The Word Detective: A Life in Words: From Serendipity to Selfie

"What do you call the part of a dog's back it can't scratch? Can you drink a glass of balderdash? And if, serendipitously, you find yourself in Serendip, then where exactly are you? The answers to all of these questions can be found in the Oxford English Dictionary, the definitive record of the English language. And there is no better guide to the dictionary's many wonderments, its quirks, and its quiddities than the former chief editor of the OED, John Simpson. John spent almost four decades of his life immersed in the intricacies of our language, and guides us through its history with charmingly laconic wit. In The Word Detective, an intensely personal memoir and a joyful celebration of English, he weaves a story of how words come into being (and sometimes disappear), how cultures shape the language we use, and how we cope when words fail us. Throughout, he enlivens his narrative with lively excavations and investigations of individual words-from deadline to online and back to 101 (yes, it's a word)-all the while reminding us that the seemingly mundane words (can you name the four different meanings of ma?) are often the most interesting ones. A brilliant expedition through the world of words, The Word Detective will delight, inspire, and educate any lover of language"--… (more)

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LibraryThing member hardlyhardy

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, is still serving the old firm well.

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LibraryThing member KallieGrace

This took me nearly two months to read, which is unheard of for me. It is so much more dense than I anticipated, and lacked a firm narrative pull in the first half to keep me moving. But still, this is so fascinating to watch the OED move online and understand the process of updating the

dictionary. I read a similar book about the Merriam-Webster dictionary right before this, and the different approaches to language and record they take are notable. I enjoyed the thread here about his non-verbal daughter as well, an irony in his life he grappled with for a long time.

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