A former Oxford English Dictionary editor explains the word 'pom'
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Surprisingly, John Simpson — lexicographer, Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire and, for 20 years, chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary — is no purist.
"I'm quite happy with anything that happens to a language," Simpson said.
Over the past 40 years, it's an attitude Simpson — and the OED — has exemplified.
While some recall dictionaries as bastions of proper usage, bulwarks of correct English or simply handy ways to resolve arguments, their chief job for many decades has been simply to record what happens to language.
Nor are lexicographers always pedants. "We don't try and say, 'This is right, this is wrong,'" said Simpson.
Does he get het up if, say, "criteria" is used in the singular? Not really. "I just think, 'Well, that's an interesting point. We'll mark it in the dictionary.'"
"We analyse words," he said. "We look at them as scientists — how old they are, which part of the word they're used in, why they change senses at particular times."
On his beginnings at the OED
While it is still possible to buy the OED in book form, the dictionary of record has for more than 20 years been a predominantly digital endeavour.
When Simpson joined the Oxford staff in 1976 this would have been an unthinkable future.
Indeed, according to Simpson, the dictionary's paper system of citations (inherited from founding editor James Murray's Scriptorium) took some getting used to.
"Being put in my place, down right in the dungeons of the dictionary while I got used to the system over the first few years: it was a shock to the system," he said.
"But I started to think, well, maybe we can start shifting the dictionary into a more accessible and friendly light."
The OED begins to digitise
Gradually, the idea of compressing an entire shelf of thick, leather-bound books into a more portable (not to mention cheaper) format began to pick up steam.
Simpson said the OED was right at the forefront of the "big data" movement, beginning with early efforts to digitise its work in the early 1980s.
Early versions of the computerised work weighed in at about 17 million characters. For reference, IBM's first hard drive to hold more than a gigabyte was the size of a refrigerator and cost more than $100,000.
"It was exciting for computer scientists," Simpson said. "We were guinea pigs for what you could do online with big reference sources."
The investment by the Oxford University Press paid off. "By 2000," Simpson says, "the [dictionary] was online."
What's the origin of 'pom', meaning British person?
"You start off with the word immigrant," Simpson says.
But Australians — being Australians — like to play around with language, so of course it doesn't stop there. "[Australians] invented, in around 1900, a personalised form: Jimmy Grants."
The linguistic ribaldry didn't end there. "Other jokers started to play around with the word again and came up with 'pomegranate'."
Immigrants soon became pomegranates, and that form had changed to "pommy" by 1913.
Why the ABC is to blame for the much-maligned 'selfie'
While its use is ubiquitous in many a lazy generational analysis, few realise that the word "selfie" comes from Australia.
What's more, its earliest citation in the OED springs from an online forum hosted by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
"Sorry about the focus," runs the forum post from 13th September 2002 in reference to an attached image. "It was a selfie."
Discovery of this shocked the OED team. "We all thought [selfie] jumped out of a magician's box in about 2008," Simpson said.
On the continuing importance of dictionaries
Lexicographers often talk about the Universal Authorising Dictionary.
Such a tome doesn't exist — it's a joke. It plays on the fact that, for most people, distinctions between individual dictionaries matter little.
Why would anyone subscribe to Australia's Macquarie Dictionary, in an age where any definition is a Google away? Who among you could tell the difference between Oxford Dictionaries and the OED?
Simpson argues that it is the historical principles of the OED make it valuable in an age of information overload.
"I've always wanted to retain the fact that [OED] dictionary entries are quite small and give people a lot of information."
In an age of fake news, that information is crucial.
"We find as much documentary evidence for the word as we know. We watch how [words] develop through compounds, work out the general areas of meaning.
"You look at the evidence, and, as concisely as you can, extract the pith of the meaning and fill out your entry from there. We just observe."
Topics: english-literature, community-and-society, languages, english, united-kingdom, australia
