The Information - James Gleick [32]
The first thousand entries from M to mahurat went online in the spring of 2000. A year later, the lexicographers reached words starting with me: me-ism (a creed for modern times), meds (colloq. for drugs), medspeak (doctors’ jargon), meet-and-greet (a N. Amer. type of social occasion), and an assortment of combined forms under media (baron, circus, darling, hype, savvy) and mega- (pixel, bitch, dose, hit, trend). This was no longer a language spoken by 5 million mostly illiterate inhabitants of a small island. As the OED revised the entries letter by letter, it also began adding neologisms wherever they arose; waiting for the alphabetical sequence became impractical. Thus one installment in 2001 saw the arrival of acid jazz, Bollywood, channel surfing, double-click, emoticon, feel-good, gangsta, hyperlink, and many more. Kool-Aid was recognized as a new word, not because the OED feels obliged to list proprietary names (the original Kool-Ade powdered drink had been patented in the United States in 1927) but because a special usage could no longer be ignored: “to drink the Kool-Aid: to demonstrate unquestioning obedience or loyalty.” The growth of this peculiar expression since the use of a powdered beverage in a mass poisoning in Guyana in 1978 bespoke a certain density of global communication.
But they were no slaves to fashion, these Oxford lexicographers. As a rule a neologism needs five years of solid evidence for admission to the canon. Every proposed word undergoes intense scrutiny. The approval of a new word is a solemn matter. It must be in general use, beyond any particular place of origin; the OED is global, recognizing words from everywhere English is spoken, but it does not want to capture local quirks. Once added, a word cannot come out. A word can go obsolete or rare, but the most ancient and forgotten words have a way of reappearing—rediscovered or spontaneously reinvented—and in any case they are part of the language’s history. All 2,500 of Cawdrey’s words are in the OED, perforce. For thirty-one of them Cawdrey’s little book was the first known usage. For a few Cawdrey is all alone. This is troublesome. The OED is irrevocably committed. Cawdrey, for example, has “onust, loaden, overcharged”; so the OED has “loaded, burdened,” but it is an outlier, a one-off. Did Cawdrey make it up? “I’m tending towards the view that he was attempting to reproduce vocabulary he had heard or seen,” Simpson said. “But I can’t be absolutely sure.” Cawdrey has “hallucinate, to deceive, or blind”; the OED duly gave “to deceive” as the first sense of the word, though it never found anyone else who used it that way. In cases like these, the editors can add their double caveat “Obs. rare.” But there it is.
For the twenty-first-century OED a single source is never enough. Strangely, considering the vastness of the enterprise and its constituency, individual men and women strive to have their own nonce-words ratified by the OED. Nonce-word, in fact, was coined by James Murray himself. He got it in. An American psychologist, Sondra Smalley, coined the word codependency in 1979 and began lobbying for it in the eighties; the editors finally drafted an entry in the nineties, when they judged the word to have become established. W. H. Auden declared that he wanted to be recognized as an OED word coiner—and he was, at long last, for motted, metalogue, spitzy, and others.♦ The dictionary had thus become engaged in a feedback loop. It inspired a twisty self-consciousness in the language’s users and creators. Anthony Burgess whinged in print about his inability to break through: “I invented some years ago the word amation, for the art or act of making love, and still think it useful. But I have to persuade others to use it in print before it is eligible for lexicographicizing (if that word exists)”♦—he knew it did not. “T. S. Eliot’s large authority got the shameful (in my view) juvescence into the previous volume of