On 10 May 1933 an undergraduate at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, wrote in her diary a description of the clothes she was wearing on that sultry summer’s day. The description includes the phrase blue celanese trollies. The diary entry in question was not published until 1984, by which time the diarist, Barbara Pym, had become a cult figure in English literary circles. By that time, too, the words blue celanese trollies needed translation. Neither celanese nor that particular meaning of trolley are to be found in the recent Longman Dictionary (the phrase being roughly equivalent for later generations to blue artificial silk knickers, blue nylon pants or blue synthetic briefs). The passage of time both makes the philologist’s lot, and makes it a difficult one. The chronological hiccough between Barbara Pym’s diary entry and its eventual publication also succeeded in outdating the entry trolley in Partridge, where it is described as a word for underpants in the 1950s, possibly emanating from the Royal Navy. History is a hard taskmaster for lexicographers, if history’s faithful servitors they aim to be. More frustrating still, Miss Pym’s late contribution to our knowledge of the terminology of 20th-century underwear still leaves us without a glimmer of an answer to the question: ‘But why trollies?’
Primitive word magic tends to be replaced in all literate societies by two kinds of fascination. One is a fascination with the question of what makes some verbal Usages ‘right’ and others ‘wrong’. The other is a fascination with words as living repositories of cultural history, present tokens of a debt to the collective past. Sometimes the two strands are intimately – even indecently – entangled: witness the early Greek preoccupation with questions of etymology. Sometimes, too, word magic lingers on clandestinely in odd lexical nooks and crannies, as in Medieval superstitions about naming, or modern inhibitions about swearing. But these are throwbacks to the psychology of a preliterate era. Once words have been finally divested of their supernatural status, their challenge to rational inquiry seems to take only two basic forms: prescriptive and historical. We seek explanations which are either one or the other: if possible, both.
This civilised rejection of word magic gives rise to two quite different skills of lexicography. One is the skill of sounding authoritative and convincing. The other is a skill required for all good storytelling: knowing how to appeal to the imagination. Both qualities are evident in the great wordmen of the Middle Ages, from Isidore of Seville onwards. Unfortunately for modern lexicography, it came of age only in the 19th century, and as a result emerged permanently tainted with the currently fashionable positivist philosophy of science. ‘Getting the facts right’ took priority. Dictionaries came to be seen as mere lists of lexicological ‘facts’, vouched for independently of the lexicographer by attested ‘examples’.
But the positivism was bogus: the examples were always carefully selected. Classic examples of the 19th-century attitude towards lexicography were Murray in England and Emile Littré in France. Neither man was lacking either on the authoritarian or on the imaginative side: but both chose to present themselves, in accordance with the spirit of the age, as mere collectors and arrangers of lexical information. However, the information given reveals immediately the cultural bias of the collectors. They give pride of place to literary usage, and what for them ‘establishes’ a word’s correct employment above all is attestation in the published works of reputable writers.
Send Letters To:
The Editor
London Review of Books,
28 Little Russell Street
London, WC1A 2HN
letters@lrb.co.uk
Please include name, address, and a telephone number.