“From Oxford, the last word”
This fine old Washington Post article, on matters including the exciting prospect of typing up the dictionary into computerised format, reminds us that the world of 1989 is a bygone age. I came across it when searching for an Anthony Burgess quotation that I saw as a boy on the back of an OED volume, and here it is:
Browsing among the 290,000 main entries in 20 blue buckram-bound volumes prompted British novelist Anthony Burgess to confess that “I have taken this book like a mistress to bed (a weighty one but handleable) and pored over a great many pages, looking for omissions. Nothing is omitted, nothing, however slangy or scabrous or high-tech.” What innocent pleasure to discover that “aerodrome” when first noted in 1891 meant an airplane, then successively a place where an aircraft was housed in a hangar, and where airplanes landed. Sometime around World War II, however, “aerodrome” began being elbowed out of usage by “airfield,” and now the older term may become obsolete by the end of the century.
The quotation also appears and is clarified in another gem, from Michael Whitworth (initially I missed that you have to click on ‘Continue reading’ to uncover a fuller article):
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A book that doesn’t belong to me? This one is easy: the full Oxford English Dictionary, in twenty volumes (1989), or in its wonderful electronic form. My main disappointment in writing this post has been to discover that Anthony Burgess’s hilariously fruity remark about the OED — ‘I have taken this book like a mistress to bed (a weighty one but handleable)’ — referred not to the twenty-volume second edition, but to the fourth and final supplement (1986, covering Se-Z) to the previous edition. The image of Burgess in bed with twenty volumes is just that little bit better than him paying amorous attention to the language from ‘se’ to ‘zymosan’. In my case, even if I could have afforded to buy all twenty volumes, I’d have had to take them to bed because there’s no space left on the bookshelves.
Somewhat ironically given the topic, the Washington Post article contains a typo (an unclosed parenthesis).
