On new editions

Someone writes to ask whether The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (CEEL, 1995) will have a new edition. I suppose one never says never. But I doubt it. Which prompts some thoughts on new editions.

One writes a new edition because the old one is out of date, for some reason. The second edition of CEEL (2003) was needed for two reasons: a century had changed, so every reference to 'in the present century', 'in the last century', and so on was wrong (plus the associated verb-form changes from present perfect to past - 'in the present century we have seen' vs 'in the last century we saw'); and the Internet had arrived, in all its many linguistic forms, requiring a whole new section. There wasn't much else to change - a handful of updates and expansions of points here and there. The population figures for English as a global language needed updating, in particular. But apart from this, the two editions are very close. Whether the amount of change warrants a new edition is a decision made by the publisher, always.

You have to distinguish a 'new edition' from a 'new impression' - that is, a reprinting of the book as the previous print-run has run out. Print-runs vary enormously. For books like mine, they're usually around 5,000 or 10,000 copies, depending on such things as the publishers' estimate of likely sales, and how much warehouse space they've got. Printing books 'on demand' in small print-runs is also changing things. A new impression is a chance to change things in a small way - getting rid of typographical errors that were missed first time round, for instance. Due to a last-minute change in printing The Stories of English, for instance, when a map was re-located towards the back of the book, some page references in the footnotes ended up being two out! A new impression allows you to get rid of that sort of problem.

You also have to distinguish a hardback edition from a paperback edition. Many publishers do not publish these simultaneously, as they naturally want to recoup their investment in a book by the higher price of a hardback. With my books, a paperback generally follows a year later. That too is a chance to make a few changes, though I don't normally do so.

Somebody mentioned Language and the Internet yesterday, and that's a nice example of a need for a new edition quickly. That book came out in 2001, and it had a new edition in 2005. That's amazingly fast. Why? Because in 2001 the first edition of that book made no mention of instant messaging or of blogging. Although blogging had been around since 1997, it didn't take off until 2003-4. Now it's the fastest growing area of Internet activity. A new edition is urgent, under the circumstances.

Am I working on any new editions at the moment? I don't like new editions, actually, and only do so when I have to. I mean, if I wrote a book in say 1999, that was because I was really into that topic then. Things have moved on since. I'm interested in other things now. To have to go back to how I was thinking in 1999 and try to take on board everything that I thought then and see how it might be improved... Well, it's a bit of a bore, to be frank. So there's just one, which has got to be revised at regular intervals, and that is The Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics. This has had a new edition roughly every five years since 1980, and there will be another one early next year.

On not being a speech therapist

I have finally managed to track down the source of an error which surfaces regularly in correspondence. 'As a qualified speech therapist', said someone in a letter to me recently - and about me! Excuse me? Not me. I am an honorary fellow of the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists. But a 'real' spth? No. (My wife is.) I worked with speech therapists in clinics and schools for many years, so any confusion would be understandable; but my role was always as a 'clinical linguist' - someone who describes and analyses the linguistic character of disorders of communication, but who never treats.

So where did the error arise? Wikipedia, of course. There it says in the entry on me, plain as the beard on my face: 'He is also a qualified speech therapist'.

I say 'of course'. I edit encyclopedias, and very early on I was intrigued by the wiki concept, thinking it would actually help my work. How wrong I was. I quickly discovered that there were so many errors that it just wasn't a safe procedure to use wiki entries without scrupulous checking - in which case you might as well go to the more reliable sources to begin with. Wiki is fine for fun browsing, but I would never take a 'fact' from there without doing a second check. The Wiki managers now seem to have realized the dangers of uncontrolled eneyclopedia compilation for themselves, as I read they have introduced a tier of editorial supervision into the system. Faced with the entries that have been mischievously (or worse) tampered with, and growing threats of litigation from people whose characters have been assassinated, I wasn't surprised. In fact, I predicted years ago that this would have to happen.

I had never thought to look me up in Wikipedia before, but, having been told about the speech therapy error, now I did. I learned some interesting things about me. I live in Holyhead 'with my wife and four children', it says. Well that's a surprise. I've just looked round the house and I can't see them anywhere. (The last one left home years ago.) I 'write articles for the Catholic devotional magazine, The Tablet'? Never. I used to review for them once, back in the seventies, but the only article I ever submitted to it was turned down! And I'm 'president of Crystal Reference Systems Limited'? Ah, it must have been an American who put some of the entry together, for we would never say 'president' in the UK. 'Chairman' I was, before that little company was taken over last year. That's history now.

My entry - as virtually every Wiki entry I have ever read - is a fascinating, unpredictable, dangerous selection of facts and fictions. And the problem is, you never know which is which. It's not as if accurate information isn't available, especially these days, when official websites exist for most things. It takes a lot of time and effort and professionalism to compile encyclopedia entries which are balanced, objective, and accurate, and even then, the professionals don't always get it right. Wiki's fond hope is that by letting everyone have a go, eventually the truth will emerge, and the result will be better than the traditional encyclopedia. That was always a naive belief. Many of the entries are fuller, certainly, than anything you have ever seen in print, and you can read stuff there which is unavailable anywhere else. But beware: lurking within the depths of detail there be always dragons.

On Shakespearean r's

A correspondent, having listened to the samples of 'original pronunciation' (OP) on the Shakespeare's Words website, writes to ask how I know that the letter r was pronounced after vowels and before consonants in Shakespeare's day - in such words as arm and far. The full answer can be found in my Pronouncing Shakespeare - but, briefly, the main reason is that people who were writing at the time tell us so. There's a nice statement from Ben Jonson (the dramatist, yes, but he also wrote an English grammar in which he describes the way letters are pronounced) who talks about 'the dog's letter' [think 'grrr'] being sounded in the middle and at the end of words, but less firmly than at the beginning. Other writers talk about it too. Exactly what phonetic quality the sound had is open to question. It might have been a trilled sound (as in modern Scots), but from the descriptions at the time I think it's more likely to have been a retroflex one - that is, one where the tip of the tongue is curled back, as in a lot of American and West Country speech. That's the sound I used in my recordings, anyway.

He also asks whether there are any OP productions taking place at the moment, and how to hear more of it. I don't know of any. Pronouncing Shakespeare is the story of the first OP production at Shakespeare's Globe in 2004, of Romeo and Juliet. There was another one in 2005, of Troilus and Cressida. Videos were made of these productions and are lodged in the library at the Globe. I know that a couple of US universities have been playing about with OP, notably some people at the Blackfriars project in Virginia. But I don't know of any planned production right now. The Globe has no plans to do another one, as far as I know. Maybe one of the other theatres will take it up, in due course. John Barton told me that there was some interest at Stratford in doing an OP version of Henry V as part of the 'completish works' season there, but it never went ahead. (I say 'completish' because there's no King Edward III or Sir Thomas More - which, despite the authorship uncertainties, were both produced at Stratford in the last few years. So the media hype that in 2006-7 the RSC is producing 'every word that Shakespeare ever wrote' is a bit of an exaggeration.) OP would sound great in the Swan, it seems to me. Although the Globe productions were excellent, the character of the OP was inevitably lost a bit in the noisy environment.

Some prose pieces in OP can be heard interspersed with music from Globe musicians on the double-CD: The World's Globe (signum SIGCD077), which came out last year. I also have a CD of extracts from Troilus, using some of the actors from the company, which I can make available to teachers of this subject. Otherwise, there are extracts on the above-mentioned website (www.shakespeareswords.com) and also on the Globe's website.

On being artistic about language death

A comment sent in response to my blog 'On editing encyclopedias' raises the topic of dying languages, which is so important that it deserves a separate post. I reproduce most of the comment here:

'I’m a writer from India and have written over a hundred short stories. Recently, I read your book ‘The Language Revolution’... have been reading a lot of your books ever since. In ‘The Language Revolution’, you have made an observation: though language death is a serious social tragedy, not many artists have reflected upon it as they have on other catastrophes. You have said that except for some poems or an odd article, there isn’t a single drama or novel or even a short story... However, while reading this, I was glad that I had already written a short story about a dead language. The premise and the claims are all purely imaginary, but through the story I wish to emphasize that with every language that dies, mankind is losing at least one vital message.'

I'm always very happy to read material on this neglected topic, and I wish more were available. For a UNESCO conference in 2003 I collected as much material as I could find to back up a keynote paper called 'Crossing the great divide: language endangerment and public awareness', and I managed to track down a couple of dozen pieces, mainly poems, which is not much at all really. I include references to some of them in the paper. (You can read the paper on my website at www.davidcrystal.com: click on the category 'Language Death & Diversity' and you'll find it under 'Articles'.)

An important point to note is that the neglect I refer to in The Language Revolution, and which is the theme of the paper, is in relation to material on language endangerment and death in general, not on individual languages. There is of course a great deal of imaginative writing about particular languages - I know of several poems, stories, songs, and so on which focus on the situation of Welsh, for instance, and there is bound to be similar material on other languages. Brian Friel's play Translations, in relation to Irish, comes to mind. But what we don't have much of is writing in which authors step back from their own language situation and reflect on the world crisis. My correspondent suggests that his story does do this, and that's crucial.

I don't know of any novels on this subject, but the other genres mentioned have actually been exploited, albeit minimally. There is David Malouf's short story 'The only speaker of his tongue', for example, and for plays Harold Pinter's Mountain Language and my own Living On. I give some quotes and observations in the UNESCO paper. But my point applied to the arts in general, not just to the textual arts. I don't know of any musical pieces on the topic, for instance. Isn't it a perfect subject for Philip Glass? Do you know of any paintings? Or sculptures, apart from Rachel Berwick's 'living sculpture' that I allude to in Language Death? Or - for this is a topic that is bigger than the 'high arts' - pop songs or raps? My most profound hope is that the artists of the world (in the broadest sense) will take this subject on board. It is, as I argue in the paper, the only real way of getting the subject of language endangerment into the hearts of the public at large.

On editing encyclopedias

Twice this week, at social gatherings, I have found myself having to explain the difference between an ‘author’ and an ‘editor’. The distinction evidently isn’t always appreciated, perhaps because editors do a lot of writing – as in newspaper editorials – and authors do a lot of editing. And on the front of a book, such words as ‘edited by’ can appear in very small type.

The question usually arises like this. I am at a house where the hosts have a copy of, say, The Penguin Encyclopedia (which I edit), and I am introduced to someone as the ‘author’. No, editor, I correct. But that has no effect. The next question is invariably ‘How do you begin writing an encyclopedia?’ I don’t write it, I say, I compile it. ‘Is there a difference?’

There’s never time to give the whole answer – hence the usefulness of a blog. The situation isn’t entirely clear-cut. I wrote, but I suppose also compiled, my first attempt at an encyclopedic work, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. That wasn’t like an ordinary book, where you start at the beginning and keep going ‘from left to right’ until you reach the end. It was like a huge jigsaw puzzle, with bits partially completed from all over the place and chunks of material moved about to make them fit better. (The English Language encyclopedia used a different method. I’ll maybe talk about that another day.) CEL was a purely authored book.

The general reference works, such as the family of books which began with The Cambridge Encyclopedia in 1990 and which now have a reincarnation in the Penguin series, are a totally different matter. I don’t write these. The writing is done by a team of people brought together for the purpose. These are mainly specialists – over 400 of them – from museums, university departments, public service organizations, and so on. Some are free-lance specialists. For current affairs (such as Nobel prize-winners and Oscars) I have an assistant editor in my office who writes first drafts.

How do I find specialists? I use my own sense of who’s who, supplemented by the intuitions of the commissioning editors in the publishing house. In firms such as Cambridge University Press, every area of knowledge is covered, and someone in the Press will know who are the leaders in a field and – more important – who are the authors capable of writing entries that are accessible to a general readership. That's the exciting bit - meeting these people. I got my space exploration entries from NASA. My biology entries came from the Natural History Museum in London.

Once potential contributors are identified, I get in touch and ask them whether they would be interested in writing, say, 300 entries of about 100 words each on the people, places, and subjects that comprise their field. With some subjects, such as zoology, it can be a thousand or more entries. Most people say yes. The fees are never brilliant, but specialists usually appreciate the importance of the task of presenting their field to a general public. Many organizations are also concerned about maintaining a strong public presence, and being involved in a big encyclopedia project is good PR.

You give your contributors a brief, and a deadline, and wait. The entries then come in on time, all beautifully written, requiring no editing.

I wish. For every one contributor who sends in material on time, five are late. Some are very late. You quickly learn to set contributor deadlines well ahead of the real deadline. In mercifully rare cases, the contributor doesn’t deliver at all, and you have to start all over again – or, if the subject is a fairly general one, you end up writing the stuff yourself. Here too, the distinction between editor and author is blurred.

But it’s mainly blurred because of all the revision that has to be done. I don’t write these entries, but I do rewrite them. And the process of rewriting takes time – months, in the days before email. The chemistry entries come in. They are excellent chemistry but I cannot understand them. I rewrite them to make them intelligible and send them back to the contributor. He says they now make good sense but they are bad chemistry. In simplifying the language I have distorted the content. He rewrites and resubmits. Now I can’t understand the entries again. I rewrite. He rewrites. Eventually we are both satisfied. Who wrote the entry that you eventually read in print, after such a procedure?

Once you have edited one entry, or set of entries, the next lot is there, waiting in the wings. And what is especially important is that you clear your mind of the first set before embarking on the second. No good having your head full of chemistry (more precisely, the language of chemistry) if you are about to edit a set of entries on, say, art history, where the style of exposition is very different. The biggest thing an encyclopedia editor has to do is learn how to forget. On Monday I would be able to talk to you intelligently about some detailed points in chemistry. On Tuesday I wouldn’t – though you can try me on art history! But not tomorrow.

So you can imagine now my reaction to the next comments which tend to come up at social gatherings. ‘Gosh, you must know a lot!’ or ‘I wish we had you on our pub quiz team’, or even, ‘Can I phone you as my friend?’ To which the answers are No, You Wouldn’t, and Definitely Not, respectively. It’s an interesting philosophical question: what do I know? If you were to ask me a factual question about an entry in the encyclopedia – when was the Taj Mahal built, shall we say? – my typical answer is ‘I know the answer to that question’. There is a pause. ‘Are you going to tell me?’ asks my interlocutor. ‘No’, I reply, ‘because I can’t remember it.’ I do know it – I rewrote the entry on the Taj Mahal, after all – but it’s one of the 5 million or so facts in the encyclopedia database which has just slipped my mind for the moment. So do I know it or not? I know where to look it up, that’s for sure.

(There is in any case no one answer to the question 'When was the Taj Mahal built?' It all depends on which part of the complex you are thinking of. That's why different sources give different dates. Many supposedly factual questions have alternative answers. Which are the longest rivers? It depends on which tributaries you take into account. Which are the tallest mountains? It depends on what you take to be the 'foot'. In which year was so-and-so born? It might depend on which calendar you use.)

I was once invited to be a member of the local Rotary Club’s quiz team, and was an absolute disaster (but not as bad as the local police superintendent, who couldn’t remember what the speed limit on a dual carriageway was). I asked the organizers whether I could bring a copy of my encyclopedia with me. Can’t understand why they refused.

On not being a Beatle

The Christmas lull comes to an end today with someone asking me whether it is true that I was nearly a Beatle. That's going a bit far, but, as I've said before, there's a grain of truth in every legend.

I moved to Liverpool from Wales in 1951 and did my secondary schooling at St Mary's College in Crosby. I played clarinet in the school orchestra, but after Bill Haley and the Comets arrived on the scene I invested in a second-hand alto sax. Sometime in the mid-50s a group of us got together to play - trad jazz first, and then rock. The critical factor was that someone had to have a drum kit, and that someone was Dave Lovelady, so we rehearsed a lot at his place. As Beatles-historians very well know, there were groups forming all over the city at the time, but the sax helped to make ours distinctive. I think we were the first Liverpool group to use one in the line-up. We called ourselves the Zodiacs - though I suppose I should now say the 'original' Zodiacs, because the name was used by at least two later groups. We played our first gig at a church hall in Maghull, and then did the rounds of the various venues where kids gathered for dancing, such as St Luke's Hall and some of the city centre clubs. It was a lively time. The Cavern opened in January 1957. There were a lot of other unknown groups playing sets at these clubs. One was called The Quarry Men.

We played somewhere every week or so until 1959, when two of us found ourselves having to spend a bit of time rehearsing for A-levels. Whether the group was to continue would depend on the results. If we passed, two of us would go on to university, and the group would fold. If we failed, we would certainly become the greatest group in the history of pop music. We passed. I went off to London and started to read English. Another group, I believe, became the greatest.

I'm not sure what happened to all the members of the Zodiacs who stayed in Liverpool. I know that Dave Lovelady ended up as drummer with the Fourmost. I imagine that my entire student grant over three years was less than what someone like him would have earned from one Hamburg gig. I took my alto sax to London, got into modern jazz a bit at UCL, then traded it in for a baritone, until I realized that you needed more puff to manage that brute than I had available. In the end, needing money to eat, I sold my sax to a music shop in the Charing Cross Road. Cue violins.

On complaining about the tide coming in

A journalist from the Observer, writing a ’fun piece’ for the Christmas edition, phones today to ask my views about the way some English words have become ‘loaded’. She had apparently read a piece in the current issue of the journal of the Queen’s English Society in which someone is complaining about the way certain words have changed their strength of meaning – like massive being reduced in power to mean ‘huge’ (as in ‘a massive heart attack’) or incredible used so as to mean ‘very fine’ (as in ‘an incredible restaurant’).

The journalist got the impression from the writer of the article that these changes in meaning are recent and novel. That didn't feel right at all, and a quick check in the OED confirmed the point. The broadening of meaning of incredible, for instance, is something that started, according to the examples recorded in that dictionary, as early as 1482. The figurative use of massive dates back to 1581. And it is the same with most examples of this kind. The writer doesn’t like arguably either (e.g. ‘Hardy is arguably the finest author to have written in English’). That usage has been around for at least a hundred years: the OED has examples from 1890.

The writer is against people loading words ‘with powers beyond their meaning in the dictionary’. If that was a valid principle – you must only use words with the meaning recorded in the dictionary – English vocabulary would hardly have developed at all, and we would have cut ourselves off from the kind of expressive richness we see in, say, Shakespeare, who was one of the best meaning-extenders the world has ever seen. It is also a misconception of how dictionaries come to be written: lexicographers record meanings as they change, and if there is a widely used meaning currently missing from a dictionary’s pages then it is a weakness of the dictionary rather than of the language.

But the writer was wrong, in any case. Factually wrong. The senses of massive, incredible, and so on are in the dictionary, and have been for some time. But ignorance of the facts of English usage has never stopped people complaining about it. Or, of course, perpetrating themselves the very crimes they complain about. The writer comments, 'The unloading of meaning from words is generally deplored as regrettable'. Now there's a word, generally, which does exactly what the writer is condemning in others. The claim is not something he knows about, for no survey of opinions about the use of these words has ever taken place. It is something he is wishing were the case. He is stating it as if it were a fact, when it is actually only a private opinion. He has, in short, 'unloaded' the meaning of generally to suit his argument.

Words change their meaning. To adapt a phrase rapidly becoming a catch-phrase at the moment (courtesy of the Bishop of Southwark): that’s what they do. They are there to help us talk about our world, and as our world changes, or our ways of looking at the world change, so do the words. It is important to be aware that the changes are taking place, of course, so that we are alert to possible ambiguities and misinformation. We need to know that generally is one of those words which writers often use in a misleading way. That is one of the driving forces behind lexicology, and why it is so important: it helps us manage vocabulary change. But to complain about words changing their meaning is as pointless as complaining about the movement of the tides.