ABSTRACT
In an episode of The Prisoner, someone impersonates the Patrick McGoohan character as part of a plot to make him reveal why he resigned. Suddenly there are two of them, look-alikes on the outside, very different within. I felt like that, during the encyclopedia years. In the morning I would be editor-man; in the afternoon linguist-man. That was the tricky bit: keeping the linguistic side of me going, so that it wouldn’t be crushed by the weight of general encyclopedic data, coming in daily from (eventually) more than three hundred contributors, or by the minutiae of daily updating. We had a boast in the office: die in the morning and (if you were famous enough) your death would be in our database in the afternoon. If you were thoughtless enough to die in the evening, of course, you would have to wait until the next day. The issue was rather academic while the books were appearing only in hard copy; but when the encyclopedia database went online in the 2000s, it became a real imperative.
