More greengrocer’s apostrophes

Happy New Year to all my reader(s), if I have any left after my total neglect of this blog over the last half a year or more.

At Christmas I was delighted to be given a copy of the 1815 reprint of John Walters’s famous English–Welsh dictionary of 1740. As with any good dictionary, you can lose yourself in it for hours. And it’s a particular joy, for those of us who get a bit weary of the golden age mythology of the Tedious Trussite Tendency, to see that it comes complete with the reviled “greengrocer’s apostrophe” on almost every page.

Amazon horribilis

It hardly needs to be said that 2009 has been a woeful year in publishing. Some light relief, and some good news for one small-time non-fiction author, might be found buried in the gossip columns. Or rather, spread across the front pages of the mainstream serious press, as is the way with celebrity trivia nowadays. When Tiger Woods had his famous contretemps with various inconsiderately-located items of street furniture, he had a copy of a 1999 book called Get a Grip on Physics lying around in the car, clearly visible in the police photo of the crash. Cue much heavy-handed hilarity among Amazon reviewers and ludicrous prices for second-hand copies (£151.48, seriously?). The book’s author, John Gribbin, “just wish[es] it was … still in print”. (It might be flippant to suggest that an inadequate knowledge of physics was not first among a certain golfer’s problems at the moment and that he should perhaps concentrate on the first three words of the title.)

And what of Whatever Happened to Tanganyika?, that soaraway phenomenon of the popular history/humour sections, or travel in the case of shops where they don’t waste too much time looking at the stock before filling the shelves? Do I have the police of 50 states on retainer, armed with copies of my distinctive crimson volume to slip into shot at any high-profile celeb RTAs? Well no. A spike like the Eiffel Tower would do it little enough good at the moment, since both American and British Amazon seem to have run out of stock — just in time for Christmas, hoorah. No-one seems to know why or what can be done about it. Publishers have heard nothing from their Amazon sales manager: there “should be” stock…

By a charmingly nostalgic coincidence this is exactly what happened when this would-be Christmas bestseller first came out. Interview on Today prog, 6.6 million listeners: good. Amazon ranking goes through the roof: good, surely? Twenty minutes later, Amazon sells out with no hope of restocking before Christmas and spike does its impression of Eddie the Eagle with a bus to catch. Hey ho ho ho.

PS: You can still get a paperback copy. Paperbacks are nice too.

Tripe-hounds and ink-slingers

The other week I was at the launch party of the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, finally published after some 44 years in the making at Glasgow University’s Department of English Language. It is easily the world’s largest thesaurus, covering some 800,000 meanings in 236,000 categories and subcategories, and the first historical thesaurus of any language. It weighs a ton and costs £250.

It sold out in a matter of days and is now reprinting in time for Christmas.

The story of such an extraordinary book proved irresistible to the press, and its editor was inundated with requests for interviews from around the world. The editor in question is Honorary Professorial Research Fellow Christian Kay, who despite the, er, Christian name, is female. She writes very entertainingly on the OUP blog this week about the sort of questions she was asked, and needless to say, they were often not exactly the most intelligent of questions. I think her piece contributes some nice evidence to my own musings on the strange ideas journalists seem to have about dictionaries and the people that make them (see “Mad professors and lollipop ladies”, etc).

We all know how much the meejah love their heavy-handed clichés, but what also emerges here is a distinctly unappealing kind of ageism. Professor Kay is an unmarried woman around retirement age, a soft-spoken individual of kindly appearance and big owlish specs — if not quite one of the “cardiganed duffers” beloved of The Times, then perhaps the chintzy librarian stereotype might answer. As she points out, it does seem incredible that in 2009 journalists consider it all right to refer to a “lingo-loving spinster” who “coyly confessed” to celebrating with a glass of champagne, and ask whether she is looking foward to getting back to her garden or perhaps a “big piece of knitting”. If she’d been, say, a sexy twenty-nine-year-old in a miniskirt, I do think they would hesitate to suggest she was looking forward to getting her hair done, painting her toenails and putting in some time on the sunbed, and I feel pretty sure that if the thesaurus had been edited by a West Indian with a taste for colourful shirts they would not have asked whether he was planning to celebrate by chillin’ to some jungle beats with a bottle of rum and maybe a large hand-rolled cigarette. But to revert to the most moronic and patronising stereotypes is still OK where a woman over a certain age is concerned.

In time, HTOED will be available on the Web in conjunction with the online OED, but for now it takes the form of two handsome blue slipcased volumes, and this brings us back to another recent subject of this blog. In Prof Kay’s position, I for one would have been tempted to make a practical demonstration to the gentlemen of the press one of the advantages of the printed reference book over the electronic version. I speak of course of the weighty purposes the holy Koran was put to in that Bangladeshi restaurant.¹

¹ Well, perhaps not if they were filming me for the telly.

Cardigans versus anoraks (one more blast)

One more thought on the subject of the printed dictionary versus its electronic challenger.

As one comment on that Guardian article pointed out, “How the good people who create dictionaries will get paid is an entirely different problem from whether we need this information printed on a page.” However, our expert on faith, philosophy, controversy and understanding appears to be groping towards something relevant when he says that “the very bulk of the book somehow contributes to the effort”. It’s true that a printed volume gives a very immediate and comprehensible idea of the amount of data and work that go into even a medium-sized dictionary. With his much-hated search box, you have no idea of the size of what you’re looking through. The blink of the cursor may seem lazy to him but in fact it searches the text at unimaginable speed. I wonder how many people who use the OED online realise that if they were using the printed edition the first task would be identify which of twenty volumes to heave off the shelf and leaf through.

With a printed dictionary you have some idea of scale, and hence price. Anyone can see that just manufacturing such an object would cost a certain amount, whatever it cost you to compile the text. In the case of an electronic product, the production cost is very small, in fact adding a subscriber to an online dictionary must represent almost no extra cost to the producer, so the fee you charge is going to be very arbitrary. How do you put a price on the lexicographical labour it represents?

Which brings us back to the fascinating question the newspapers seem to be showing so little interest in. Who can say what will happen to the printed dictionary over the next few years? Is it an endangered species, as some people even seem to think those printed newspapers are? Certainly, paper has its limitations when it comes to reference works. But it would be very sad never to pick up a convincingly hefty chunk of well-inked cellulose, riffle through the pages and actually get that physical impression of scale, not only of the richness of the language itself but of the sheer labour and dedication that goes into a making a dictionary.

And the hefty tome does have occasional other uses too. I once read a nice anecdote in a newspaper restaurant column whose author had visited a Bangladeshi restaurant and noticed a large copy of the Koran on top of a fridge. How interesting, he immediately thought in his Guardian-journalist way, to see the way religion is an inherent part of the daily life of these fine people. “Well yes,” they agreed when he mentioned it, “but it also comes in very handy if anyone tries to get out of paying the bill. You can’t keep a baseball bat behind the till these days, that’s an offensive weapon, but a Koran…”

Cardigans versus anoraks (round two)

Broadsheet journalists, moved to print by the Chambers closure, have been demonstrating a sometimes comical ignorance of where dictionaries come from. (Apparently they’re left under gooseberry bushes by cardiganed old duffers, which is OK because the duffers who write printed dictionaries are like lollipop ladies, we know and trust them, unlike those faceless geeks in Silicon Valley who are responsible for the electronic sort.)

In a Guardian Online article bemoaning the rumoured “demise of the paper product”, the editor of the Chambers Dictionary of Beliefs & Religions (“Faith, philosophy, controversy and understanding from the ancient world to the present day”) sings the praises of the printed book as “a superb browsing device”. He informs us that

Computers proceed by gathering facts, along with the links between those facts, and then run them through algorithms to try to make sense of the world — or more often than not, to fail to make sense of the world, as they get lost in an infinite tangle.

This stuff goes right over my head I’m afraid. Either it’s so highly metaphorical as to be more or less meaningless, or it’s just, well, nonsense.

He’s presumably trying to put into words the feelgood factor he gets from handling a printed book. Nothing wrong with that of course, speaking for myself I take as much pleasure in a weighty tome as the next man, although in the work context juggling six of them at a crowded desk can be less than convenient. Many people enjoy flicking through the pages of a dictionary, exploring a garden of words, tempted down this path or that by the exotic blooms they happen to spot. But the claim that the printed dictionary beats the electronic sort as a “browsing device” is a pretty tough one to defend.

“Compare the richness of that experience with a spell check facility.” Why, since we’re talking about dictionaries, not spell-checkers, which are mere lists of acceptable words? “An empty box on the screen stares vacantly back at you. The cursor blinks lazily. It offers no help at all. It conveys nothing of the world of words that, with a dictionary, you can hold in your hands.” Curse that lazy cursor!

The second strand of the argument, if you can call it that, is that printed dictionaries are somehow more real than electronic ones.

We humans are embodied creatures. As philosophers put it, we are extended in space and time. That’s no humdrum observation.

Well, if you say so, squire. How a computer screen can be said to be less a part of the “embodied” world, or less conducive to learning, than a piece of paper, I have no idea. A wittier blogger than me would insert here a drole skit featuring a luddite of the ancient world deprecating the soulless invention of writing when knowledge can be passed on so much more pleasantly and interactively by word of mouth — which might actually be a more credible theory than this one. As for me, I’m as lazy as a blinking cursor, so I’ll save time by stealing a cameo instead.

“Books do furnish a room” according to Anthony Powell’s epic A Dance to the Music of Time. I’m inclined to agree, as long as they all fit on the shelves without overflowing onto the floor, but Stephen Fry’s creation, Professor Donald Trefusis, would not. Here is the description of his “librarinth” in The Liar:

Barely a square inch of wood or wall or floor was visible. Walking was only allowed by pathways cut between the piles of books. Treading these pathways with books waist-high either side was like negotiating a maze. […] Trefusis himself was highly dismissive of them. ‘Waste of trees,’ he had once said. ‘Stupid, ugly, clumsy, heavy things. The sooner technology comes up with a reliable alternative the better.’

Cardigans versus anoraks

Me, trying to be positive for once? It couldn’t last. As I opined the other day, one of the most interesting things about dictionaries is the attitudes of the general public to them, and I can’t resist taking up some of the frankly odd ideas aired in the English broadsheets recently.

It is truly sobering to see how little clue the people that write for these newspapers have about dictionaries and where they come from, as we can see from this bizarre remark in that Times article I mentioned:

It seems curious at a time when provenance and traceability are gaining in stature, from the food we eat to the wood we build with, that language is allowed to travel in the opposite direction, with its semantic history and the defining of its meanings outsourced to anonymous, unaccountable parties in Silicon Valley or whoever else elects to throw up a dictionary site.

If writing a dictionary were no more than part of the process of “throwing up a dictionary site”, what would all the fuss be about? We could all dash one off in a weekend, whereas in reality a new dictionary often demands centuries of person labour. So where do these online dictionaries come from? Could it be that they too are the work of lexicographers, whether or not it ends up on paper between hard covers? But computers and search engines come from Silicon Valley, so that must be where online dictionaries come from too, and the Gatesian geek stereotype hardly matches up with that of those familiar old cardiganed duffers we know to be the authors of proper dictionaries, so something’s not right.

Is it important to know the names of the people who drafted the text? It’s only recently the contributors started to get a mention in the front of “their” dictionaries. Do we know these people from Adam, and how exactly are they accountable? If “provenance and traceability” are important in a reference work, perhaps what you want is actually a wiki. On the much despised Wikipedia, every fact is (supposed to be) tied down with a reference to a reliable external source, and every single change to every single one of millions of articles there and on sister sites such as Wiktionary can be viewed and traced to its author (admittedly in the form of a screen name or sometimes an IP address) by simply clicking on the “History” tab.

Most striking of all, to me, is the way this shows yet again the enduring iconic power of the book as an object. Even in this electronic era when journalists spend their whole day in front of a screen, some of them still seem to feel proper information is only found stamped on a piece of dead tree.

And more on that in a bit.

“The demise of the paper product”

It was Robert McCrum in the Observer, tipped off by commenters on his blog, who finally broke the deafening silence south of the border on the subject of the Chambers closure and its implications. Now the Observer’s sister paper the Guardian has finally weighed in. An actual opinion piece about dictionaries, would you believe, not specifically about the Chambers closure but prompted by it. And it’s by someone who, if not quite a lexicographer in the normal sense, has at least worked on a reference publishing project so will have met some dictionary people. It may not exactly be expert comment or analysis, that’s still too much to hope for, in fact it’s really just a vague, ill-informed rant about how electronic dictionaries are no fun and should not be allowed to replace printed ones. But at least it’s people (journalist and commenters) discussing dictionaries, however subjectively and irrationally, in the light of the shocking news of the closure of one’s Britain’s oldest and best-loved reference publishers.

As you can see, I’m trying hard to be positive for once.

PS: The petition to “Keep Chambers in Edinburgh” is still available at http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/chambers-in-edinburgh/

Mad professors and lollipop ladies

One of the most interesting things about dictionaries is how they, and their creators, are perceived by the general public. I’m grateful^¹ to The Times for the information that

The classic lexicographers of yore, meanwhile, those whitehaired, cardiganed index-carded old duffers in Edinburgh, are types we’re taught to trust, as homely and familiar as lollipop ladies. They’re boffinish, pedantic and obsessed; for them the words disinterested and uninterested are as distinct as lions and tigers.

Where do they get this stuff? Seriously, that’s not (just) an expression of exasperation² but a genuine enquiry. Where do we get our images of lexicographers, when very few people can ever have met one? We might well imagine they would be pedantic and obsessive, certainly, since after all that’s part of the job. You wouldn’t want an air traffic controller to tell your plane to “descend to, I dunno, a bit lower than you are, and land sort of over there somewhere whenever you get the chance”, and you don’t consult a dictionary to be told that a tiger is “kind of a bit like a lion but with stripes, I think it lives in India though.”

But what’s all the nonsense about “whitehaired, cardiganed … old duffers” (and did he mean “old buffers”)? Is it a sort of amalgam of the absent-minded professor cliché with the prim, fussy, dowdy librarian stereotype — “boffins”³ with a vast knowledge of arcane trivia and a pedantic obsession with ordering it? And apparently these people are as “familiar as lollipop ladies”?

It’s interesting that one of Simon Winchester’s books on the history of the OED, The Surgeon of Crowthorne, was re-titled The Professor and the Madman for the American market, where they presumably like their stereotypes nice and bold. One of the characters in the story (W. C. Minor) was indeed a paranoid schizophrenic, or a “madman” if you want to be brutal and sensationalist about it, but the editor of the dictionary, J. A. H. Murray, never came closer to being a professor than the years he spent teaching at Mill Hill School. But hey, he had a long white beard and a donnish appearance, that’s good enough. Who knows what a lexicographer looks like? How many people assume that the front cover of the book (above) shows the “professor”, when in fact it’s the “madman”?

¹ No, not really
² I don’t actually set to out to be bitchy about the people who churn out the acres of ignorant, trivial and frequently infantile rubbish that bloat our broadsheet newspapers, but you have to wonder how anyone can come up with stuff like this, glance back through what they’ve written and not think “I can’t send that in, it’s embarrassing!”
³ A rather childish word that should probably be banned from the newspapers for a few years

Scottish Unenlightenment

By now there’s been a fair bit of comment in the press, north of the border at least, on the Chambers Harrap closure in Edinburgh. It all runs along the lines of “how sad to see such a historic firm fall victim to the internet, shows how times are changing, shouldn’t be allowed”. Some writers even claim a certain quintessentially Scottish quality for Chambers dictionaries (sometimes appearing to forget that Collins is just as Scottish), recruit the heroes of the Scottish Enlightenment to their cause, or cite Edinburgh’s status as UNESCO City of Literature. While I’m not sure I quite follow that, I can’t disagree with the general drift.

But I’m still naive enough to be disappointed by the lack of any actual analysis of what’s facing reference publishing, indeed any comment from anyone who actually knows anything about it. The press have treated this as mainly a matter of sentimental pride in Scotland’s publishing history, plus the little local matter of the loss of a couple of dozen jobs, but while these are relevant, there are surely other far-reaching implications. The future of reference publishing in our information-driven society could hardly be a more relevant subject for discussion in what passes for the serious press in this country, but all we get is waffle, hand-wringing and silly puns.

Pauline McLean, blogging on The South Bank — of the Clyde that is, “every bit as lively in cultural terms as its namesake” we are told — drops in the following intriguingly casual remark, as if it were so obvious as to be hardly worth wasting keystrokes on. “Of course, reference publishing has been in trouble for decades, and not just because of the decline in sales or the increasing appeal of online editions.” Perhaps I’m being dense or pedantic, perhaps she’s writing in a hurry, but I wonder what this other malaise is, the one that has nothing to do with sales. I don’t even know how far back the current life-threatening decline in sales goes, but I would be surprised if it’s literally decades. Dictionaries were still doing OK even a decade ago, as far as I could see; two decades ago they were taking on staff. There was serious money being invested in exciting new techniques and technology for researching, editing and typesetting their products.

“Decades” ago, a computer was a huge, mysterious machine in an air-conditioned room that got your utility bills comically wrong, or maybe a little educational toy for geeky schoolboys to plug into the family telly when no-one else wanted to watch one of the three available channels. And this was before it became fashionable to describe oneself self-deprecatingly as “geeky”, in fact before we in Britain had even heard of that American word. Portable electronic gadgets of the sort we all carry now were pretty much non-existent and there was simply no alternative to paper dictionaries.

So what exactly has been happening to reference publishing over the last few years, or decades if you like? I don’t expect detailed breakdowns of sales figures, but I would like to know just how serious and recent this phenomenon is, and what will actually happen to dictionaries over the next few years. What about the all-important schools market, is it in free-fall? No commentator on the Chambers affair has mentioned this, and they show no interest in the plight of Chambers’s bilingual stablemate, Harrap. What about tourists, surely we’re not yet at the point where all of them are looking up vocab on their iPhones or even those feeble little pocket translator gadgets you used to see in the Innovations catalogue? I’d go for a cheap phrasebook or pocket dictionary any time, you can scribble in it, smear sunblock on it and swat flies with it; it won’t run out of battery and it’s not a disaster if it gets lost or stolen.

The “content” for all those electronic gadgets has to come from somewhere: have dictionary firms underpriced the goods or is there some other way in which electronic sales have failed to bring home the bacon? Those currently offering their vague valedictions don’t know (nor do I), and those who know aren’t telling.

PS: It’s not too late to sign the “Keep Chambers in Edinburgh” petition at http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/chambers-in-edinburgh/

“The hegemony of the south”

At last, the chattering classes of South Britain have woken up to the incipient Scottish tragedy looming over Chambers Dictionaries in Edinburgh. Good on Robert McCrum of the Observer for breaking the silence with a blazing indictment of “cultural vandalism” that, as he notes, “has not troubled the cultural conscience of the south”.

However, it seems “the south” is still a little hazy about what comes from where. Those of us who have spent years writing dictionaries in Scotland for the old Glasgow firm of Collins, which became part of HarperCollins in 1990 or so, might be a little miffed to see it lumped together with the likes of OUP and Penguin as part of the “hegemony of the south”. William Collins, a Glasgow mill-worker-turned-schoolmaster, founded the company in 1819 (the very year Chambers brothers published their first title, The Songs of Robert Burns), and like Chambers, Collins was a family firm until quite recently. HarperCollins’s British HQ may be in London, just as the parent company of Chambers is based in Paris, but their dictionaries are still Clyde-built, by the way.

The feelgood factor

Hostage to fortune, these bullish statements on corporate websites.

“The gold standard for dictionaries”

glimmer n. some small gleam or flicker, as in hope or intelligence
[Campbell, in the style of The Chambers Dictionary]

Fingers are still crossed for Chambers Harrap, the embattled dictionary firm in Edinburgh. An emergency works committee has been held at the level of the parent company Lagardère and the consultation period extended. A online petition to keep Chambers in Edinburgh is available to sign at http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/chambers-in-edinburgh/. Tell your friends.

David Crystal considers the proposed closure “especially ironic, in the case of Chambers, when we think that Edinburgh has been made the first UNESCO City of Literature.” Robert McCrum, blogging in the Guardian, considers that “Chambers sets the gold standard for dictionaries” (see the response of McDrudge in the comments) but it’s revealing that when he wrote those words neither he nor Crystal had yet heard of the closure announced two weeks earlier — and not surprising given the disgraceful lack of interest in the story shown by the “national” press south of the border. My friend Caroline of the Publishing Cupboard points out that what we need is to get the King of Twitter, Stephen Fry, on board. An article in one of the English broadsheets from one of these luminaries would surely do no harm at all.

And in an unorthodox but thought-provoking move, MEP David Martin has even launched a campaign to give the Chambers brand protected geographical status, like Scotch whisky or Stilton cheese. Can it be true that a product’s unique qualities are sometimes due not just to the soil or water or climate of its place of origin but to the accumulated intellectual expertise of its makers, who can only be found in that place? It might seem a stretch in this case, given the relative geographical mobility of such workers and the publishing industry’s dependence on “outsourcing” to freelances all over Europe, but it’s certainly an interesting idea. Terroir intellectuel?

Update on Chambers Harrap

The Financial Times seems to be the first non-Scottish newspaper to get round to reporting the Chambers closure announced last week. The BBC website reports on the NUJ’s fight to save the company’s Edinburgh HQ. Messages of support can be sent to the Chambers Harrap NUJ chapel [union branch] care of the NUJ Scottish Office at nujscotland@nuj.org.uk; messages of protest to Chambers Harrap can be directed to admin@chambersharrap.co.uk.

ANOTHER UPDATE
From the Scotsman, 24 September 2009:
Dictionary staff spell out case for keeping Capital base open

Everyone’s an expert

The Herald and the Scotsman have their say on the ChambersHarrap closure today. Surprise surprise, not one news source anywhere seems to have quoted a real live lexicographer on the subject, or indeed anyone that works in dictionaries.

The culture minister, Michael Russell, a former television producer and author, feels that “it does, to a certain extent, reflect the changing patterns of how research and reference are now undertaken.” No doubt he’s right, but why couldn’t we hear from someone who actually knows about how all that affects dictionary sales?

Philip Jones of the Bookseller magazine claims that “so much is available faster and for free online. It doesn’t have the credibility that a print book has, but mostly people would tend to look online rather than buy a book for £10 that might go out of date in six months.” Again, no doubt true, though a tenner doesn’t go far these days, it’s the price of a round of drinks or couple of glossy magazines at an airport, and less than the tourist guide to the place you’re flying to, and those things date a fair sight faster than dictionaries. In my experience people see a dictionary as about as ephemeral as a bible, and buy a new one about as often.

Marion Sinclair of Publishing Scotland (formerly the Scottish Publishers Association) says “dictionaries have migrated online and a lot of people have the attitude that it doesn’t matter about the brand name. But often it doesn’t have the wealth of lexicography behind it. That is a real specialist skill and that is what we are in danger of losing.” Very good point, but one that would perhaps have been better made by a lexicographer. And, pace Ms Sinclair, actually it doesn’t matter much about the brand name. What matters is that the thing is properly written by someone who knows what they’re doing and then regularly updated, something that is indeed under threat.

Oh and by the way, assuming Google News is to be trusted, not one lousy English newspaper has even mentioned the story yet.

Chambers Harrap to close

Appalling news today of the closure of Chambers Harrap in Edinburgh, my first dictionary employers. As BBC news points out, this “marks the end of a 200 year association with Scotland for the dictionary”; of course they mean the Chambers Dictionary/ies, rather than The Dictionary — there are still dictionaries published north of the border — but it shows just how bad things are in reference publishing. I was going to entitle this “Hachette job” after the parent company, but it doesn’t really seem like a laughing matter, least of all for the 27 people who are apparently going to lose their jobs.

Classy picture there from the BBC (right). I love the way that, in order to illustrate the piece, someone has just heaved their office copy of Chambers off the shelf, plonked it down on a clean area of carpet and pointed their cameraphone at it. Is this the photographic equivalent of what’s happening to reference works? It’s become so easy to lay your hands on some recycled content you nicked from somewhere (just as I do right), or knock up something yourself which can then propagate itself all over the internet. In one way that’s liberating and democratic, but surely it must be accompanied by an awareness of when something, like that excuse for a photo, is so embarrassingly rubbish as to be unprofessional. Is this casual lack of discrimination, amid a plethora of unmediated information, actually part of the disaster that’s happening to dictionaries?