Blogocentric Formulations

The Professor and the Madman

Just finished reading The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester; curious to know if anyone else has read it and, if so, what you thought of it.

I'm by no means an avid reader of nonfiction, but this particular story fascinated me. It's an account of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, an undertaking the resulted in almost 500,000 entries compiled over the course of more than half a century. The editors assigned to complete the dictionary requested that readers submit entries and citations from preexisting written works, which would be verified, cross-referenced, and included in the dictionary. What makes this story particularly interesting is that it was discovered one man (retired U.S. Army surgeon Dr. W.C. Minor) submitted more than ten thousand entries, almost all of which were used in the dictionary... and that he did so as a patient in an asylum for the criminally insane.

The book lags a little at the beginning as it establishes the history of dictionaries (ooh, exciting! ) and the events that led up to the Oxford English Dictionary project, but the latter half of the book is a fascinating account of Dr. Minor's troubled character, his friendship with editor James Murray, and the remarkable contribution he made to the English language, all while battling against what would later come to be diagnosed as schizophrenia.

It's a fascinating story and if you're a fan of history, lexicography, or stories of how coincidence formed events of our past, this might be worth the read. For those that have already read it, what did you think?