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?