Friday, April 19, 2024

Taylor Swift Advises Fans to Use a Dictionary to Listen to TTPD Album - Us Weekly - Dictionary

Taylor Swifts TTPD Listening Essentials Include a Dictionary a UniformTalismans and More
Taylor Swift Gotham/GC Images/Getty Images

The chairman of the Tortured Poets Department, better known as Taylor Swift, has revealed exactly how fans should listen to her 11th studio album.

In a social message shared via the official department intern (a.k.a. Taylor Nation’s X page), the official “board meeting agenda” for Friday, April 19 at midnight details the event’s purpose, discussion topics and essentials to bring along to any listening parties.

“The intern will call the meeting to order and department members will stream the chairman’s manuscript,” the message reads, referring to Swift’s LP The Tortured Poets Department. “Sign into your streaming platform of choice and press play simultaneously so all members can review the evidence together. Relaxed poets, consult your tortured muse before attending.”

While pondering on the tracks — which are listed on the agenda as “12 a.m. discussion topics” — Swift, 34, also advises what fans should have handy, including a listening device, a “department-issued uniform,” talismans, charms and snacks (it will be late at night, after all) and a dictionary.

With Taylor Nation’s agenda proclaiming that a dictionary will be necessary to appreciate TTPD, fans have been theorizing how that corresponds to the record’s lyrics.

“I’m scared too coz apparently I’m going to need a dictionary as [an] international fan,” one social media user wrote via X. “I thought my English was higher, I’m ready with a Cambridge dictionary.”

Another added, “Imma need to buy a dictionary and thesaurus before this album drop. Thanks Taylor Alison Swift.”

Swift is well-known for her crafty lyrics, often featuring fancy phrases and uncommon terms in songs. After the November 2023 drop of 1989 (Taylor’s Version), Swifties ran to their dictionaries to look up “surmise” after it was briefly mentioned in “Is It Over Now? (Taylor’s Version).”

“Only Taylor Swift could rhyme blue eyes with surmise,” an X user wrote at the time. “She probably knows how to rhyme the word orange too.”

A separate fan quipped, “I can’t believe Taylor Swift invented the word ‘surmise.’”

It’s not only Swifties who know that the pop star is an intelligent mastermind, but her boyfriend, Travis Kelce, gets it too.

“I’ve never been a man of words,” Kelce, 34, gushed to WSJ. Magazine in a profile published in November 2023. “Being around her, seeing how smart Taylor is, has been f—ing mind-blowing. I’m learning every day.

Kelce, who has been dating Swift since summer 2023, has already heard TTPD before the official release day. “I have heard some of it, yes, and it is unbelievable,” he said at a February press conference for Super Bowl LVIII. “I can’t wait for her to shake up the world when it finally drops.”

The Tortured Poets Department will be released on Friday, April 19.

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Thursday, April 18, 2024

Tennessee names first English-language Bible translation in U.S. as official state book - Catholic News Agency - Translation

The 18th-century resolution states that the lawmakers “highly approve the pious and laudable undertaking of Mr. Aitken, as subservient to the interest of religion, as well as the interest of the progress of arts in this country.” It further states that the lawmakers “recommend this edition of the Bible to the inhabitants of the United States.”

The translation, which is a version of the Protestant King James Version of the Bible, is not approved by the Vatican for Catholics. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops lists approved translations of the Bible on its website.

Tennessee’s legislation that names the Aitken Bible as an official state book notes that the state is home to “the largest publisher of authentic reproductions of the Aitken Bible,” which is the Aitken Bible Historical Foundation. It adds that Tennessee is home to “three of the five privately owned original first American Bibles remaining in the world today.”

The legislation received strong support from Republicans in the Tennessee House and Senate, who hold strong supermajorities in both chambers. The bill faced opposition from most Democrats but received one Democratic vote in the House.

Some of the other historic books designated as official state books in this legislation included President George Washington’s “Farewell Address” and “Democracy in America” by Alexis de Tocqueville. The bill also recognized the 1977 book “Roots” by Alex Haley, which discusses slavery in the United States, and the 2016 book “Coat of Many Colors” by the Tennessee-born country singer Dolly Parton.

Tennessee lawmakers also passed a bill that would recognize November as “Christian Heritage Month.” The legislation was sent to Lee, but the governor has not yet taken any action on it.

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The Humane AI Pin is lost in translation - The Verge - Translation

A photo of a person tapping on a Humane AI Pin.
As funny as it was when the AI Pin utterly failed at translating Korean and Japanese, it also broke my heart.
Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Of all the things the Humane AI Pin promised, I was most intrigued by translation. In a demo, a man speaks to Humane co-founder Imran Chaudhri in Spanish. The AI Pin automatically translates it to English. Chaudhri replies in English. Again, the AI Pin translates his words back into Spanish. There are notable pauses when the AI is processing, but it’s a powerful concept. Unlike with Google Translate, there was solid eye contact between both people. The AI voice sounded more natural and less robotic. And crucially, there were no screens. The language barrier was still there, but it was much more permeable. 

That’s not what happened when I tried it myself.

I spoke some simple phrases in Japanese and Korean. Instead of translating, the AI Pin spewed gibberish back at me. I asked my colleague David Pierce, who reviewed the damn thing, if I was doing something wrong. I wasn’t. It just didn’t work.

The whole experience was funny. It felt like vindication for the blood, sweat, and tears I poured into two decades of foreign language study. But when I rewatched Humane’s translation demo, my heart broke. I found myself wishing I had something like this when my parents were dying. 

Living in an immigrant, multilingual family will open your eyes to all the ways humans can misunderstand each other. My story isn’t unique, but I grew up unable to communicate in my family’s “default language.” I was forbidden from speaking Korean as a child. My parents were fluent in spoken and written English, but their accents often left them feeling unwelcome in America. They didn’t want that for me, and so I grew up with perfect, unaccented English. I could understand Korean and, as a small child, could speak some. But eventually, I lost that ability. 

I became the family Chewbacca. Family would speak to me in Korean, I’d reply back in English — and vice versa. Later, I started learning Japanese because that’s what public school offered and my grandparents were fluent. Eventually, my family became adept at speaking a pidgin of English, Korean, and Japanese.

This arrangement was less than ideal but workable. That is until both of my parents were diagnosed with incurable, degenerative neurological diseases. My father had Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease. My mom had bulbar amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD). Their English, a language they studied for decades, evaporated. 

It made everything twice as complicated. I shared caretaking duties with non-English speaking relatives. Doctor visits — both here and in Korea — had to be bilingual, which often meant appointments were longer, more stressful, expensive, and full of misunderstandings. Oftentimes, I’d want to connect with my stepmom or aunt, both to coordinate care and vent about things only we could understand. None of us could go beyond “I’m sad,” “I come Monday, you go Tuesday,” or “I’m sorry.” We struggled alone, together.

If the Humane AI Pin’s translation features worked as demoed, how much grief and loneliness might have been spared? Would our burden have felt even a smidge lighter? I’ve kept rerunning those fantasies in my head since rewatching the demo. And I know that, for the foreseeable future, it’ll stay a fantasy.

A photo of the Humane Ai Pin’s camera and speaker.
A photo of the Humane Ai Pin’s camera and speaker.
Real-time translation is so hard for so many reasons. Some may be beyond Humane’s current ability to fix.
Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Better versions of Humane’s translation tech already exist. Google Translate requires screens, but it’s a widely known tool that can act as a digital interpreter. Even so, Google Translate still struggles to keep up with all the ways language evolves. It now knows that “ㅋㅋ” is how Koreans text lol, but it completely fumbles with the Japanese idiom tsutsumotase. What you get is a direct but incorrect translation of the characters, along with an approximate definition. (The word refers to a specific type of badger game where a man and woman team up to financially extort another man.) Not to mention, English may be the lingua franca that unites tech, but some languages are easier to translate than others. It could very well be that Humane opted for Spanish and French demos because they’re much more closely related to English. Perhaps it simply didn’t have the same resources to actually build out all the languages of the world  — and the myriad permutations that would entail.  

Screenshot of Google Translate incorrectly translating tsutsumotase from Japanese to English
Screenshot of Google Translate incorrectly translating tsutsumotase from Japanese to English
Tsutsumotase doesn’t mean beauty bureau. Confidence person gets close to the meaning, but it lacks the actual nuance of the phrase.
Screenshot: Victoria Song / The Verge

But those are the finer details of mastery and fluency. You need much less to “survive” in another language. That’s where Google Translate excels. It’s handy when you’re traveling and need basic help, like directions or ordering food. But life is lived in moments more complicated than simple transactions with strangers. When I decided to pull off my mom’s oxygen mask — the only machine keeping her alive — I used my crappy pidgin to tell my family it was time to say goodbye. I could’ve never pulled out Google Translate for that. We all grieved once my mom passed, peacefully, in her living room. My limited Korean just meant I couldn’t partake in much of the communal comfort. Would I have really tapped a pin in such a heavy moment to understand what my aunt was wailing when I knew the why? 

Translation is an art, and art is something AI often gets wrong. It’s not enough to spit out a direct meaning. For high-context languages like Japanese and Korean, you also have to be able to translate what isn’t said — like tone and relationships between speakers — to really understand what’s being conveyed. If a Korean person asks you your age, they’re not being rude. It literally determines how they should speak to you. In Japanese, the word daijoubu can mean “That’s okay,” “Are you okay?” “I’m fine,” “Yes,” “No, thank you,” “Everything’s going to be okay,” and “Don’t worry” depending on how it’s said. (See: this ball of rice explaining it.) It’s confusing enough for humans to get it right — how are AI translation gadgets trained by imperfect humans supposed to? 

Even so, I can’t help but long for the future Humane demoed. I can study Japanese and Korean for the rest of my life — and I will — but there’ll always be gaps. I have countless memories of times when I forgot how to speak my second and third languages. Times when I was in physical pain, nervous, or had to do math. (I guarantee you, everyone does math in their native tongue.) In those moments, it’d be nice to have a simple, seamless way to ask for help. And to be understood. 

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Tennessee names first English-language Bible translation in U.S. as official state book - Catholic News Agency - Translation

The 18th-century resolution states that the lawmakers “highly approve the pious and laudable undertaking of Mr. Aitken, as subservient to the interest of religion, as well as the interest of the progress of arts in this country.” It further states that the lawmakers “recommend this edition of the Bible to the inhabitants of the United States.”

The translation, which is a version of the Protestant King James Version of the Bible, is not approved by the Vatican for Catholics. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops lists approved translations of the Bible on its website.

Tennessee’s legislation that names the Aitken Bible as an official state book notes that the state is home to “the largest publisher of authentic reproductions of the Aitken Bible,” which is the Aitken Bible Historical Foundation. It adds that Tennessee is home to “three of the five privately owned original first American Bibles remaining in the world today.”

The legislation received strong support from Republicans in the Tennessee House and Senate, who hold strong supermajorities in both chambers. The bill faced opposition from most Democrats but received one Democratic vote in the House.

Some of the other historic books designated as official state books in this legislation included President George Washington’s “Farewell Address” and “Democracy in America” by Alexis de Tocqueville. The bill also recognized the 1977 book “Roots” by Alex Haley, which discusses slavery in the United States, and the 2016 book “Coat of Many Colors” by the Tennessee-born country singer Dolly Parton.

Tennessee lawmakers also passed a bill that would recognize November as “Christian Heritage Month.” The legislation was sent to Lee, but the governor has not yet taken any action on it.

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Wednesday, April 17, 2024

Here Are the Lyrics to FloyyMenor & Cris MJ’s Viral ‘Gata Only’ Translated Into English - Billboard - Translation

After seven weeks on the Billboard Hot Latin Songs chart, Chilean newcomers FloyyMenor and Cris MJ have reached No. 1 on the tally with their viral hit “Gata Only.”

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The infectious reggaetón track — about going after an attractive girl — has been gaining traction on social media, where on TikTok alone, it has garnered more than three million video creations.

“I was performing some shows in another region of the country when I wrote this song,” FloyyMenor, who’s an 18-year-old rising act from La Serena, Chile, previously told Billboard. “I knew it was going to be a hit, and it feels amazing that people are supporting it.” 

“Gata Only” marks the first time a Chilean artist enters the chart’s top 10 in 25 years, after La Ley and Ednita Nazario’s “Tu Sabes Bien” peaked at No. 8 in 1999. Prior, it was Myriam Hernández’s “Huele a Peligro,” which peaked at No. 5 in 1998.

Trending on Billboard

Below, check out the “Gata Only” lyrics translated into English:

Baby, I feel you far, tell me where are you
I want to have sex with you, I’m going to kidnap you
Let loose and turn off your phone
Nothing’s going to happen to you if you’re with me
Just let loose
Pay attention to the getaway
I want to be with you and you want to be with me
Let me know if it’s going to happen

Baby, let’s go, be mine, follow me
You’re for me and I’m for you
Baby, you’re alone, send me your location
She moves her cheeks to the TikTok rhythm
That baby escaped with me
And nobody noticed in her home
She had a great time with me tonight
Baby, put your phone on airplane mode
You’re my crazy and I’m your crazy
You’re made for me
And I’ll go on a mission for you

Baby, I feel you far, tell me where are you
I want to have sex with you, I’m going to kidnap you
Let loose and turn off your phone
Nothing’s going to happen to you if you’re with me
Just let loose
Pay attention to the getaway
I want to be with you and you want to be with me
Let me know if it’s going to happen

Let’s go, get activated
Dress up, I want to see you
I’ll pick you up, I’ll make you my woman
I’ll make you my woman, I’ll make you my woman
We’re having a great time tonight
They don’t want to see you with me
Tell me what you want to do
Baby, I’m going to break you
We’re having a great time tonight
They don’t want to see you with me
Tell me what you want to do
Baby, I’m going to break you
Then we’re going to the afterparty

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New ISO Standard 5060 Focuses on Human Evaluation to Ensure Translation Quality - Slator - Translation

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO), the body in charge of developing and publishing international standards, has published a new standard on evaluation of translation output.

ISO 5060 is the result of four years of work conducted by the ISO/TC 37/SC 5 technical committee for translation, interpreting and related technology, and the 18th document of this kind published by the unit (with a further seven being currently under development). Numerous experts on translation and quality evaluation formed part of the working group, with participants from more than 30 countries contributing to the creation of this new standard.

ISO certification brings an array of benefits for companies deciding to pursue it: increased sales and revenue, heightened efficiency, and improved quality of operations are usually expected as a result of certifying against a selected standard. Language service providers (LSPs) and others recognize compliance with ISO norms as a competitive advantage, allowing them to position themselves among top players in the industry.

The new ISO 5060 standard was published in February 2024. It “is applicable to translation service providers […], including individual translators, translation companies or in-house translation services, their clients and other interested parties in the translation sector, such as translator education and training institutions.” Aimed at providing guidance for human evaluation of the translation output, ISO 5060 can be applied to workflows involving both human and machine translation with or without subsequent post-editing.

The standard combines hands-on advice with the strategic considerations and general principles for translation quality evaluation. It is built on the analytic approach that involves a “bilingual examination of target language content against source language content while classifying any errors with respect to translation evaluation specifications and for the purpose of reaching a quality rating.” Focus on the translation requirements and treating any deviation from it as an error allows for a high degree of inter-rater reliability (IRR; guaranteeing that the results of evaluation don’t differ significantly depending on evaluator) and evaluation objectivity.

“The standard enables the user to produce reliable, trustworthy translation quality data and is therefore something completely different than MT predictive quality estimation.” — Christopher Kurz, member of the ISO/TC 37/SC 5 committee

ISO 5060 introduces a framework of concepts related to the evaluation of translation quality, and provides a set of requirements for all steps of the evaluation process, covering the pre-evaluation, evaluation, and post-evaluation phases. Error typology that has been harmonized with the first level Multidimensional Quality Metrics Framework (MQM), as well as guidelines on severity, weight, or the approach to repeated errors, form an important part of the standard.

According to the proposed typology, errors can fall into one of seven main categories: 

  • Terminology;
  • Accuracy;
  • Linguistic conventions;
  • Style;
  • Locale conventions;
  • Audience appropriateness; and
  • Design and markup.

Each of the categories contains several sub-categories and every error can be classified as Critical, Major, or Minor, depending on its severity.

Additionally, the standard outlines the competencies of evaluators, enumerating aspects such as: understanding of the source language, fluency in the target language, cultural ability, knowledge of the domain, as well as formal qualifications, among others.

Annexes provide readers with a set of questions to guide them through the process of analyzing the evaluation needs and to help them develop a translation evaluation strategy and system. Practical recommendations on sampling, a detailed explanation of the concepts of cohesion and coherence, as well as ready-to-go scorecard templates are also included.

The next revision of the standard is planned for 2029.

Interested parties can obtain a copy of the ISO 5060 standard and the other standards related to language services from the ISO website.

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Tuesday, April 16, 2024

The Dictionary of Dictionaries - City Journal - Dictionary

The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary, by Sarah Ogilvie (Knopf, 370 pp., $30)

Recently, I had a friend to lunch in New York and when I showed him my study, he was struck by the magnificent edition of the Oxford English Dictionary on my shelves, which is to say the 1961 corrected reissue of the 1933 first edition, the one Vivian Ridler printed on the university press, not lithographically. To run one’s fingers over the pages of the resplendent 13 volumes in their cream and blue wrappers, with their wonderfully tactile raised surfaces, is one of those pleasures that only proper books bestow, though to read the definitions, etymologies, and illustrative quotations is a rarer pleasure still.

No serious reader can be indifferent to the glories of the OED. Its wonderfully subtle, precise, comprehensive definitions, its illustrations setting forth the historical evolution of words, and its incomparable array of cited authors are marvels of scholarship. Delight in this most authoritative of dictionaries naturally leads to interest in James Murray, the OED’s founding editor and the many men and women who helped him to compile the Dictionary. Sarah Ogilvie’s The Dictionary People seeks to satisfy that interest. Does it succeed? It may complement but it certainly does not supersede the delightful biography that Murray’s granddaughter, K. M. Elisabeth Murray, wrote of the great lexicographer, Caught in the Web of Words: James Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary (1977), which Anthony Burgess rightly praised as “one of the finest biographies of the twentieth century.” Nor does it come close to giving readers an understanding of the life of dictionary-making that Robert de Maria, Jr. gives his readers in Johnson’s Dictionary and the Language of Learning (1986). It is nothing as authoritative as Peter Gilliver’s The Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (2016).

What does Ogilvie’s offer instead? She certainly serves up a crowded gallery of pen portraits of Murray and his coworkers. She sets scenes with a brisk, affecting vividness. She writes a bubbly narrative. Yet her grasp of lexicography can be wobbly.

The OED’s founding editor is a fascinating figure. The son of a tailor, Sir James Augustus Henry Murray (1832–1915), was born in Denholm, Scotland, and left school at the age of 14, but only after proving himself a prodigy with a passion for philology. He knew the letters of the English alphabet before the age of two and the Greek alphabet before the age of seven. He knew the Latin names of plants after mastering the rudiments of Latin. He also taught himself French, German, Italian, and classical Greek. Before beginning work on what would become the OED in 1879, he worked as a schoolmaster, a profession for which he had a genuine genius. He was also a devoted family man, siring no less than 11 children. It was his wife Ada who insisted that he move his office for the Dictionary out of the family house in the Banbury Road and into the back garden, where Murray built his famous Scriptorium, the cramped iron shed in which he and his helpers toiled for 30 years. After Murray’s death, the shed was demolished and Ada remarked on the terrible void it left for her and her children, so much of whose daily lives were intertwined with the repository of her husband’s herculean research.

Toward the end of his labors, Murray was ambivalent about whether he had chosen the right profession. “The greatest sacrifice the Dictionary entailed upon me, by far,” he confessed to his eldest son—who would graduate with a first from Balliol, write a scholarly book on chess, and become Her Majesty’s Inspector of Schools—“was the constant companionship of my own children; and I doubt it was worth the sacrifice. I have tried as a husband and father, to do what should have been the work of a celibate and ascetic, a Dunstan or a Cuthbert; no wonder it has been a struggle. But has it been worth it?” That the philologist prevailed over the family man in Murray may have given him second thoughts, but it has been an enormous boon to the rest of us.

Though Ogilvie provides good portraits of the founders of the OED, Herbert Coleridge and Frederick Furnivall, as well as the editors Henry Bradley, William Craigie, and Charles Onions, she contrives to see too many of her figures—especially the more eccentric ones—as avatars of our own fashionable notions. Too many pages, for instance, are given over to an oddly gushing account of the career of “Michael Field,” the pseudonym for Katherine Brady and Edith Cooper, the rather absurd literary ladies who were for many years readers for the Dictionary. Moreover, Ogilvie sees most of the women involved in providing “slips” (the sheets of paper on which readers for the Dictionary supplied Murray with their illustrations of words) as proto-feminists, oppressed souls knocked about by unfairly patriarchal men. Whether North Oxford at the time, learned or otherwise, actually saw itself in such terms is not a question with which Ogilvie concerns herself. “Should women writers be read for the Dictionary?” she asks. “They were, of course,” she concedes, “though not in the quantity that male authors were.” That there were simply more male than female authors on which to draw does not somehow signify. For Ogilvie, despite this disparity, there ought to have been an equal number of male and female authors read. In her Whiggish history, the Dictionary People are too often dragooned into vindicating such silly prejudices.

Despite her soft spot for the Dictionary’s female readers, Ogilvie is constrained to dismiss poor Charlotte Yonge, author of the excellent Tractarian novel, The Heir of Redclyffe (1853), as “old fashioned.” Why? The novelist was “a devout worshipper in the parish church,” and her books contain “didactic messages about the duties of a Christian.” Murray, however, saw fit to quote from Yonge’s works 1,300 times, which shows the extent to which he was uninfected by Ogilvie’s faddish strictures.

Murray’s definition of “fad” is tell-tale here: “A crotchety rule of action; a peculiar notion as to the right way of doing something; a pet project, esp. of social or political reform, to which exaggerated importance is attributed; in wider sense, a crotchet, hobby, ‘craze.’” One cannot view this definition on the online site for the OED because, as the current editors explain: the “OED is undergoing a continuous programme of revision to modernize and improve definitions. This entry has not yet been fully revised.” In the OED’s second edition, edited by J. A. Simpson, the sentence regarding “social or political reform”—which so aptly skewers the whole progressive project—is predictably excised.

If the current editors are poised to bundle away what had been the provocative élan of the OED’s definitions under Murray’s tutelage, Ogilvie in her account of its helpers can be relentlessly informative about things most readers will already know. Speaking of Virginia Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, for instance, a frequent contributor to the Dictionary, Ogilvie tells her readers that he was also the editor of the National Dictionary of Biography, “which is still going strong today under the aegis of Oxford University Press.” Reading this, those charged with marketing the ODNB must despair of the efficacy of their efforts.

Admittedly, these might seem trifling foibles, but when Ogilvie writes of lexicography, a subject upon which she should be expected to have some reliable expertise, we can see that her misjudgments are more fundamental. “We think of the OED as a radical dictionary,” she writes, “because of its size, its scholarship, and its methods . . . But if you compare it with other languages, there was nothing about its creation in the mid-nineteenth century that had not been done before in Europe.” Yet no reasonably informed person would regard the OED as “radical:” its debt to Johnson’s great Dictionary, to name just one, is patent, as anyone can see who attends to its development of the Great Cham’s use of illustrative quotation or the frequency with which “[J]” appears throughout its pages. Secondly, most of the compilation of what would become the OED was started in the late nineteenth century, when Murray took over the reins, not in the mid-nineteenth century, though the London Philological Society might have broached the need for a new dictionary as early as 1857. Thirdly, there were no dictionaries in Europe in the middle of the nineteenth century comparable to the OED, whether with respect to the realization of its historical principles or its wide-ranging quotations from classic authors. Gilliver cites the German scholar Franz Passow’s Greek dictionary of 1826 as an influence on the OED—especially his declaration in the introduction that genuinely historical dictionaries must capture “the life history of each individual word.” Yes, Murray and his editors followed Passow in embodying this “life history” in the OED; but an influence on a great work, however profound, is not necessarily comparable to the great work itself. We do not put Holinshed on the same level as Shakespeare.

Even worse, Ogilvie, who identifies herself on the book’s jacket as “a linguist and lexicographer,” claims that Johnson’s dictionary was “prescriptive”—as opposed to “descriptive”—which is to say that it defined words as they ought to be, not as they were. For Ogilvie, in other words, Johnson’s Dictionary was given over to “telling . . . readers what words should mean, and how they should be spelled, pronounced and used.” Of course, as all readers of Johnson’s Dictionary would know, this is a crude misrepresentation of his lexicographical work.

Henry Hitchens’s superb Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Johnson’s Dictionary (2005) presents a far more accurate understanding of Johnson’s approach to lexicography. Speaking of the Preface that Johnson wrote to his Dictionary, Hitchens says that “it is magisterial, noble, imperishable . . . no one has ever written so acutely and at the same time so personally about the problems of language and lexicography.” For Hitchens, “The experience of writing the Dictionary . . . transformed Johnson’s ideas about these subjects, and accordingly the Preface feels very different from the Plan of eight years before. Johnson is reconciled to the instability of language. He understands the importance of descriptive lexicography, and has renounced his own narrowly prescriptive notions.” And to substantiate his reading of this development of Johnson’s lexicographical career, Hitchens quotes the great man himself, who insists that “while our language is yet living, and variable by the caprice of every one that speaks it, . . . words are hourly shifting their relations, and can no more be ascertained in a dictionary than a grove, in the agitation of a storm, can be accurately delineated from its picture in the water.” Only a poet could have landed on so happy a metaphor to capture the irrepressible exuberance of language. It is also the poet of the vanity of human wishes in Johnson who charts the disillusionment he experienced in persevering with his great work:

When first I engaged in this work, I resolved to leave neither words nor things unexamined, and pleased myself with a prospect of the hours which I should revel away in feasts of literature, the obscure recesses of northern learning, which I should enter and ransack, the treasures with which I expected every search into those neglected mines to reward my labour, and the triumph with which I should display my acquisitions to mankind. When I had thus enquired into the original of words, I resolved to show likewise my attention to things; to pierce deep into every science, to enquire the nature of every substance of which I inserted the name, to limit every idea by a definition strictly logical, and exhibit every production of art or nature in an accurate description, that my book might be in place of all other dictionaries whether appellative or technical. But these were the dreams of a poet doomed at last to wake a lexicographer. 

Ogilvie’s voguish leanings notwithstanding, there are intriguing things in her book. For example, there is her description of the Sunday Tramps, who were formed and led by the godless Leslie Stephen. Like all good agnostics, he and his friends—mostly upper-middle-class professional men—spent their Sundays walking instead of attending church services. Murray defined the word agnostic as “one who holds that the true existence of anything beyond and behind material phenomenon is unknown and (so far as can be judged) unknowable.” Murray, a staunch Nonconformist, would never have been asked to join the Club—he was too devout—though his professional relationship with Stephen was fairly close. Ogilvie quotes an excerpt from the speech Murray gave on his seventieth birthday that could only have met with Stephen’s disdain: “The Dictionary is to me . . . the work that God has found for me and for which I now see that my sharpening of intellectual tools was done and it becomes to me a high and sacred devotion.”

Tidbits like these may not entirely save the book from its trendier proclivities but they do make it diverting, even moving.

Photo by PA Images via Getty Images

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