How to hire a lexicographer

John Simpson

Does any university anywhere offer a major in lexicography? I doubt it. Not even Oxford University, home of the Oxford English Dictionary, does that. There simply are not enough dictionaries being produced at any one time to warrant studying lexicography on the chance of landing one of those few jobs. So then where do lexicographers, the people who compile dictionaries, come from?

The most interesting chapter in John Simpson's memoir, The Word Detective, reviewed here a few days ago, may be the one in which he discusses how he made hiring decisions when he headed the OED. His methods sound outrageous, yet they apparently worked.

For example, he favored left-handers over right-handers. He turned away applicants who said they "love words." "What is the point of loving words and at the same time expecting to analyze and classify them?" he asks. He also frowned on applicants who used the word hone during interviews.

One hiring strategy that makes more obvious sense is to choose listeners, not talkers. Unless you are looking for someone in sales or politics or a very few other kinds of positions, listeners are usually better employment choices than talkers. That's because talkers talk more than they work. Their talk disturbs other workers. Talkers don't like working alone, something lexicography certainly requires. As for listeners, Simpson wanted employees who heard language and observed how words were used in everyday conversation. Many talkers only listen to themselves.

Simpson hired finishers, not ramblers. By that he means he wanted people who weren't interested in research for research's sake. Instead he wanted those who could quickly complete the research on each word, then move on to the next one.

He imagines various famous people from the past coming into his office to apply for an opening. Dickens, he says, "would have been exasperatingly fond of lengthy, indulgent, and detailed descriptions." Archimedes was more a numbers man than a letters man. Agatha Christie, being interested in detection, shows promise. But was she left-handed?

Detecting words

There are a few of us for whom a memoir by a lexicographer sounds like fascinating stuff, and for us few John Simpson's The Word Detective (2016) is a winner.

Hired in the 1970s by the Oxford English Dictionary, after first being turned away, Simpson found a career as a "word detective" a perfect fit for him. He gradually rose through the ranks until he became its chief editor, overseeing the transformation of the OED from a giant, multi-volume reference found mostly in libraries to a valuable online resource available on anyone's phone or computer.

The phrase "word detective" seems apt, for the work of a lexicographer involves such tasks as discovering the many meanings of a particular word at various points in the expanding English-speaking world, accounting for different spellings and pronunciations and, perhaps most difficult of all, determining the earliest use of this word. "At the time," Simpson writes, "I couldn't imagine anything that was as much fun as doing this: working fast, assimilating insightful but sometimes mistimed comments, taking a good entry and making it as perfect as possible."

Throughout his book Simpson uses such words as crowdsourcing and transpired, then in an aside explains something about that particular word's history and meaning, thus not just telling us how he worked but showing us the actual results of word detecting.

Sometimes Simpson gets personal, never more so than when he writes about Ellie, his now adult daughter who can neither speak nor understand language. It's a tragic irony — the man in charge of the world's greatest English dictionary having a wordless daughter with whom he cannot communicate.

More than a memoir, The Word Detective is also a modern history of the OED, with a lot of its early history thrown in. Simpson is now retired yet, through his memoir, still serving the old firm well.

Lincoln's love triangle

A love triangle involving Abraham Lincoln? Well, yes, and what's more, Louis Bayard's 2019 novel Courting Mr. Lincoln sticks fairly close to the historical record.

Lincoln and Mary Todd show up in Springfield, Ill., at about the same time. Gangly and ignorant of how to dress and behave in polite society, Lincoln comes to town to launch both his legal and his political careers. Mary moves in with her sister to try to find a suitable husband, although her outspokenness has so far turned suitors away.

Unable to afford a room of his own, Lincoln accepts an offer to share a bed with Joshua Speed, a merchant with good prospects and a man seen as Mary's best prospect. Yet Joshua and Mary, it turns out, are each more interested in Lincoln than in each other.

An older woman in Springfield who views herself as both a political kingmaker and a matchmaker, sees potential in Lincoln that is still invisible to others, but she knows he needs a wife to get very far in politics. She settles on Mary Todd as the best choice, and she conspires to bring the two of them together in secret in her home.

Wondering where his friend is spending his afternoons, a jealous Speed has Lincoln followed, then he reveals the secret to Mary's sister, believing that will end the affair. And it does, but only temporarily. How Abraham and Mary eventually get back together and what happens in the Lincoln-Speed friendship occupies the rest of this engrossing and very unusual romantic novel.

So did Lincoln have homosexual leanings? Bayard raises the possibility, but leaves the question unanswered. just as history does.

Someone else's movie

Larry Watson's new book The Lives of Edie Pritchard is a novel about identity. Who are we exactly, and are we always the same person? Consider these lines uttered by the title character during the story:

"I'd like to take another shot at being me."

"They'd seen what they projected on me. And now when I look at myself I wonder if that's what I'm doing too — just seeing someone else's movie."

"But the thing is, when you're back home, you never have a chance to be someone other than who you were then. Even if you never were that person."

Watson shows us three episodes from Edie's life at 20-year intervals. In the first she's Edie Linderman, a young woman married to Dean, an uncommunicative man who is jealous, and rightfully so, of Roy, his womanizing twin brother. Roy pleads with Edie to run away with him.

Then she's Edie Dunn, divorced and remarried to Gary and the mother of a teenage girl. More because of her unhappiness with Gary than any lingering love for Dean, she takes her daughter and goes to see Dean when she learns he is dying of cancer, her angry husband in pursuit. Roy is married now, but again he asks Edie to run away with him.

Finally she is Edie Pritchard again after returning to her maiden name and to her hometown, Gladstone, Mont. Her teenage granddaughter visits with two young men, her boyfriend and his brother, and Edie senses they are both trouble. Later the granddaughter calls her from Bismarck asking to be rescued.  Roy Linderman shows up to help. After they complete the rescue mission in exciting fashion, he still wants Edie to run away with him.

One thing you can say about Roy is that he, at least, is one constant in her life. Yet to Edie he is representative of her identity problem, that of "seeing someone else's movie." Even at 62, she is an unusually attractive woman, something virtually everyone in the novel, women as well as men, comment upon. Even Watson himself seems to want to define Edie by her looks. We don't learn all that much about her true identity, at least not until that final showdown with the young brothers.

In love with Cleveland

We'll Always Have Cleveland, the 2006 memoir by mystery author Les Roberts, is a book with limited appeal, which is why it came and went very quickly while making little splash. But for anyone with an interest in Cleveland or the Milan Jacovich mysteries written by Roberts, this slim volume is a must read. If you fit into both categories, it's a gold mine.

Roberts doesn't ignore Cleveland's problems — he devotes an entire chapter to them — yet mostly this is an ode to Cleveland, expressed with all the enthusiasm of a new convert. Raised in Chicago, he  spent most of his early career in Los Angeles. He was briefly an actor, then moved into writing for television (The Andy Griffith Show, The Lucy Show, etc.) and producing such shows as Hollywood Squares. Then he began writing murder mysteries set in L.A. featuring a hero named Saxon.

He discovered Cleveland in the 1980s when he went there to produce the Ohio Lottery television show. It was apparently love at first sight. It was a city with the midwestern values and weather that were familiar to him from his Chicago youth. He also saw it as an ideal place to set a new series of mystery novels.

He began the Milan Jacovich novels while still living in California, but he moved to the Cleveland area in 1990 and has never regretted the move. His book celebrates the people, sports teams, restaurants, bars, bookstores, etc., not just in Cleveland but within an hour's drive of Cleveland. His comments on Holmes County Amish country will make anyone want to spend a day there.

Roberts says his Slovenian private investigator was named after an actual dentist in Parma. The names, appearances and personalities of many people he has known in Cleveland show up in his novels, even if in slightly disguised form, and much of the action takes place in actual places in the area, often in businesses Roberts himself frequents. Clevelanders often ask to have characters, even villains, given their names.

Wherever he goes, Roberts says, he takes with him both a notebook and a tape recorder. His impressions of people and places usually show up eventually in his novels. He says he never creates a character who isn't based in some way on a real person.

The memoir is instructive about how a mystery writer works, as well as an excellent travel guide to northeastern Ohio. Unfortunately the book is a bit dated, for many of the businesses Roberts raves about are now closed for good.

Another world

A story creates its own world, often — though not always — with clear or mysterious correspondences to our own.

Francine Prose, What to Read and Why

Isaac Asimov

When reading J.R.R. Tolkien, Isaac Asimov or Lewis Carroll, readers know very quickly that they are entering a world very different from their own. Hobbits? Robots that look and act like humans? Tweedledum and Tweedledee? This is not the world we live in, which is a big part of the appeal of these writers' work.

But Francine Prose is not just talking about the likes of Tolkien, Asimov and Carroll. She is also talking about the likes of Steinbeck, Dickens, Austen, Baldacci or any other writer of fiction you might name. Every storyteller creates not just characters and a plot but a whole new world. Some fictional worlds are just more similar than others to the world you happen to live in.

In fictional worlds telemarketers rarely call. Characters rarely spend hours each day watching television. The routine labors that fill most of an average person's day rate hardly a mention. Interactions involve only a relatively small group of individuals. Characters spend little time eating and sleeping and rarely visit the bathroom. All these facts make fiction less like the real world, but also much more interesting.

In one of the essays in her book, Prose writes about Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle, a six-volume, 3,500-page account that details virtually every moment of the author's life. More volumes are expected for as long as Knausgaard lives his life and writes about it. And Prose loves it.

Most of us, however, would find the very thought of reading about a stranger's life in such exacting detail to be tedious. Even our own lives aren't that interesting. When we read, give us a world that is different from our own.

Manufactured pleasure

Phaedra Patrick plots always seem manufactured, rather than flowing like something than might happen naturally in the real world, yet that is not to say her novels do not provide pleasurable reading. So it is with her 2017 book Rise & Shine Benedict Stone.

Benedict Stone, 44 years old, operates a village jewelry shop in England and doesn't seem to mind that he has few customers. It just gives him more time to mope about the departure of Estelle, his wife of 10 years, who has left him and moved in with a friend.

Then a vaguely familiar teenage girl shows up at his door. She is Gemma, 16-year-old daughter of Benedict's estranged brother, who moved to America years before. If Benedict thinks he has problems, Gemma's are worse. Feeling unloved after her mother left and her father diverted all his attention to a new woman, the girl has run away to England and the only relative she knows about.

Benedict, whose endless pining for a child is one reason Estelle left him, finds in Gemma the child he has yearned for. In her uncle, Gemma finds a loving father figure. Together they set about solving each other's problems. She turns out to have a gift for knowing the perfect gemstone for customers at that particular point of their lives, and she awakens Benedict's creativity in making jewelry. She also takes over Benedict's campaign to win back Estelle.

Meanwhile her uncle takes steps to reunite Gemma with her father, made difficult because that means reuniting with his brother himself. And that means facing up to the act that caused his brother to break contact with him so many years before.

So yes, this does seem as fake as costume jewelry, all a little too neat, but as with The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper and The Library of Lost and Found, the novel is a joy to read.

Thinking positions

"Then you had better leave me, so that I can go to work with the paper straight before me, and my pen fixed in my fingers. I can never begin to think till I find myself in that position."

Anthony Trollope, Dr. Wortle's School

Anthony Trollope

Dr. Wortle, the main character in the Anthony Trollope novel Dr. Wortle's School, has his favorite thinking position, as I suspect many of us do.

Charles Dickens liked to take long, extremely long, walks through London at night to mull over his plots. Thomas Wolfe wrote best standing at his refrigerator, or perhaps it was an icebox, letting completed sheets of paper float to the floor. Some writers think they can work only with a pen and legal pad. I have always felt more creative in front of a keyboard.

Non-writers have their favorite thinking positions, as well. It may be while sitting in an easy chair, driving a car, cooking dinner, taking a shower or pretending to sleep.

In any case, two things seem to be most important: solitude and habit.

Organizations of all kinds typically appoint committees to solve problems, yet it has been found again and again that individuals pondering problems on their own are more creative than committees. Committees may work as sounding boards or rubber stamps, but individuals actually come up with most of the great ideas.

It can be difficult to think clearly with other people around, especially when they are talking and interrupting one's thoughts. A good thinking position usually requires solitude. But not always.

When I began in the newspaper business I found it difficult to concentrate in a busy newsroom, where telephones were ringing, typewriters were clacking and people were talking, sometimes even shouting, constantly. Yet at the end of my career, when the newsroom had become mostly depopulated and computers were mostly quiet, I found the relative silence made it difficult to focus my thoughts. I had gotten used to the bustle.

And so the second and perhaps most important essential is habit. We do our best thinking in one particular situation because that is the situation that has worked before. Newness distracts. The familiar comforts. To do our best thinking we seek out those circumstances that seemed to aid our thinking in the past.

The quality of mercy

It is often a question to me whether the religion of the world is not more odious than its want of religion.

Anthony Trollope, Dr. Wortle's School

Jesus himself, when sounding off against hypocrites, probably would have agreed with Dr. Wortle in his comment above, for hypocrisy and an absence of grace are themes that run through Anthony Trollope's 1881 novel Dr. Wortle's School.

Dr. Wortle operates an exclusive school for boys bound for Oxford and Cambridge, and there is no shortage of parents willing to pay the steep tuition. That is, until controversy erupts regarding an excellent teacher named Mr. Peacocke when it is discovered Peacocke and his wife may not be legally married. The couple had married in America after learning that her husband had died, but then this supposedly late husband had reappeared. Rather than separate, the couple fled to England. Then the husband's brother shows up with blackmail on his mind.

With more charity than most people in his situation might possess, Dr. Wortle sends Mr. Peacocke back to America to determine whether that husband really is alive or, as Dr. Wortle suspects, now dead. Meanwhile he allows Mrs. Peacocke to remain in her residence at the school. This starts tongues wagging, and parents begin withdrawing their sons from the school.

In a subplot, Lord Bracy, one of Dr. Wortle's most promising students, falls in love with the doctor's daughter.

The story actually seems a bit thin, but Trollope milks it for everything it holds, while making readers consider how they might act were they in the position of Mr. Peacocke, Mrs. Peacocke, Dr. Wortle or one of the other key characters. Sometimes choosing between right and wrong, or between the lesser of evils, seems easier when it is not your choice to make.

The disaster that changed the circus

Stewart O'Nan thought of himself as a novelist. Living in Hartford, Conn., he took an interest in the Hartford circus fire of 1944, which took 167 lives. Why had nobody ever written a book about it? He began gathering information about it, intending to try to tempt some other writer into tackling such a book. Then, with some reluctance, he wrote it himself.

The result was The Circus Fire (2000), a work of history that reads like an edge-of-your-seat novel. O'Nan takes the reader minute-by-minute, and then day-by-day, through the fire and its aftermath, an aftermath that continued even into the 1990s.

Circus fires were not a rarity in those days, but it took the Hartford disaster to persuade anyone to take them seriously. In 1944 the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus was much more concerned about rain than fire. And so to waterproof tents the canvas was coated with a highly flammable compound made of paraffin and white gasoline. Even the circus seating was covered with layer upon layer of flammable paint.

The cause of the Hartford fire was never determined, although a known arsonist in Ohio was long considered the prime suspect. However the fire started, it spread quickly, giving the matinee audience, composed mostly of women and children, little time to exit.

Smoke, not flames, accounts for most fire fatalities, but not this time. The smoke quickly escaped through the top of the tent, but the burning canvas and wooden fixtures quickly set people on fire. Many burned to death, while others were trampled in the stampede to get out.

O'Nan gives us all the details about those who died and those who survived and about the confusion created when families tried to identify badly burned bodies. We read about the severe burns suffered and about how the fire affected survivors for decades afterward. We learn, too, about legal efforts to assign blame for the fire.

Circuses changed their practices after the Hartford fire, and communities took more seriously the passage of fire safety laws and their enforcement. Yet by the end of the 1940s, tent circuses were mostly a thing of the past. The Greatest Show on Earth moved into arenas and stadiums.

Stewart O'Nan returned to writing novels after this book, and he has written some excellent ones. But we can be thankful that he took a break to write this excellent work of nonfiction.

Transforming clutter

Everything we write is, in a sense, translated from another language: from the chatter we hear inside our heads, translated from that interior babble (more or less comprehensible to us) into (what we hope will be) the clearer, more articulate language on the page.

Francine Prose, What to Read and Why

Eric Weiner

I have sometimes attempted to excuse my messy desk by saying that I have an orderly mind, and I am only half joking.

In The Geography of Genius, Eric Weiner poses the question, "Might Beethoven's slovenly ways help explain his musical genius?" He, too, is only half joking. Albert Einstein, too, he points out, had a messy desk. I am hardly claiming Beethoven-like or Einstein-like genius. Far from it. At the very least we might conclude that the clutter in one's life does not equal cluttered thinking. Or we might say that a person with a messy desk or a cluttered room might have better things to think about. Who has time to clear off your desk if you are pondering relativity or a fifth symphony? Or we might go even further and say that clutter and chaos actually stimulate orderly thinking.

In her book What to Read and Why, Francine Prose writes not about the clutter on one's desk but the babble in one's mind, all those things we read and hear, all those memories that keep coming back to us, all those stray thoughts and ideas that grab us and won't let go. What a writer does, she says, is to try to make sense of all this babble. Writers cannot do much with empty minds. They need something to work with, as with Beethoven and Einstein, and it is this jumble circling through their minds that they attempt to turn into something new and original and ordered.

When I was a newspaper reporter I covered city council meetings, where there were always public complaints, speeches by council members and discussions of various ordinances and resolution, followed by votes. All this took several hours. Then I had to write a story, sometimes several stories, about what had occurred. Doing this meant unraveling the tangle in my mind and in my notebook, discarding the insignificant and ordering the significant according to relative importance. Order out of chaos, in other words.

All writers work in the same way, to some extent. Prose calls it translation from another language. Or perhaps it's just translation into language.

Places of genius

What Eric Weiner did so ably with happiness in The Geography of Bliss, he attempts to do with genius in his 2016 book The Geography of Genius. Well, almost. This time he includes the time element to his geographical considerations, true geniuses gathered in one place being even more rare than happy people. So while he looked for the happiest places in the world today in the former book, this time he seeks the great places of genius in history.

This search takes him to Athens at the time of Socrates, Plato and Thucydides; Florence at the time of DaVinci and Michelangelo; Edinburgh at the time of Adam Smith, James Watt and James Hutton; and Vienna at the time of Mozart, Haydn, Schubert and Beethoven.

Some places of genius may surprise readers. Calcutta, for example. Calcutta? Well, yes. From about 1840 to 1920, fueled in part about by the influence of the British Empire, this city produced a number of men of genius, such as Nobel Prize winner Rabindranath Tagore, who is still revered in India.

Of the places of genius Weiner discusses, only Silicon Valley still exists as such today, but the author opines that its days may be numbered. As places of genius go, it is already getting long in the tooth.

Weiner travels to each of these places, and others, to see what they are like today and to discuss with local authorities the reasons why genius bloomed, however temporarily, in these particular locales and not others. Although he tries to generalize, the reasons seem to vary from place to place. In Calcutta, he determines that cultural chaos may have stimulated genius, except that such chaos doesn't seem to be working today.

In Florence he says that genius is always communal, one genius stimulating another. In Scotland he finds that genius is practical and has a high tolerance for ambiguity. Tension is necessary in Vienna. In Silicon Valley he gives a share of the credit to moving vans, the fact that great computer minds keep coming and going, moving from one company to another, failing with one idea but then going on to the next.

In summary he says that creative cities need three T's: technology, talent and tolerance. And three D's: disorder, diversity and discernment. Yet true genius remains something that cannot be cultivated or predicted. Mostly it's just a matter of luck.

Creating the truth

Sharyn McCrumb's 2010 novel The Devil Amongst the Lawyers is actually more about the devil amongst the newspaper reporters. It is based loosely on an actual murder case from the 1930s.

Reporters gather in little Wise, Va., less because the case is interesting than because the defendant, Erma Morton, is young and pretty. She is a schoolteacher accused of killing her drunken father. Because she is young and pretty, Erma expects the all-male jury to acquit her.

The trial itself occupies little of the novel. Mostly we read about three reporters and one photographer covering the trial.

Henry Jernigan is a big-name New York reporter known for his flowery prose. Yet Henry cannot focus his mind on the murder trial, for he is preoccupied with a tragedy he witnessed during his years of retreat in Japan.

Rose Hanlon, also from the big city, is considered a sob sister. Shade Baker, the photographer, works mostly outside the courtroom, getting pictures of principals entering or leaving, as well as shots of the surrounding countryside.

The fourth journalist, Carl Jennings,  is a young man from the mountains still trying to make his name with a nearby newspaper.

The New York reporters sound like they could be working for the New York Times today, less interested in truth than in the story they want their readers to believe or the story their readers already believe. McCrumb stresses this point to excess, giving us line after line of Henry and Rose's cynical attitude toward truth"

"America expects things to be backward up here. So we're just showing people what they already know to be true."

"The truth is just what everybody believes."

"Truth is what you can convince people to believe."

"They wouldn't believe the truth if I told 'em, and they wouldn't like it if they did."

And so on.

Shade is directed to get pictures of hicks living in shacks, even though he finds it a challenge finding either. They are disappointed that most people in Wise seem pretty much like most people back East.

Only Carl attempts to tell the true story, yet he ultimately gets fired because his stories lack the color of the big-city reporters.

McCrumb flirts with the supernatural in her novel, yet she is the one who seems prophetic.