ABSTRACT
The OED has become a crowning symbol of the conservatism overassigned to Victorian linguistics, and as such it provides an ideal opening ground for a re-evaluation of this myth. Initiator Richard Chenevix
Trench envisioned the dictionary as a lexicographic testament to the beauty and magnitude of the English language, and it was clearly received as such by many of its readers (Willinsky 16). Yet even in the most glowing reviews of its initial numbers, there lurks a curious hesitancy as to the social consequences of such a meticulous documentation of the language. Some reviewers felt distinctly uneasy about the dictionary’s democratic inclusiveness, seeming to fear that the insertion of vulgar words and contemporary citations might lead to a sapping of the language’s power, or at least, dignity. An 1884 London Times review of the dictionary’s fi rst section, while lauding its scientifi c vigour and deeming it ‘a great and mature birth of the time,’ nonetheless qualifi es its praise by suggesting that ‘in some cases a little too much use has been made, in the case of perfectly common words, of ephemeral and anonymous publications of the present day . . . though a scientifi c dictionary should be by no means Della Cruscan in its selection of words, it should surely maintain as far as possible a classical standard in its selection of authors quoted’ (6). Clearly recognizing the dictionary’s authorizing force, the reviewer senses that the use of contemporary rather than classical citations for words will confer an unearned legitimacy on modern speech and literature, admitting unruly elements of not-yet proper English into a domain whose purity derives from precedence. A similar concern haunts later Times reviews of the dictionary’s subsequent numbers. ‘We are almost tempted to say that the dictionary is, if anything, too complete,’ writes the reviewer of the 1886 A-B section, ‘[. . .] nothing is gained by the quotation of passages from daily newspapers and magazines. A dictionary, such as the New English Dictionary aims at being, is sure to be quoted as a standard authority, and in that case we fear it will exercise a somewhat questionable infl uence on the future of the English language’ (12). Here the ephemeral phrases of modern mass literature assume an even more clearly antithetical relationship to ‘proper’ English, acting not simply to clutter up its ranks but to exert a pernicious infl uence on its progress. When restricting its scope to the Arnoldian ‘best-that-is-known-andthought,’ the dictionary was to be unequivocally commended; when dipping into the pages of the popular and thus ‘invest[ing] Grub-street with the authority of an academy,’ as an 1889 review put it, it raised troubling questions about the parameters and effects of English (‘The Oxford Dictionary’ 4). In its very rigour, the volume seemed poised to police the language and to barbarize it by recognizing words and phrases that should, by some accounts, be left unsaid.
