Dictionaries are supposed to be descriptive (ie, presenting examples and definitions of how words are being used out in the world) not prescriptive (ie, their job isn’t to tell you what the words ought to mean, or how they ought to be used). What they definitely should not be is proscriptive (ie, they can’t tell you what you must or must not say) and that’s why, however passionately people are feeling about what lexicographers say about the word ‘woman’, I would have to say that we must not pester them with what we think they ought to say.

Probably, Pip Williams has given more thought than most to all the complications, grey areas and chimeras that flicker around that situation. I didn’t get hold of a copy of her novel, The Dictionary of Lost Words when it came out. I first read her sequel, The Bookbinder of Jericho. That I found an extraordinary experience.

Peggy, the bookbinder herself, working around the press and the academics of Oxford, picks up scraps of words and ideas from the pages that pass through her hands, and a thirst for more knowledge becomes a passion whilst her twin sister Maud, who I think nowadays would be  described as autistic is clearly both bright and perceptive, but lacks whatever it is that we use to formulate ideas into language. She has to wait until someone feeds her the phrases she needs. Thus, life for Peggy becomes an eternal game of twenty questions. Every carer ever will recognise that as a frustrating, exhausting and demanding situation but for the reader of this novel, it leads to exploring and shedding light on what people are actually thinking or feeling, especially those parts they can’t quite articulate.

The Bookbinder of Jericho has many other precious qualities but I will evidence that just by saying that as soon as I had finished it, I went out looking for its forebear, The Dictionary of Lost Words. I wasn’t disappointed. There are reviews of it to be had all over the internet already so I’ll just say one thing about that, too. Williams places her fictional character Esme amongst the team of real people who put together the first Oxford English Dictionary – a labour of some 70 years, that involved hundreds of people. As the work on that 12 volume epic develops, Esme has a fairly typical middle-income woman’s life and the house servant Lizzie who has looked after her since childhood has a fairly typical house-servant’s life, but Esme gradually works out that the words for what happens to them don’t seem to get the same regard as, for example the words for what happens in the lives of male academics.

So much food for thought that as soon as I’d finished The Dictionary of Lost Words, I started on the OUP publication The Meaning of Everything, which is Simon Winchester’s non-fiction account of the making of that first Oxford English Dictionary. I was instantly delighted to find James Murray and the other dictionary builders who I had come to love as characters in a novel, friends and colleagues of the fictional Esme, now in a non-fiction book with real photos!

Winchester manages to say that ‘one feels slightly shamed’ to note that there were no women at all at that dinner held in 1928 to celebrate the dictionary’s completion, given that so many women were involved in the work along the way.

I wonder if that comment could be what set Pip Williams off on her creation of Esme and her friends, in an attempt to put the women back in the picture and see how it all looked to them.  I also wonder what James Murray would have said if you told him that in a hundred years’ time, people would be trying to get women arrested for ‘hate crimes’ for posting the dictionary definition of woman (adult human female) about the place.

Three wonderful books for thinking about our language and what we do with it.

********************

Dear Reader,

Times are hard, and so the articles on this site are freely available but if you are able to support my work by making a donation, I am very grateful.

Click here to donate

Cheers,

Kay

********************