The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary

One hundred and forty-one years ago the British first published their great—in every respect—Oxford English Dictionary. Not even its publishers, the Oxford University Press, seem to know exactly how volumnous that dictionary was, but it was at least twelve volumes. (Sometimes Oxford says there were thirteen volumes.)

Then in 1971 Oxford published the above dictionary in two volumes, a feat that was accomplished by reducing the earlier work “micrographically.” (The two volumes were, to prevent wholesale blindness, sold with a magnifying glass!)

Now comes the latest reduction, The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, but this time the OED has not been reduced by a photographic process, but rather by simply whacking great gobs out of the definitions and illustrative quotes. In other words, the size of this edition’s print will allow anyone under the age of 40 with normal eyesight to read it unaided, and the size of its entries will make anyone over the age of 40 recall wistfully those good old days, even in his own lifetime, when scholarship meant elaboration, not crimping back.

This version of the OED is the literary equivalent of Maxim’s being put under the management of McDonald’s. Well, okay, maybe that is an exaggeration; after all, The Shorter does have 163,000 words, combinations, and idiomatic phrases, which is still two-thirds the number of entries in the original, and the scope of the definitions and illustrations is often, though not always, as good as that of Webster’s unabridged. Nevertheless, we must warn you that much of the endearingly donnish spirit of the original OED has been bled away.

John Dean III, former counsel to the president, has left many people wondering just what duties he was supposed to be performing. The original OED gives assistance, telling us that the King’s counsel (who, by the way, “wears a silk instead of a stuff gown”) “must not be employed in any cause against its interest (that is, against the government’s interest), without special license of the Crown, which is however never refused.” This is a quotation plucked from the literature of 1853 and indicates, it seems, that bending laws to suit the top dog’s whim is hardly new.

Then, dropping down to “counsel” as a verb, we find among the plethora of illustrative uses, this one, most appropriate in regard to both Mr. Nixon and Mr. Dean, from Spark’s Life & Writ. II (1789): “He has neither sense to counsel himself, nor to choose counselors for himself, much less to counsel others.”

On the word “counsel,” alone, all of the above, and much, much more besides, is left out of The Shorter OED.

Now let us turn to one of the words most frequently deleted from the Nixon transcripts—a word, after all, that has become commonplace elsewhere than in the Oval Office—and see how much less generously it is treated in The Shorter than even in Webster’s unabridged:

The Shorter: Shit, shite, sb. Not now in decent use. OE. . . . 1. Excrement from the bowels, dung 1585. b. A contemptuous epithet applied to a man, 1508. 2. Diarrhaea, esp. in cattle—late ME. Also vb. trans. and intr. Webster’s unabridged: Shit. . . . vb. shit, shitting, shits. . . . vt. 1. to defecate in—usu. considered vulgar 2. slang a: to talk nonsense to b: to attempt to deceive. Shit noun—substantive 1. excrement—usu. considered vulgar 2: an act of defecation—usu. considered vulgar 3. slang a: nonsense, foolishness b: something of little value (didn’t give a—) (not worth a—) c: trivial and usu. boastful or inaccurate talk 4. slang: a contemptuous person 5. shits pl. but sing or pl in constr: diarrhea—used with the; usu considered vulgar.

But none of this is sufficient to fill the needs of The Era of Transcripts. One must still go to the original OED to get a feel for the pungent history of this very British word, to learn, for instance, that in the W. Somerset Word Book of 1885 the gentry was instructed that using the word to describe a contemptuous person was very common but that it is “applied to men only.”

Indeed, to understand fully what our President or any other politician is getting at, one requires at least the original twelve volumes. However, if one’s life is limited to the company of ordinary folk and if one limits one’s reading to such periodicals as The Nation or Human Events, then The Shorter version will do very well. And it is a handsome book.

Reviewed by Robert Sherrill / (2,672 Pages) / BFL Price $47.50