Transcript of “The Dictionary People”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette. If you’ve ever played tennis, you know that after a while the net will start to sag. And at that point you have to go over to one end and turn a crank to make it taut again. Now that crank was invented by a Yorkshireman named Robert Charles Hope. He came up with this device in the late 19th century at a time when the popularity of lawn tennis had begun to surge in England. For example, the first Wimbledon tournament was in 1877. Now you may wonder, why am I telling you all this on a show about language? Well, Robert Charles Hope was not just passionate about tennis, he was also passionate about words. And he’s one of many members of the public who responded to a call from the Oxford English Dictionary to send in citations for notable words that they encountered in their reading. And it was Robert Charles Hope who provided the OED with its first citation for the word filching, meaning pilfering. And he also sent in the first citation for the verb to jaunt, meaning to make a horse prance up and down.
And I learned about him in a fantastic new book by linguist and lexicographer Sarah Ogilvie. It’s called The Dictionary People, The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary. And I’m very excited about it.
That was just a preview because I want to talk about it later in the show, too. This is tonally different than Simon Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman, also known as The Surgeon of Crowthorne in the U.K., and that it’s not just about a couple of people and how dictionaries are made. It’s about a lot of people and how dictionaries are made. And I would say that it’s a lighter, more fun book. It’s a lot of fun.
In fact, I was going to add that one more word that Robert Charles Hope probably used is spharistike.
Oh, spell that.
S-P-H-A-R-I-S-T-I-K-E, spharistike. It comes from Greek, and it’s an old name for the game of tennis that was used in the 1870s and eventually replaced by the term lawn tennis.
Sporistiki.
Yeah.
Well, we’ll talk more about this book by Sarah Ogilvie later in the show, but we’d also like to talk to you. Why don’t you lob some balls across the net to our phone number at 877-929-9673, or you can reach us on our website at waywordradio.org/contact.
