Some well-meaning family members gave me The Professor and the Madman for Christmas the year it came out, and I couldn't read past page three. Like one eudaemonist, I can't help but marvel at your endurance. Must be the copyeditor in you. I think Winchester's as happy with his style as his reviewers, where style equals putting big words just anywhere as nobody knows what they mean anyway.

Picky isn't the word. Picky is when you talk about errors in something clearly written, and written in good faith. And Winchester doesn't. No point getting your panties in a twist about a deception practiced on those who want to be deceived, is the way I see it, and there are a lot of reviewers and readers there who are just counting the inches till the back cover on whatever book you give them.

A curious parallel curiosity is that padded is precisely what I thought about The Professor and the Madman, which I did finish if only because I was still interested in the story, padding be damned.

Excuse the twisted panties, but I've just looked at a couple of interviews online (1, 2), and it looks like he's just as much of a twat in real life, if you pardon the expression. He wrote for National Geographic as well, so now I have a face to put to my dislike of that magazine. Though I see (by interview 2) he's been to Skovorodino, which is a plus for me, and loves Dersu Uzala. But still manages to be a prick.

Might we agree to take O.U.P. off the list of publishers of whom we say things like:

"But this is a book published by....."?

I've been repeatedly disappointed. Cambridge, too. California, too. California edits with a spellchecker -- it catches the non-words, but not the wrong words. (Frame's Rabelais has multiple errors, most of which are no real problem but just ugly, because they make no saense at all).

I blame Margaret Thatcher, but I don't know why she was in California.

Hugely enjoyable piece, lh. A merciless (and richly-deserved) dissection. It's always a joy to see bad writing get its come-uppance, and Mr Winchester is a 'magisterially' bad writer!

Yes, well: Mel Gibson owns the movie rights to The Professor and the Madman.

(I kinda like "assemblages," though. But "magisterially famous" made me snort.)

He seems to have a touch of Monty Python about him. I feel your pain.

Be assured that you have provided the kind of "Thank god it's not just me" comfort that a writer of negative critiques hopes to provide.

And here I was wondering if anyone would read all that! Thank you all for providing solace and companionship in my pain. (Alas, it's very hard for me to put a book down once I've started it.)

I was looking at "The Meaning of Everything" on my bookshelf last night (honest) wondering when I'd get back to reading it. I gave up after about the third chapter. I have Winchester's "Professor and Madman" as well, but I got through that one. Forget the errors about this new book. They're unavoidable in a breezy popular book, but the style of this book is so annoying that he gives sesquipedalianism a bad name.

Here's another problem: the title. It smacks of British triumphalism, which is common enough when it comes to discussions of English. (I once wrote a letter to "English Today" complaining about the use of the term "archaism" to describe the word "fall" meaning "autumn." I wouldn't have complained about "fall" being called an archaism in a certain dialect, but I complained about calling "fall" an archaism in general when--by my estimate--it is used by about two thirds of all native speakers of English.)

Back to the issue: The title implies that all meaning is contained in English, and that all this meaning is then ensconced in the OED. First, the OED has serious gaps in its coverage of English itself. Try looking up any number of terms in rhetoric, for example, which the OED intentionally leaves out. Take the uncommon "praecisio" for a start. Second, there are plenty of words in other languages that have no equivalent in English. What about that meaning? Third, it ignores the idea that language is most meaningful when words are concatenated rather than left to live their lives alone and isolated in a dictionary.

And I collect dictionaries. I own and have read scores of monographs on lexicography, lexicographers, and lexicology. I have an interest in this field. But Winchester's book annoyed me page by page.

In compassionate support,

Geof

I haven't taken an opportunity to read this book which is loathed by so many at this site. Dare I ask any one's opinion on K.M.Elisabeth Murray's Caught in the Web of Words: James Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary? (1979, Oxford University Press)

In answer to the above, "Caught in the Web of Words" is lugubrious at best. I had to go back to it after a year's respite before I could finish it. Turgid prose, but eventually the story itself carries the day. There are better works about the making of particular dictionaries.

Geof

While reading this apparently well-deserved éreintement, I was wondering if you knew Etiemble. He passed away three (?) years ago, but this was exactly his kind of critique: altogether passionate and rational (les pieds sur terre). Of course, people detested him for that (having been compared to Homais, the positivist pharmacist in Flaubert's Madame Bovary, he took the insult as an honor), but kept, and still keep plagiarizing him (among other achievements, Etiemble has revolutionned comparative literature in France by opening it to non-Western, sometimes non-written, cultures).

The funniest bit for a French reader (or, say, living in France, which is my case when I am in Europe), is the sentence about "the much-feared Forty Immortals" of the Académie Française. Remember Leiris? "".

Sorry, I pressed "Post" instead of "Preview". I meant:
Remember Leiris? "Macadam pour les mites" (in Glossaire, j'y serre mes gloses).

'but I reminded myself that people like a little scene-setting'

Name one. Excluding the nincompoops who teach journalism, or wherever it is people pick up bad style. Without any facts at all to back me up but my own prejudices, I'm going to guess most people are like me with scene-setting: screaming 'Shut up! Who cares?' at the book (or _New Scientist_ article, worst offender of all).

I'm sure the list of lords is in there for the American market: no-one in Britain is impressed by that stuff.

l337 dissection, teh hat.

Winchester's 'Krakatoa' was like a few 10 page sections randomly repeated multiple times and bound into a book.

National Geographic is the epitome of bad, but highly-praised and laboriously-achieved, style.

I remember someone somewhere having a really brilliant parody of it. Michael Frayn, maybe.

A few sentences from the Nat Geo "Atlas of World History" indicate what's involved:

"By A.D. 100, when the Roman Empire was in full swing, some Maya cities were already in decline."

"Great empires butted heads and power changed hands, but these episodes fed a...kinship with a wider community."

"Vikings were not just ruthless killers; they traded as often as they raided, and their wives knew rights that other medieval women could scarcely imagine."

Now we can see where Winchester developed his style!

It would be interesting to trace the history of brainless orotundity back through the centuries to Hellenistic Alexandria and beyond (are there examples of this sort of thing on baked clay tablets?)... but it would probably drive the investigator to the madhouse.

The book definitely sounds pretty bad but I did enjoy the dissection. I can hardly wait for Chapter 2.

"'The dialects of the Papuan or Negrito race, scattered through the Australian and other Asiatic islands.'" [In other words, it was a paper on what we would now call the Austronesian languages. Those wacky, arcane philologists!]

Not wanting to be picky... ;-) but Austronesian scattered through the Australian islands? Fair enough they're spoken on the Papuan coast but surely not natively in Australia or on any of its islands.

Fair cop, guv'nor.

This note reminds me of an anecdote about Robert Benchley, who went to review the opening night of a new play. After the first act, he went to the cloakroom to get his overcoat. An acquaintance asked about the review, and Benchley said he knew what the review would say. To the other's comment that he had only seen the first act, Benchley answered that he was sure the author of the first act had also written the second and third acts.

I read Winchester's The Map that Changed the World a while ago, and thought it was painfully bad: poorly written and bad history both. I had been thinking about taking a look at The Meaning of Everything because the subject looks interesting and the reviews have been good... but now I will not. Thanks for the warning, especially as it was so much fun to read!

I have not blogged in vain if I have kept even one innocent victim from being subjected to the oleaginous prose and invincible ignorance of Simon Winchester!

Not only the prophylactic service rendered to the innocent, Mr. Hat, but the confirmation sorely needed by those already harmed by this egregious profanity; confirmation rare and sorely needed in these trying times.
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I will read almost anything, though I prioritize and catalog what's available before settling in for the night. If there's nothing else I'll read a People magazine; cover to cover if I've had too much stimulant.
Winchester's first "book" was actually recommended and given to me. So I tried.
I love the OED. The most painful separation of my life was made far worse by an uncompromising struggle over custody of a full set of the early 20th century edition.
So of course an anecdotal history...oh boy!
Masochist that I can be it was at least a third of the way through before I threw it across the room, and like a smoker or a next-morning drunk, vowed never again to subject myself to the damage contact with such a disturbed mentality can cause.
But I repress things that scar me deeply, as most people do.
I forgot.
There on the limited shelves of the bookmobile, this January, while I was searching for some nice non-fict. for my aged mother, who still reads two or three books a week I saw, well yes.
The Demeaning of The OED.
But the "Winchester" resonated as that guy from MASH, David Ogden Stiers, for some reason.
Then that night just as I opened it up, the size and cover graphic brought back the horror full-force.
Oh God what have I done?
One page and I was incensed. One page.
Another paragraph and it was over.
I didn't throw it though, not this time, the room's too small and filled with valuable things. I put it underneath some dirty socks.
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Something evil in that facile emptiness.
That a work so revered by so many could be so profaned so publicly...
What dark-motived creature would be allowed...
But no, it's probably only due to simple greed and self-blinding arrogance, like so much else that's wrong.
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This post has done much to heal the aesthetic wound Winchester's scurrilous grasping caused. And I'm most grateful.

You know, I understand his writing the book: he can't do any better, and they offered him a contract, after all. I even understand (though with severe pain) the book's being published in its present form: we all know what's happened to the publishing industry, and even OUP doesn't bother with editing and factchecking any more. What I CANNOT UNDERSTAND is all the reviewers rolling over for this tripe. Can't any of them READ?

(Excuse the shouting. Sometimes it gets to me.)

Page 1:

"A great horse race on a sunny afternoon tends always to bring out the best in people, and it is probably fair to say that the concern of most in England that summer's day was not so much with historical enterprises, however great or small they might have been, but rather more prosaically..."

But... but... but...

I liked "The Professor and the Madman"! I mean, the story! What an amazing story!

I knew nothing about how the OED was created, or even that dictionaries did not come into being until so recently, so the entire thing astounded me.

The book was completely new information to me--both the history of the madman and the history of the OED. How could I not forgive its blemishes and faults as it told me things not only fascinating but true?

I admit that I have a very low standard for non-fiction--if it's better written than my high school textbooks, I'll read it--but then how else am I supposed to learn these things?

If no one else is telling these tales, then what alternative have I but to read books, no matter how badly written, to learn the stories?

So what did vastidity mean?

Michelle: Sure, if you want to learn about something, you'll put up with a poorly written book to do so. I'm not forbidding anyone to read Winchester (or anything else), just expressing my exasperation at the failings of his much-praised style. (And he's counting on the fascination of the tale to cover up his sloppy telling.)

bryan: Vastidity is a noun, not an adjective; if you're going to say "...soilure, tortive, and vastidity, which mean, as one might expect, staining, twisted, and..." you have to finish with a grammatically parallel form, in this case "bigness" or the like.

Oh. Well.

Then why isn't someone why *can* write telling these stories?

Hat, I think that Michelle challenged your manhood. You WILL go out and write a History of Dictionaries.

Here's a good dictionary translation (not history:

"'The King's Dictionary: The Rasulid Hexaglot' was finally published by Brill in June.....The dictionary contains approximately 7,300 words in Arabic, Persian, Turkic, Greek, Armenian and Mongol, the main languages of the vibrant Asian and Middle Eastern states of the Middle Ages."

(Note that Frankish is no longer a factor; the dictionary was compiled at the end of the fourteenth century.)

http://ur.rutgers.edu/focus/index.phtml?Article_ID=218&Issue_ID=26

CHEAP! at $180.00: http://tinyurl.com/38dcq

Damn. How can I pass up a book called "The Rasulid Hexaglot"?

(embarassed look)

I wasn't doing any challenging! It was an honest question!

(And it was supposed to be someone who not someone why. Sorry.)

Michelle-
I'm no linguist, but I know words when I see 'em. Your question's legit. And gains my sympathy.
So do kids who think Pooh is a Disney-created teletubby mutant with a glucose addiction, as opposed to the valorous bear he'll always be to those of us who know.
My sympathy for you and those kids becomes ire when focused on the perps in question, that's all.
You're cool, Winchester's a scammy twit.
My imagined scenario viz. "The Demeaning of Everything" is that the inexpressibly dear, and eminently forgivable, British eccentrics who have formal charge of the OED and its archives are so removed from the hury-burly of popularization they think of someone of Winchester's ilk as a necessary translator, or middleman, between the Magister Ludi of Castalia and the public avenues.
Plus Winchester maybe had piles of money going in or something; it was obviously not a labor of love, unless you count self-love and avarice.

Just to follow up on a minor point made early in the thread: college reference librarians stopped regarding OUP as a serious, "must-order" press years ago. Large university libraries such as the one my father used to work for (Penn State) tend to have blanket orders for the output of major academic presses, but OUP is not among them. They still publish some good stuff, of course, but they also put out a lot of crap.

Man, that's depressing.

Isn't the title a play on words? When I see "the meaning of everything" I think of an "answer to life, the universe and everything"; that the phrase was used with a different sense seemed slightly clever. But perhaps that's just me.

Oh well. I'll probably still read the thing; I doubt I'm quite as sensitive to poor style as you are, and it remains an interesting subject. (Besides, I don't want to plunge my "to read" list into a constitutional crisis over whether an entry can be removed.)

No, I'm afraid it's nothing so hip. It's from his excited peroration (p. 41) on the inadequacies of previous dictionaries:

"No, nothing that had so far been made was good enough. What was needed was a brand new dictionary. A dictionary of the English language in its totality... No, from a fresh start, from a tabula rasa, there should be constructed now a wholly new dictionary that would give, in essence and in fact, the meaning of everything."

(In other words, it would ignore neither obscure words nor words that had been considered too simple and obvious to define by earlier lexicographers.)

By all means, go ahead and read it; it's fascinating subject matter, and you've already got the damn thing, right? Forewarned is forearmed.

Actually, I was fortunate enough not to receive a copy for my birthday; I'll borrow it from the library. It's possible, of course, that Winchester could have chosen a semi-punning title without drawing attention to it, but given your description of his style this doesn't seem very likely.

********

Hat, I think that Michelle challenged your manhood. You WILL go out and write a History of Dictionaries.

I'm going off-topic here, but this reminded me of a question I've been meaning to ask. Do you (LH, or anyone) know of a good general history of linguistics? Something covering the major figures and movements in the development of the discipline, e.g. origins, neogrammarians, Saussure, structuralism, the Prague school, Sapir, Whorf, Chomsky, Lakoff, generativism, functionalism, cognitivism. (This list probably strikes the informed reader as incomplete, out of order and overly heterogeneous, but that's what I want the book for - to develop a proper perspective.) Or, if a single volume doesn't exist, perhaps a series of books from which the same narrative could be cobbled together?