The bitchiness of lexicographers and NYRB reviewers
Andrew O'Hagan's
review of Henry Hitching's
Defining the World: The Extraordinary
Story of Dr, Johnson's Dictionary, in the
New York Review of Books for
4/27/06, leads (on p. 12) with a pretty solid slam:
If you keep an eye on them, you might
notice that dictionary-makers are marginally bitchier than runway
models.
O'Hagan is keeping up a NYRB tradition of lapidary disparagement
here. The first sentence introduces the organizing figure of this
paragraph, that lexicographers are unpleasantly feminine -- shrill and
trivial if women, shrieking, prancing queens if men. The
bitchiness of lexicographers is illustrated by what O'Hagan presents as
an exchange between two recent dictionaries on the punctuation of a
single expression. Meanwhile, O'Hagan's elegantly sneering prose
illustrates just how bitchy NYRB reviewers can get.
There is no mention of Samuel Johnson, Henry Hitchings, or Hitchings's
excellent book in this paragraph. It's all about (modern)
dictionary-makers.
But then things get better. How could they not, once Dr. Johnson
enters the room?
Here's the whole first paragraph:
If you keep an eye on them, you might
notice that dictionary-makers are marginally bitchier than runway
models. A few summers ago, the revised editions of the Chambers Dictionary and the Oxford Dictionary of English were
published into an avid marketplace. Out came the lipstick, out came the
knives, as the great lexicographers of today rolled their eyes at one
another and balanced their inky fingernails on their slender
hips. "Bling-bling" is one word separated by a hyphen, said
Oxford. Not at all,
honey-pie. Two words and no hyphen, said Chambers, summoning the authority
of the ancients, or Puff Daddy, seeing as the ancients were unavailable.
A not necessarily complete list of disparagement by imputation of
femininity/effeminacy in this paragraph:
"bitchier" ("bitch" and "bitchy" being
largely reserved for insulting women and gay men)
"runway models" (who are both female and male, though modeling, like
almost everything associated with fashion, is considered to be a
"feminine" occupation, and male models are widely believed to be mostly
gay; I mean, look at Brad Gooch)
"the lipstick" (no further comment necessary)
"the knives" (debatable, but knives are the weapon of choice for women,
guns for men)
"rolled their eyes" (a gesture widely believed to be feminine, and to
be a gay mannerism)
"their slender hips" (oh, jesus! this is where I started hissing
like a raging queen)
"honey-pie", attributed to one dictionary, applying it to the other
That's a lot to pack into one little paragraph, which as a result
configures a difference between the two dictionaries as
The Women meets
The Boys in the Band. I guess
O'Hagan thought he should lead with a really good punch. Wipe out
the pussies in the first round. Unfortunately, though I find the
paragraph artful, I also find it decidedly unpleasant and also, well,
damn bitchy.
Then there's the utter triviality of this difference, which O'Hagan
clearly wants his readers to appreciate. These wusses have
nothing better to do with their lives than engage in catfights over
whether an expression is to written as two words, one hyphenated word,
or one solid word! (There is, of course, a huge literature about
the issue and about particular cases. For the most part, though,
lexicographers don't invest a lot of passion in such things: practice
changes over time, there's a certain amount of variation that just has
to be recognized, and clarity and comprehensibility are hardly ever at
issue.)
To my mind, what's most disturbing about this passage isn't its
rhetoric and distasteful background assumptions, but the way it
presents the purported confrontation between the dictionaries.
Notice that there are no actual quotations here, and no reference to
any publication or to some public event at which the dictionary folks
could be observed actually exchanging words with one another. Yet
O'Hagan frames things so that the non-specialist reader is invited to
suppose that there was such an exchange. A melee (I follow
NOAD2's preference for the spelling of this word) at the Dictionary
Society of North America meetings, perhaps.
But of course there was no such thing. All that happened was that
one dictionary published one thing and the other published something
else. The catfight scene is an imaginative construction of
O'Hagan's. No doubt he will say that he supposed that readers
would recognize his hyperbolic fantasy for what it was -- this is the
"just kidding" defense -- but I'm not sure they're equipped to.
Even if readers correctly divined his intentions, there's still the
imputation that this is the way lexicographers behave, and since few
people hang out with dictionary-makers, I suspect that even the readers
who understand that the paragraph is not a factual report, jazzed up
some, will come away from it supposing that it's an entertainingly
exaggerated picture of the way lexicographers really do tend to behave
(these days, anyway). That's a nasty underhanded blow.
My guess is that O'Hagan felt he needed to twist a knife into
SOMEONE
in a NYRB review -- it can be a tough neighborhood -- and since he had
nothing really negative to say about the book (which he generally
admires), Hitchings (whose writing he praises), or, of course, Dr.
Johnson, he looked around for a victim and settled on modern
dictionary-makers to show off his writerly chops on. Too bad.
After that first effusion of deprecatory hyperbole, O'Hagan settles
into less extravagant expository prose, mostly about Johnson, who tends
to crowd everyone else into a corner whenever he's in the room.
There is a brief review of Hitchings's book in O'Hagan's piece, but by
and large it's an essay about Johnson. (Well, the book review as
a hook for an essay has a long history and many excellent
practitioners. I'm not complaining about that.)
This essay begins, "Authority and provenance are watchwords for the
dictionary-making classes." I wouldn't argue with that, though I
think "dictionary-making classes" is over-showy and that "authority"
needs more discussion, especially in a passage that shifts from the
authority of Puff Daddy (see above) to Johnson's intention to both
ennoble and fix the language. And I think "definition in context"
belongs on the list. Certainly, that was a prime concern for
Johnson and is still for modern lexicographers, especially those
working on the vocabulary of special communities or on the historical
development of meanings, but generally for anybody who wants to figure
out what words mean.
In any case, we're now into O'Hagan's essay on Johnson, and out of the
Bitch Zone.
Full disclosure time. I am not a lexicographer, but I
hang out with a lot of them (on the American Dialect Society mailing
list and at linguistics meetings), and I currently have a gig as a
Delegate to the Oxford University Press, consulting on American
dictionaries.
[Added 5/3/06: I didn't say much about Hitchings's book above, but for the record let me say that it's marvelous. Hitchings writes clearly and engagingly, and, most notably, he's unobtrusive; the book is about Johnson, not Hitchings. When I first saw the book, I thought, oh hell, not another book about Dr. Johnson and his Dictionary -- but, yes, there's room for one more, especially one so focused on the dictionary project itself.]
[More added 5/3/06: Mark Liberman has now
posted about O'Hagan's review, citing a perceptive
blog entry on it by "A White Bear", who nails something in it that I failed to draw out, namely its contempt for scholars (as opposed to creative writers). Check it out. Oh yes, Mark also quotes from a delightful, genial review by Russell Baker in the most recent NYRB, just to show that the NYRB doesn't actually require its reviewers to skewer people.]
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at May 1, 2006 02:52 PM