the gimmicks of her male-heavy peer group, no mind-bending plot twists or avant-garde camera trickery. In fact, Acord tells me, it was shot mostly on an Aaton 35-III, a 35mm camera Jean-Luc Godard had commissioned with the brief that it fit into the glove box of his car – also handy for carrying around Tokyo streets at night discreetly. I still recall the shock of the new the first time I saw the bold opening shot, in which a Kevin Shields riff scores a closeup of Scarlett Johansson’s horizontal back in sheer pink underwear. I’m a similar age to Johansson, and though the shot was not entirely dissimilar to something you might have found in the infamous lad mags aimed at my demographic back then – Loaded, FHM, Nuts, Zoo – there was something about its colour palette and refinement that made it appear as if from another dimension. Coppola has said the shot was inspired by the 1970s hyperrealist paintings of John Kacere, but does just enough to subvert the male gaze implicit in those paintings and turn it into something distinctly feminine. The pink pants are slightly too big, the pale blue merino top slightly too casual and comfortable-looking, the body slightly too real, in a decade of thongs, touched-up tans, fake boobs, and size-zero waists, to code-signal to the fabricated male fantasy of the time.
Over email, Coppola tells me of another inspiration for this subtle, feminine mood: a young Japanese photographer who came to prominence in the 1990s called Hiromix. “She was a huge influence – it was before Instagram and snapshot culture, and it was so cool for me to see this intimate world of girls, the way she showed it, that I really related to.” Coppola echoes this in a new book, published by Mack, Sofia Coppola Archive: “[Japan] seemed to be a place where girl culture was dominant… I met Hiromix, and her photographs made a big impression on me… with all this in my head, I sat at my dining table at night back in Los Angeles and tried to pull together impressions that I thought could come together into a story for a film.”
I caught up with Hiromix this spring, in her leafy neighbourhood in Tokyo, and for her, remembering the turn of the century brought back mixed emotions. On the one hand, Japan had been in the economic doldrums after the bursting of the bubble economy, but this led to a changing of the guard – and a photography scene once dominated by older men with expensive cameras gave way to a younger generation of female photographers who created snapshot culture with cheap 35mm compacts. Known as onnanokoshashin, “girly photography”, it included artists such as Yurie Nagashima and Mika Ninagawa, but Hiromix was its megastar.
As we strolled the sakura-lined suburban backstreets taking photographs, we talked about the compact camera I was shooting on, which Hiromix had made famous; the Konica Big Mini. She was all smiles, but winced when I mentioned another Japanese compact, the Yashica T4. That camera is forever associated with the disgraced fashion photographer Terry Richardson who, along with Russell Brand, seems the ultimate relic of what the Economist recently called “the nasty noughties”. And if you want another reason to hold back on the 2000s nostalgia, you need only look at the 2005 “Sex Issue” of Vice, which features Hiromix on the cover, and included photographs of her apparently having sex with Richardson, as well as a blindfold competition to see who gives the best blowjobs, “gays or girls”, and a nauseating photo essay featuring Iraqi corpses, where the first question posed by Vice to the anonymous photographer, is: “So, what’s the pussy sitch out there?” (Thank god for “cancel culture” and “the woke brigade”!) Hiromix regrets those hypersexualised days, and told me she was exploited by older male photographers, and though she still seemed to be on OK terms with Coppola, as we came to the end of our walk, she looked at me and said: “People tell me I inspired Lost in Translation, but if that’s true, then I think maybe Sofia misunderstood my work.”
This ambivalence about the film is echoed by other Japanese people who featured in it, such as Akiko Monou (the girl in the fur hat who sings karaoke with Murray), Akira Matsui, a pro skateboarder who appears as Hans, and senior staff at the Park Hyatt Tokyo (the film’s setting), for whom the making of the movie brought back fond memories, but the film itself raised eyebrows. “Those party scenes,” Monou tells me, “were such a great portrayal of Japan at that time. Nobody had smartphones, so everybody would let their hair down more, and it captured that sense of carefree fun. But I’m not sure about other parts of the film; I think some of the Japanese characters – like the director shouting at Bill Murray – were a little… exaggerated.”
A less diplomatic word might have been “stereotypical”. Matsui says he understands some of the criticisms levelled at the film, but also thinks Bill and Charlotte’s night out in Tokyo, orchestrated by Fumihiro “Charlie Brown” Hayashi (who plays himself, the editor of a cult Japanese magazine called Dune), really captures Tokyo in the 00s. “In those scenes you have cameos from Nobuhiko Kitamura, the founder of [fashion brand] Hysteric Glamour, [renowned designer and musician] Hiroshi Fujiwara, Hiromix, gallery owners, artists, surfers… they were all brought together by Charlie, who was so important for the art world because he connected the underground with the mainstream.”
Hayashi was Coppola’s introduction to the scene in Japan in the 1990s, she tells me: “He was important, as he first hired me to take photographs and cared about my point of view, which gave me the confidence to make my first film, and he showed me an exciting world in Tokyo. He had culture and taste and appreciated my eye.” It’s worth remembering that all this followed the spectacular fallout from Coppola’s lambasted performance as Mary Corleone in the final instalment of her father’s Godfather trilogy. Far from Hollywood, Japan was a place where she could reinvent herself.
No matter the location, Coppola often presents the world she knows in her films: white, wealthy, feminine. I grew up brown-skinned, working-class, and male, so it would be easy for me to think of Coppola, and in turn Charlotte, as the quintessential poor little rich girl. I often wonder what it is, exactly, about Lost in Translation, beyond a nostalgia for how the world might have turned out, that resonates so deeply. I’m not alone – the film’s most popular Google search is: “What is the point of Lost in Translation?”, a question I put to Sofia herself.
“The film started with wanting to make something about my experience of being [in Tokyo] in my 20s at that time and the feeling it gave me. The wandering, being away from home and the thrill of discovery. It is all about a mood, a feeling to me, trying to capture how I felt there… I was so surprised so many people connected to it, it was so personal to me and I thought: ‘Who cares about a privileged young woman who doesn’t know what she’s doing with her life?’ But the ultimate thing it was about, to me, was a connection. And I think we’re all looking for this. It was about unexpected moments of connection.”
That’s it, exactly. Encoded in Lost in Translation is that kind of liminal melancholy we feel at certain points in our lives, when one era is ending, but another has not quite begun. These moments often precede a breakthrough, if we only pay enough attention. And to go back to nostalgia for a moment… In The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym suggests the term could be split into two – not always binary – types: restorative and reflective. The former is what nationalism thrives on: the attempt to rebuild an imagined past that never really existed (Make America great again!). The latter, and perhaps healthier, version of nostalgia, however, “dwells on the ambivalences of human longing and belonging and does not shy away from the contradictions of modernity. Restorative nostalgia protects the absolute truth, while reflective nostalgia calls it into doubt… [it] loves details, not symbols.”
What makes me want to hold on to Lost in Translation, in spite of its flaws, made only more evident by the years? The details. The languorous, laconic beauty of pre-smartphone travel. The scenes where Charlotte is alone in her hotel room, listening to a CD (Beck’s downbeat album Sea Change came out during the month of filming, and drove those scenes, according to Acord), gazing at the skyline or daydreaming on her bed, are some of the movie’s most stirring and, looking back, poignant passages. Charlotte would be on that bed scrolling her socials now – no way would she have hung out with Bob. I miss this slowness, or what Coppola’s Italian ancestors might have called otium divinorum: divine idleness. I also miss the ambiguity, and the idea that if Charlotte and Bob were real, their experiences would linger on only in private memories and Polaroids (“loss is itself lost”, to quote Fisher again). I miss the promise of such counterintuitive encounters; in 2023, my WhatsApp groups are formed around my loves and alliances, algorithms lead me toward confirmation bias, Netflix suggests films it thinks I will like based on films I’ve already seen. But I think of lifelong friends made during my pre-internet travels, because I was stuck with them somewhere far away from home, and struck up a conversation because I had nowhere else to go (like online). The scene where Bob and a Japanese man (in real life, the gallerist Akimitsu Naruyama) try to converse in bad French reminds me of encounters with Japanese kids I had as a child, our friendships revolving around not just our similarities, but also our differences, which brings to mind another anachronistic 90s/early 00s word: fusion – that is, the blurring of seemingly disparate things to create something new.
What to do with nostalgia for an era of such contradictions? Hegel thought that each era contained a specific insight, and nostalgia was the holding on to what was good. The key was not to want to go back, but to achieve equilibrium in the present by mixing the best bits of each era and losing the worst elements. When I asked Sofia Coppola a couple of such retrospective questions, however, she (perhaps wisely) gave me short answers. Twenty years later, is there anything she’d change about Lost in Translation? “I feel like [my films] are what they are, I wouldn’t want to change them…” Does Lost in Translation make her nostalgic? “It was a different time, and it’s nice to go back to it through the film.”
Maybe, in the end, that’s all that should be said for those of us who came of age in the 2000s; it was a different time. It is nice to go back to it through film. Only through film.
Johny Pitts is a writer, artist and broadcaster. His new series, The Failure ofthe Future, will air on BBC Radio 4 from 16 January
After graduate school, I treated myself to a full set — that's 20 very large and heavy volumes — of the Oxford English Dictionary for my home office. It was a very on-brand purchase for me, and also a wildly impractical thing to own, as I am reminded every time I move. But where else can I flip through at random and discover that not only is the word "indeedy" (originating in the U.S., "used as an emphatic affirmative or negative") in the OED, its first documented instances originated in an 1856 volume of The Knickerbocker (or, New-York Monthly Magazine) — "Yes, indeedy" — followed swiftly by Mark Twain's 1872 book "Roughing It," with "No indeedy" this time?
How does an American colloquialism like this — I'm not sure I would have known it to be an actual unique word, and not simply a little flourish of noise Ned Flanders favored to make it sing, without the OED — make it into an Oxford dictionary? Now that I've read Sarah Ogilvie's surprising and delightful new book "The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary," I can imagine James Murray, the venerable Dictionary editor, reading a slip of paper mailed to his Scriptorium, perhaps by a volunteer in the U.S., documenting the appearance in print of this folksy expression.
Such volunteers — the Dictionary People of Ogilvie's title — were an invaluable source of labor for the Oxford team tasked with completing the ambitious dictionary project that began with three original editors in 1857, was shaped largely by Murray, and finally finished in 1928 after his death. While some enjoyed notoriety — see Simon Winchester's 1998 book "The Surgeon of Crowthorne," adapted into the 1999 Sean Penn film "The Professor and the Madman" — there were also thousands of other volunteer readers who made up, as Ogilvie writes, "the Wikipedia of the nineteenth century — a huge crowdsourcing project," sending in examples of words they encountered in print.
"I just thought they deserved credit, finally, and I wanted to shine a light on them. And I wanted to know where they lived, what they did with their lives, what they did with their daily life, who they loved."
While spending time in the Dictionary archives at Oxford University Press, Ogilvie — a linguist, lexicographer, current director of Oxford University's Dictionary Lab, and a former OED editor herself — came across the address books Murray kept for his volunteers, which to her knowledge had not been fully unpacked in any other OED histories. "I became obsessed," she writes, "with unearthing the lives of the people in his address book and reclaiming their place in the history of the OED." Using the information in those books, including codes that Murray used to annotate the entries, she and her research team were able to peel back the curtain on this largely unseen army of contributors who helped build the foundation for the OED to become the dynamic, expansive, exhaustive linguistic resource that it still is today.
"The Dictionary People" is an intriguing A-Z composite of the most intriguing and representative of those contributors, which include several murderers, institutionalized mental-health patients, suffragettes, inventors, a preeminent collector of pornography, and even Karl Marx's daughter. I spoke with Ogilvie recently over Zoom about the colorful cast of characters she discovered and the ongoing cultural significance of the OED.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
The OED was designed to be different from the other authoritative dictionaries. Can you explain how?
In the middle of the 19th century, three men came up with the idea of creating a dictionary of every word in the English language. And this dictionary was going to be different from everything before it, because previous dictionaries had not necessarily been based on descriptive data, meaning they had been quite prescriptive rather than descriptive. And this dictionary was going to be one that was based on historical evidence of how a word is used, from its very first instance — more or less giving a biography of every word from the first time that it's used through to its current usage. And so that was how the dictionary was going to be different. It was going to be historical, rather than synchronic, which is what the others had been. So it was going to be a diachronic dictionary — dia [as in] across, chronos [as in] time — so it was going to show you the life of word across time.
And they realized that to do such a mammoth task that they — a small group of men living in London or Oxford — couldn't do alone. So that's why they came up with this brilliant idea of crowdsourcing it, and asking people around the world to read their local books and write out words from those books and send them in. When you think of it, they had no idea whether this was going to be a success or not. But you know, it ended up being a huge success. So many people sent in slips to James Murray's house, at 78 Boundary Road … so many people sent in slips that Royal Mail put this red pillar box outside 78 Boundary Road, and it's still there today.
I love that. So you write in the book about finding Murray's address books tucked away in the archives, seemingly not opened in forever. I think this always shocks us when we find out that there are things in archives that that are still to be discovered. I think people who have not gotten to spend time in archives like this think of archives as very orderly, like a bookshelf: Everything's cataloged, everything's very precise, and it's just a matter of pulling things out and already knowing exactly what they are. But you found these address books tucked away, containing all of these codes and details about these contributors. Can you talk a little bit about the moment you realized what you had found and what it could mean?
Because I used to be an editor on the Dictionary, I had always wondered — and because we knew that this was a crowdsourced project, like the Wikipedia of the 19th century — I had always wondered who those people were. We knew that there were several hundred, but we didn't know exactly how many. And so in the back of my mind, that's always been there: Oh, I would love to know, because I'm originally from Australia, I'd love to know who the Australians were who sent in slips and words. And because I worked in America for eight years, I've always wondered who those Americans were, as well. So that has always been at the back of my mind.
"I think that they were on the fringes of academia, and this project that was attached to a prestigious university was a chance for them to be part of a world that was otherwise denied to them."
I was killing time, because I was starting a new job at Stanford [University] and my visa was delayed. I was down in the basement of Oxford University Press where the Dictionary archive is, and I was just looking around. And in this box, as you say, I came across this little black book, and it was tied with cream ribbon. And when I opened it, I recognized James Murray's handwriting, the longest-serving editor. And then when I saw that there were all these names and addresses, and then, underneath everyone's address, he had a list of all the books that that person read, the number of slips they sent in, and the date that he had received it — he was, you know, quite obsessive, as you could imagine, right? He sort of had to be to do this task well.
And yes, it was just one of those moments. Because I didn't know about the address books, and no one had ever written about them or mentioned them in any of their publications, everything just sort of went into slow motion for me. I thought, My goodness, this might be his address book. And yes, it was. And then I found five other address books. So there are six in total, three belonging to James Murray and then three belonging to his predecessor, Frederick Furnivall.
To answer your question about archives, I thought, Surely I'm not the first person to see this. And sure enough, on one of the pages, as I was looking, I saw a little pencil mark. So an archivist had cataloged this because there was a pencil mark with an archive. But I guess this is a lesson in us making sure that we're always talking with archivists. The researchers really need to talk with archivists to get to know the archives. I was not the first person to see the address books, but I'm the first person to thoroughly go through them.
As I went through the pages, I saw that Murray, as you said, had little codes and little crosses and stars and very strange little symbols that he used. And he also had some very sweet notes about people, where when a woman would get married, he would put her her new married name or, he would write a note about how a contributor had died on a certain date. Or he would also write little notes, like "hopeless" or "no good."
The hopeless ones! I just loved them.
Yeah! So then I realized, Oh gosh, OK, I want to know more about these people. So that's how my journey for the last eight or nine years began. And then I just went down lots of rabbit holes, wanting to find out as much as I could about everyone.
"Women played a huge role in this project. And that did come as a surprise, actually."
I realized that a lot of these people were sending in thousands of slips and reading countless books. They were spending a lot of time on this. And they were doing it for free. They were volunteering their time and their skill. And so I just thought they deserved credit, finally, and I wanted to shine a light on them. And I wanted to know where they lived, what they did with their lives, what they did with their daily life, who they loved. I just wanted to find out everything that I could.
Thankfully, I was going to this new job in Stanford. Stanford really supported this project. And my students were so receptive. And so I worked with a wonderful group of students. And together, we went through the censuses, the marriage certificates, the death records, and we built two large databases and found out as much as we could about these people. So I'm very grateful to the students.
Your research team was like the Dictionary People as well. This quote really stood out to me: "Most of the Dictionary People, including Murray himself, were outsiders,” you write. Why do you think outsiders were drawn to this work, something that set out to be this authoritative?
Yeah, this was a big surprise to me, that these weren't the scholarly elites. And so your question was one that I kept asking myself for several years. What was it that was motivating these people? Murray left school at 14. A lot of these people left school young. And they taught themselves; they were autodidacts. And I came to the conclusion — and I think that there was a bit of this in Murray's motivation as well — I think that they were on the fringes of academia, and this project that was attached to a prestigious university was a chance for them to be part of a world that was otherwise denied to them.
And that includes many more women than we originally knew, right? What did you learn about women's roles overall in the creation of the Dictionary?
They were completely mixed. I learned that Murray really respected women and gave them the same tasks, appreciated them. So they were not just readers, meaning that they didn't just read books and send in words, but they were also sub-editors. And he also asked them as specialists in certain subject areas. Women played a huge role in this project. And that did come as a surprise, actually, to just see how many hundreds of women there were and to see how varied they were. They were from all social classes.
Karl Marx's daughter!
Karl Marx's daughter, who stars in the "H for Hopeless" chapter, unfortunately. Yes, Eleanor [Marx] was there. I've got a wonderful biography of her right in front of me here. She's definitely one of my favorite characters from the book.
Speaking of colorful characters, I thought it was fascinating to read these mini-biographies. Some of the more colorful characters especially had quite a lot going on in their lives. There are murderers, there are people at the forefront of social justice movements. There's a cannibalism strain. Who was the most surprising character to you that you encountered?
Really hard question to answer, because to be honest, each of them was unique and eccentric and devoted. So, right from the first woman: The book opens with "A for Archaeologist." Margaret Murray was a teenager living in Calcutta, reading the books from her mother's bookshelf. And she'd wake up early, while it was still cool, and go to go to the roof of her house and read two main things. One was the Bible — she sent in thousands of slips from the Bible. But then the other topic that she read a lot of were travelers' tales in India. So there were Indian words that she sent into Murray. And she worked for many years doing that, for, I think, seven or eight years. And she didn't quite know what to do with her life. She came over to Britain to visit an uncle and went to this lecture given by the famous archaeologist Flinders Petrie. And that's where she just fell in love with Egyptology, and she becomes the first female Egyptologist.
"I can just imagine James Murray perhaps blushing with these bundles of sex words coming in monthly."
She lives to be over 100. And on her 100th birthday, she publishes her memoir called "My First Hundred Years," one of my favorite books. It's fantastic. In the middle of the 20th century, she starts to specialize in witchcraft. And so what's lovely about Margaret Murray — and this happens with quite a few of the contributors who became specialists in their own fields — is other contributors then read her books and sent in words that she had been the first person to write. So now there are many quotations from Margaret Murray in the Dictionary for words to do with Egyptology.
There's a man who sends in 165,000 slips called Thomas Austen — and he is one of four people who has connections with what were called "mental asylums" or "lunatic asylums," they called them in the 19th century. And I think that these people who did this very repetitive, rigorous work, were perhaps just on the spectrum. But in the 19th century, they were classified — on the census, there was a column for whether you were a "lunatic, blind, deaf or dumb" — several of the contributors were classified as that.
There's the first female astronomer, Elizabeth Brown, and her sister. They're living in a rural village together, two spinster women. They send in between them about 15,000 words and slips. Her sister Jemima is especially devoted. And when she dies, she leaves in her will to James Murray over 1,000 pounds, which he really needs. Because that's the equivalent of a whole year's wage — not just for him, but for all of his staff as well. There are lots of little stories in here that I hope also tell the story of the making of the Dictionary, sort of through the eyes of the contributors and the people rather than from the top down. More from the bottom up.
I think also one of the delightful surprises of this book is getting to know the people who sent in great numbers of specific profanities, terms about sex that were contributed. "The Pornographer" is one of the one of the more colorful characters I'd say. It's also kind of at odds, I feel, this spiciness with our contemporary ideas about both word nerds and Victorians. But should it be should this be surprising?
"Dictionaries and lexicographers led the way in the early days of computer science and humanities computing. "
That's a great question. And look, you know, I think all of us have little hidden sides. And therefore, the "P for Pornographer" [chapter] was about Henry Spencer Ashby who lived in Bloomsbury and had the world's largest collection of pornography. But you're right, I mean, I can just imagine James Murray perhaps blushing with these bundles of sex words coming in monthly. And that's another reason why I admire Murray so much is that he was very true to the scientific method and the historical method of the Dictionary. And he was very principled and stuck to the rigor of the scientific principles of the Dictionary. So even though he may have felt compromised sometimes about whether or not to put a word in, in most cases, he did put the word in. So as I talked about in the book, with respect to coarse words and profanities, there was actually an Obscenities Act. And there was a big court case going on at the time, where a slang lexicographer, Stephen Farmer, was being sued for putting in the c-word and the f-word in his dictionary. And Murray, I found letters between them in the archive, so this was very much on Murray's mind. And so even though he gathered all the evidence for the c-word and the f-word, in the end, he decides not to put that in.
Those came in later, right?
Yeah, we then had to wait until the 1970s for those words to get in.
I'm glad that you mentioned the scientific theory behind the Dictionary, because that leads me to my next question. In the chapter that opens with The Big Stink in London, you write, "Dictionary People showed a strong tendency toward innovation." This was in the context of helping the city deal with its industrial revolution-caused sewage problem. I wonder what that strong tendency towards innovation that you discovered in your research says about how we think about the role of a dictionary culturally. Somebody with a penchant for innovation, and yet also devotion to writing a dictionary, in some ways sounds like a contradiction.
It's true. And when you think about dictionaries, even in the 20th century, dictionaries have always been right at the frontier of technology and innovation. So all of the beginnings of computer science were working on dictionaries, because dictionaries, of course, are structured in the perfect way with these fields. And so dictionaries and lexicographers led the way in the early days of computer science and humanities computing. And even now, dictionaries are being used as the data — the data from dictionaries are powering the back end of the internet. It's thanks to dictionaries' data that we've got text-to-speech, that we've got morphological analyzers. This kind of structured and curated data is vital for certain tasks in machine learning.
That standardization is interesting in light of another historical detail in this book that you write about, the role that the Dictionary People played in the campaign for reformed spelling. The dictionary can be sort of wielded as a weapon, like: Well, is that how it's spelled in the dictionary? To find out that folks who are so devoted to this cause were also quite passionate about changing the way that English words are spelled to be more intuitive, that surprised me as well.
Absolutely. And I too was surprised by that tension there. And to think that Murray in his early career was also a proponent for spelling reform. But when you actually delve into the weeds of those movements for reforming spelling and simplifying the spelling of English, it's actually got a social justice route, where they were wanting to do that because they felt that it was the complicated and unnecessarily complex spelling of English which was a barrier to the working classes and to people learning to read and write. So they were trying to simplify it so that more people had access to reading and writing.
That plays into the outsider affinity perhaps as well.
That kind of philosophy is really present in one of the founders, Frederick Furnivall, who's quite a hero of the book. Frederick Furnivall wanted this dictionary to be a democratic dictionary. He said, "We must fling our doors wide. All must enter." And I think by that he meant all words must enter the dictionary, but also all people must be part of this creation process.
So what role does an institution like the OED play in today's wide open, technologically available, vastly connected internet-powered web of words and information that are instantly available and updated constantly? With Wikipedia, and other crowdsourced projects like the Urban Dictionary, which can go into great descriptions of slang terms and whatnot. What is the OED's identity today?
I think that it's got a dual identity, because I think that users of dictionaries still want an authoritative, rigorous source. So yes, we can go to all of those other freely available places on the internet, or we can just track words ourselves in real time on social media, but at the end of the day, I think many of us still like to go to an authoritative source to see what someone has come up with as either the meaning or the usage. Because basically, they've spent hours and days and sometimes weeks working on a single word. I, personally, really value their work. So I think that is one use of the Dictionary today, and why it's still important. But I think another one is what I was talking about, which is that this is curated rigorous data, which is really valuable to certain digital tools and methods. So I think it's got a dual role, and therefore, I think it will always have a place — at least I hope it will always have a place, at both the front end and the back end of digital work.
And there are still Dictionary People, right? That surprised me too. Can you tell us about the personal connection you made to the contributor Mr. Collier?
When I first started working at the Oxford Dictionary — actually, down in Australia, and then over in Oxford — I used to open the mail and every month would come in this eccentrically wrapped bundle of slips. They were wrapped in old cornflake packets with bits of dog hair and cereal stuck on them. And inside were always many slips. They were all from the same source. They were from a local newspaper that this man Mr. Collier read from his local town of Brisbane, Australia, which actually turns out to be my hometown as well. But growing up there, I had no idea that just two suburbs away, Mr. Collier was there. Every single day, he would read this local newspaper, cut out quotations and stick them onto little slips. So he, over 35 years, sent in over 100,000 slips.
I had the opportunity of going to meet him in 2009. I met him at a park in Brisbane. He said, "Meet me in my office." And it was this park behind the Paddo Tavern, which was quite a rough pub. So I turn up and there he is, sitting on the park bench in the sunshine, reading of all things the Courier Mail newspaper, and so we sat and talked together for several hours. He fits into the Dictionary People in many respects. He too left school at 14. And he said that in the 1970s, he read an article where the chief editor of the Oxford Dictionary at that time, Bob Burchfield, was putting out an appeal and asking people around the world to again read their local books and newspapers and send in slips. And he said to me, “I thought to myself, imagine if I could get one word into the Dictionary.” He in fact got thousands in.
When I did an analysis of how many quotations there are in the OED from the Courier Mail, turns out there are actually more from that very random newspaper than there are from T.S. Eliot or Virginia Woolf or the Book of Common Prayer. So there's this bias now towards the Courier Mail.
I said to him, look, you know, you've done the most incredible job at sending in Australian words to the dictionary. Would you consider flying over to Oxford, and we could show you the workings, and you could meet the editors? And he said to me, “Oh no, couldn't possibly, just imagine all the Courier Mails waiting for me when I got home?”
So they're just as devoted as ever — so typical of the Dictionary People. What I love about the OED today is they just launched a new website last month. And when you go in, and you're looking at an entry, they now have a contribute button where you can send a message to the editor. It shows me that they're still valuing the contribution of the public.
I learned about the OED and how to use it as a freshman in college in a philosophy of words seminar. We used it mostly for etymology. And then later I bought my own. It's an incredibly impractical item to own, the whole 20-volume set, but I can't bear to part with it, even though dictionaries have largely gone digital now. It's still special to me, I think, because of that first class that I took that I used it in. What makes the OED special to you?
That physicality, it's really special. Because when you look at those 20 volumes, you really realize the scale of this project, and the fact that without the contribution of these 3,000 people around the world, this text could not exist, this dictionary could not have existed without these people. So I think looking at the 20 volumes brings it really home. And that's why I wanted to shine a light on these people and give them credit, finally, because I think without them, the dictionary wouldn't exist.
By the very end the All Blacks were down to 14 men. Not because one of them had been sent off, or because they had run out of fit replacements, but because, well, they felt like it. Scott Barrett had been sent to the sin-bin in the 65th minute for slapping the ball out of the hands of Argentina’s scrum-half Lautaro Bazán Velez, but when his time was up again the coaches didn’t even bother to bring him, or anyone else, back on to the pitch. Apparently, they decided that it would be better preparation for next week to play a man short for the last five minutes. This, then, was a World Cup semi-final that ended up being treated as a practice match.
The All Blacks strung it out into overtime too, pitilessly running through the phases instead of kicking the ball dead as they tried to score one more try on top of the seven they already had. They were, at this point, already 38 points up. “Stop! Stop!” you wanted to holler, “he’s already dead!” That may, in fact, have been what the pocket of Argentinian fans down by the dugout were shouting out. It was the first time in 16 years that anyone has scored more than 30 in a semi-final, since Argentina were beaten 37-13 here by South Africa back in 2007, and the first in 36 that anyone’s won one by that many or more.
There are good players, proud players, in this Argentina team, and it is tempting to say that they deserved better. The crowd certainly did. The Stade de France, which was full of neutrals, was quiet as a night in the desert for long stretches of the game.
Days previously, Argentina’s head coach Michael Cheika explained that it was not motivation his team needed, but belief. They had travelled up late from Marseille, where they had played their quarter-final, so only had three full days in Paris to prepare for this match. Cheika spent them trying to instil what he called a “winning mentality” in the team. It was, he said, his job to “tell the players a story about why they were in with a chance against New Zealand”. Cheika is a good talker, and there were at least 10 minutes there at the beginning when it was possible to imagine that he really had persuaded them.
A good few of those minutes, it’s true, were before the referee actually blew his whistle, Argentina put in a fine performance at the anthems, when a couple of them broke down in tears, and were superb at facing up to the haka, when, they held their line, arms bound tight around each other, and stared down the New Zealanders. Confidence swelled in the opening moments, when they rolled through wave after wave of phases, and won a penalty off the back of a lineout after Jordie Barrett sliced his very first clearance. Emiliano Boffelli kicked it and gave Argentina a 3-0 lead.
They even began to bring the crowd along with them, and a great ululating cheer rose up from the scattered pockets of Argentinian fans, who had filled every stadium the team had played in but got a little lost among the masses of neutral supporters here.
And then New Zealand started to play, in the way only they can. Catch-pass, catch-pass, catch-pass, each one so close to the other that they seemed almost to become a single motion, and all of a sudden Argentina were scrambling back towards their own try-line. New Zealand didn’t just run rings around the Argentinians, but around referee Angus Gardner, too. He seemed to be so utterly hypnotised by the pace of their play that he simply stopped calling any penalties against them at all for a large part of the first half. Poor old Julián Montoya was left pleading with Gardner to please explain his decisions.
When Gardner did, he spoke in crisp English, which is Montoya’s second language. It felt like World Rugby had made a mistake by not giving the match to a referee who could also talk Spanish. Although New Zealand were so good it wouldn’t have made so very much difference if Gardner spoke it like Gabriel García Márquez.
The All Blacks played with ravenous intent, and pounced on every breakdown like hungry gulls swooping on fish and chips. In among it all, they were lit up by the odd wizardly touch from Richie Mo’unga, like the long loopy pass he threw to put Will Jordan through for the first try.
There was one last moment when it looked as though Argentina might just cling on, when New Zealand were leading 15-6 and conceded a penalty from a knock-on in kicking distance, but it came and went as quickly as the advantage Gardner awarded for it.
Shannon Frizell scored New Zealand’s third soon after, and that made it 20-6 at half-time. They could have called the game then. No one has ever come back from more than eight points down at the break to win a semi-final. And Argentina weren’t the team to break that streak. The pain of this defeat will, you guess, last a lot longer than the cuts and bumps and bruises it left them with.
