Stuff You Should KnowThe story of the Oxford English Dictionary is really something. From its origin to its crowd-sourced literary quotations. Dive in today to learn all about the best dictionary.
Hey, everybody, we want to let you know that we are doing our traditional Pacific Northwest Swing for our live show next year, in fact, the end of January next year, very early next year, and.
We're starting out in Seattle, Washington on January twenty fourth at the Paramount Theater. It's huge, that's right, and then on to Portland on January twenty fifth at Revolution Hall, the place we always are. It's kind of our home away from home in Portland. And then we're gonna wrap it all up at the thing that started the Pacific Northwest Tour in the first place all those years back. SF Sketch Fest will be at the Sydney Goldstein Theater on Friday, January twenty sixth, right.
Chuck, that's right, And remember you can go to stuff youshould Know dot com click on tours in order to get to the correct ticket link or go to the venue page only. Do not go to scalper sites.
That's right, and we'll see you guys in January.
Okay, welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, there's Chuck. Jerry's here too, and this is stuff you should know.
I believe a is an order. Why because we're debuting a brand new writer.
Oh yeah, great idea, Chuck, thank you for doing that.
Yeah, welcome aboard Alison Miller. Alison came to us. This is by way of Livia, right, is a recommendation.
Yep, we said, Lvia, you're great, you know and the other great writer. She said, actually I got one I can recommend, And here we are.
Yeah, and Alison Miller did a how it works here is we do like sort of a test article, and this is that test article. So it obviously worked. And Allison is a historian and researcher and just did a fantastic job. So welcome, Welcome to the fam. Allison.
Welcome Alison here. I'll coordinate you too. Do do do do?
Yeah, you do it better than me. So I was hoping you a chime in.
I just put some enthusiasm, and I think that's the difference, that's right. So yeah, we're talking about the OED today, the Oxford English Dictionary, and I have to say, Alison, knock this one out of the park. I get the impression that she may or may not have read significant portions of the OED in her lifetime.
I think Alison is smart.
So and she kind of starts off by talking about different kinds of dictionaries, which is significant because the OED the Oxford English Dictionary is a specific kind of dictionary. It's not a regular, average joe, you know, work at a dictionary like some other dictionaries. The Oxford English Dictionary is a historical dictionary, so it not only tells you the definition of the word, there may even be multiple definitions. By the way, I don't know if you've ever looked at a dictionary before, but sometimes one word can have more than one definition. It's nuts, right, the OED says. And by the way, here's where that word came from, and here's examples of its first use to it's probably most recent use for one of its most recent uses. So you can see how this specific word in the English language evolved over time.
Yeah, I didn't know that.
It's it's pretty ambitious, it is.
And historical dictionaries they don't they don't say like, well that that meaning is not something that people use it for anymore, like macaroni. Whatever the heck they meant in that song.
The Yankee Doodles, They any one, Yeah, I took that as a reference to pot.
But my point is they don't say, like, let's get rid of that old that old definition. Like the whole idea for the OED is that the English language is alive, and so the OED is alive, and we're gonna we're gonna leave it in there and go forward in time. But if you if you want to look up these old usages and these old meanings, it's all right there for you in this massive, massive dictionary that whose aim was to include every word in the English language and every usage of that word up until.
Now, starting in eleven fifty c.
Yeah, as far as the words go. They didn't start the dictionary then, but they went back to Middle English to get what we now have is a third edition, more than six hundred thousand entries, of which we have eight hundred and fifty thousand definitions. See three million of those quotations, which is amazing. And although I think we're locked in with the beginning in the end because the first word is a, there's no way you can get before that in line no, and the last word is ziziva, and there's no way that someone could create a word that is after z y zz y va. It would have to be zz zz.
Yeah z or zz top. I'm surprised they didn't mention zz top.
Yeah. Don't talk to me about cartoons sleep bubbles. So I think we're locked in it as Actually, Allison has a great title for this, the OED. Cohen A to Zizia, I'm sorry, Ziza already messed it up.
Well, it's a tough word, zyzzyv a. It's fun to spell out loud because you say it like that with some oomph, but it's a tough word to say. Did you define it?
Uh?
No, go ahead.
It's a weavil yeah, and it always was right. So one thing about the OED You might say, well, like wow, that's a lot of information packed into one tome. You'd be right. If you don't know much about the Oxford English Dictionary, you may at least have the idea that it's enormous, that it's way bigger than your average dictionary, because those six hundred thousand entries with eight hundred and fifty thousand definitions and three million quotations, when you put them all together, it takes up a lot of space. In fact, I by my estimate, it takes up something like an eighth of the entire Internet.
Right, should we read some of this these fast stats?
Oh yeah, let's do that.
So I believe this is the first volume.
The first Yeah, the whole first edition, I think.
Yeah, the whole first edition. So this isn't even the current edition. This is the one that was finished up in nineteen twenty eight. At the time it had four hundred and fifteen thousand words, half a million definitions, one point eight million quotations. But this is the part I wanted to get to. One hundred and seventy eight miles of type, fifty million words, four feet of shelf space, and ten or twenty half volume. So you know that Encyclopedia Britannica set you grew up with in your hallway, that's basically what this dictionary is. First edition looked like.
Yeah, and back in nineteen thirty, nineteen twenty eight, I guess when it came out, you paid about today's equivalent of three three hundred and sixty pounds sterling for a dictionary. Yeah, about four grand in US dollars today, And according to the Bank of England, that was equal to two hundred and twenty eight days wages for a skilled worker in nineteen thirty, imagine spending most of your year's salary on a dictionary.
Yeah. I think the point has got to be that very like you had to be a very well healed person trying to impress other people by owning a copy of this thing.
Back then, right, yeah, or a library, well exactly. So, yeah, that was the first edition. It's gotten even bigger as we've seen over time, and so now finally the Internet was born. I think to howse the third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, which is where we're at now, and one thing that they do, which is pretty sharp. As the dictionary comes out, new words are being added to it all the time. They're probably finding less and less old words that they hadn't included. But you know, like you said, the English language is living, so it's expanding and contracting and adding new words to it all the time. So by the time those things go to press and that last volume of the edition comes out, there's words that are left over that are just constantly being added. So I think on a quarterly basis, they release supplements essentially that have new words that came out or were coined since the volume that contained that letter was published in the latest edition.
That's right, and we'll get to how those supplements figured in back then and what they do with those today. But the other really unique thing about the OED is that it is a and always has been, from the very very beginning, a crowd source work. Yeah, right from the beginning. The editors who we're going to talk about, the original editors, editors here in a minute. They said, hey, public, we need help. So if you're into this, you've got a little time. If you like to read, if you're a linguist, you're into words, if you love language, go back to Chaucer, start reading and find these words that we're looking for. Find usages of these words descend into us by hand on they call it a slip, a little four by six sheet of paper and mail it into us. And you could very well have a hand in creating the Oxford English Dictionary.
Yeah, pretty cool. And they got a really great response to it, and I think still do.
Today, oh for sure. But that's also explains why you have, you know, quotes from Chaucer and Shakespeare, and also, as Alison points out, quotes from like a social media post. As a usage example of a word.
Yeah. She also used an example that came from the most recent quarterly update from September twenty twenty three. Porch pirate appears in there, and so it's a really good illustration of what the OED does. They explain that it's someone who steals packages from doorsteps. Everybody knows that. Yeah, but did you know that it first came about from a news segment on kfo R from Oklahoma Cities, one of their local broadcasting stations.
Yeah, so they'll have that.
Wait, you didn't doubt.
It, No, well no, I said they would have that. I gotcha as like the example or whatever. And then if you want to dig deeper and just say, well, what about this word porch, then they'll take you back to the thirteen hundreds with the definition of porch and then examples of these what they call senses like that's when not a tense, it's a sense. It's like how the word is used basically.
Yeah, and it might not be used that way anymore necessary.
Yeah, but they will have all of them listed and you can see sort of the evolution of not only the word porch, but when you eventually get to something like porch pirate.
Yeah.
So it's pretty neat stuff like, that's what they do. And they've been doing this for one hundred something years since they think the first the first volume of the first edition came out and I think eighteen eighty four.
Right, Yeah, and those supplements you were talking about, I promised to kind of explain how they do things now. They were for many many years. They were released just like hey, here's this extra thing. But it created a problem if you're like, well, wait a minute, now I have to look up a word in two different places if it has a more modern usage. And so eventually they started combining them. I think they finally did that in what nineteen eighty nine, where the supplements were actually worked into the main addition.
Yeah, just the first edition.
Yeah, so they finished that in nineteen eighty nine, and a couple years before that they had finally put it on a CD ROM And then, like you said, it only exists today. Well, I mean you can get copies, but they're not releasing I don't think print editions any longer. It's just a online subscription type thing now.
Yeah, and usually I mean it's pay right, so yeah, subscription, so usually you can log in through your library pretty neat. They're also in the midst of putting out a third edition, so look for that in the next century. That's right, I say, we take a little break, Charles, and then we'll come back and talk about the history of the OED.
How we got here, let's do it.
So the OED is not the first English dictionary ever. In fact, the first one ever was from sixteen oh four. It's called a Table Alphabetical of hard usual English Words by Robert Kaudrey, and he basically just put this together to help people, I guess, explain themselves in English better. He it was I think, words that were commonly used but not necessarily commonly understood. So that was the first one. But the I guess the OED really traces its spiritual roots to a more recent phenomenon that the Brothers Grim had started, which was essentially a dictionary of a language in order to show the history of that language, ostensibly in order to prove how great that language actually was.
Yeah, we shout out to a couple of great episodes we did many years ago, one on the Brothers Grim and was there one on the Just the Fairy Tales?
Yes, there, it was a two parter, right.
Yeah, yeah, that was That was a good series, So go back and listen to that. But Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm did what you said. They were like, hey, we want to create a German dictionary from Martin Luther on which eventually they died before it came out, but it was called I believe the first Fascicle, and the Fascal is just the first part, basically like, hey, we finished a through j or whatever. I think the first fasccal came out when they were alive, but of the Deutsches Vertebuch It and I believe they died in the late eighteen fifty nine, for Wilhelm in eighteen sixty three, and it finally came out in nineteen sixty one in full, so they weren't even close. And she points out Alison that Jacob died at the F's he was working on the word fruit or di fruit.
Yeah.
I want to say it was pretty good. Oh you want to say it.
I want to say it too. Deutsche's Vertebruk which means literally German word book, right, yeah, it's more like buch Deutsche's Vertebuch VerTech.
Yeah, there you go.
Yeah, I said it way better. In my head, I think I tried too hard. So, like I was saying behind the Grim, the whole initiative is not just like documenting definitions for German words. They wanted to trace the history of the German language because they suspected that far in the distant past, all of these disparate groups of people who are now members of separate nations were all members of the same Germanic speaking tribe, and that this had been like a glorious, amazing civilization that was now fractured, and maybe if we understand it a little better, it can come back together and dare I say, take over the world.
It's like easy, brothers Grim. Yeah, they had a good idea.
It got a little perverted along the way, although it may have been a bad idea from the beginning, you know.
Yeah, this this does link up very oddly with that episode that we just recorded on Tectonic Plates.
It does.
I think the lesson here is anytime you have a social or cultural movement, to go back and find how great your specific culture is or was. That's a red flag for everybody else.
Yeah, probably so so the OED it was basically the same thing, and they're like, well, you've got your German book, but what's greater than the English language. Let's do that for ourselves.
We're going to make an English word book.
That's what it's called. So the Gentleman scholars, and that's in quotes from Britain got together to form the Philological Society in London in eighteen forty two from the Greek philos love and logos words. So philology is just the love of words. It's really very plain and kind of wonderful. Yeah, and it's the study of the language in the written language. And a lot of philologists will say like Greek and Latin or what we're concentrating in. But this, at this time, there were people like, well, wait a minute, English seems to really be pretty important too. I know it's not Latin or Greek, but maybe we should look forward and get down with this English dictionary. And they said yes. In eighteen fifty seven, after that, that's when it was that's when the Grims put out their first fascicle. In fact was around the same time. They said they got a head start on us, but I think we can catch up and do a great job as well, And in fact they did.
Yeah, and As a matter of fact, word got out about this and everybody was like, hey, this is a great project. The members of the Philological Society in England were kind of celebrated culturally for trying to do this thing, for documenting the English language and how great it was. So what they decided to do first was to find out all the words that weren't already in other dictionaries of English or any dictionary that contained English words. Unregistered words is what they called them, and they were going to make a dictionary of unregistered words to basically complete everything. And there was a guy, Richard Chenovic's Trench R. C. Trench who gave some lectures against this idea and essentially said, rather than patch an existing garment, let's make a brand new garment from whole cloth, and it's going to be the most beautiful garment anyone's ever seen. It's gonna well, yeah, plus sequin shoulder pads, the whole shebang, and to me, that's that's the height of amazing fashion. So he actually convinced the Philological Society to veer a different way and rather than just take, you know, the words that hadn't been defined and define them and make that take on the entire English language, going back to eleven fifty forward and again when you're doing this, So just think about going into the deep past and saying, Okay, we're going to do all words from eleven fifty to eighteen fifty. That's daunting enough. But they were also signing up for essentially a never ending unfinished work. Yeah, because as we've seen, every time they put in an addition, there's any number of new words that have come along or that they didn't they didn't have before. Like it's an ongoing, never ending process. They'll never be done with the OED. And I suspect that probably drives some members of the OED staff completely mad.
Maybe. And you also have to keep in mind that they did this without a publisher secured, and in fact did work for about two decades without a publisher even.
Yeah.
So they were just working on what was then called the New English Dictionary, was the I guess the working title, and their first editor was a dude to name Herbert Coleridge. And if you're thinking, I wonder if if he was, Yes, he was. He was the grandson of Samuel Taylor. And there were several predictions in here. They were all wrong as to how big this project could be and how long it would take. But Herbert was the first one to be way off base and said it'll be about seven thousand pages and we'll be done in a decade. Not how it worked out. They started working, They started building this thing from you from a forward, and they made a list of books like basically the English Language Literary Canon, and said, all right, volunteers, you all wrote in, said you had some time, so start reading. Read these books and look out for these words, and when you find them, put them on a slip word for word, send them in to us. Again, that's a four x six inch piece of paper. It was all very sort of regimented, and they said, please read these books. And we like English literature because the whole point of this is to talk about how great we were and how great our works and language is.
Yeah, so are That's why they first were like, we're going to look through the great works of English language only because this is the highest use of these words. So these are the best examples. These are the quotations we want to use. And they were very narrow minded in that sense. They were really until the twentieth century. They were very much centered on that. That's what they were going to use to derive their quotes from, because it would just demonstrate how great the English language was. Look at how these amazing English writers used it. Right. So, Herbert Coleridge died in eighteen sixty one. I get the impression he was only working on it for a few years.
But he was because he died right, right, but four years later.
Yeah, so it was like four years, right. But he really threw himself into it so much so that he apparently on his deathbed he had definitions like slips scattered about, like on the quilt of his deathbed. He died working, Yeah, and he had contracted tuberculosis. And when the doctor was like, this is not ever going to get better. It will get better, but you're going to be dead, That's how it's going to get better, Herbert Coleridge was like, oh, I must start Sanskrit tomorrow, which has taken to mean that he had never learned Sanskrit. He was a polyglot. He studied all sorts of different languages, and he had never gotten to Sanskrit. Now that he realized he's going to die, he needed to start on it tomorrow.
Yeah, ironically dying of what was then known as Consumption and later TB. So that's a new usage and a new entry. Yeah, eighteen seventy nine, we're skipping forward. And like I said, this is twenty years after they started. This is when they finally found that publisher. At the time, they were known another since as Clarendon, later to be known as DA DA DA the Oxford University Press. And even though they didn't specifically call it the Oxford English Dictionary until late I believe the very first publishing in nineteen twenty eight was called a New English Dictionary on Historical Principles.
And so we should mention that after Coleridge died, it just the whole thing kind of like lost momentum. He was a real driving force as the first editor. But you know, a few I think twenty or so years later it started to pick up again, and it was thanks to a new editor named James Murray, who I believe was the third editor of all, and he took this ball and ran with it, and he is the person that you can point to as the one who ultimately got the OED published. He was the true driving force of it.
Yeah, absolutely, Murray was Scottish, came from a just sort of a regular working class, middle class background, was the son of a tailor. Apparently his father was a very smart man and known for being a smart and sober person. And James as a child was a prodigy, was a language prodigy, learned his ABC's before he was eighteen months, was apparently reading and writing in Greek by seven, left school at fourteen, was studying four languages and eventually came to London to be the headmaster of a school there. And that is where in London he joined up with the Philological Society. And like you said, he was the guy. He was also the guy who had another ten year completion prediction. He said this will take ten years from now. And after five years of that ten year prediction, they had a through ant.
No yes, wow. I would just see that and be like, well I quit.
He's like a lot of that was on boarding, you.
Understand, jeez man, that's crazy. Yeah, But it also goes to show how little they actually had gotten done apparently under Coleridge's command.
Ye, and was just they wanted jokes about Grandpa. Come on, tell me what was Sammy really like?
So the one thing that you said, I think from the start was that this was a crowdsource project.
Yeah.
And it's not like the OED makes a secret about this. They're very deferential to the volunteers that have worked for them over the years because they just could not have done this without them. It was just too big of an undertaking to for just a small group of people to have done by themselves. And there were a lot of different people. There's a book out there called The Dictionary People.
What's it about?
Isn't that what it's called?
I don't know where is it?
Yep, The Dictionary People. I think it's fairly new. And the author had worked at the OED and before she left she had gotten from the archives. She'd come across James Murray's address book and it was pretty thick because it had the names and addresses of a lot of the volunteer correspondents that were working contributing quotations to the Dictionary. And so she decided to write a book tracking down who these people were, and that's what she came up with, this book called The Dictionary People, and she found some pretty interesting stuff. For example, about one in six by her estimate, were women, including James Murray's wife and daughters. He drafted them and got a lot of support and help from them. Apparently the editing the OED did not pay much, but he had dedicated his life essentially to it and his family supported him in that, which was pretty great. And a lot of other women contributed to right.
Yeah, the daughter of Karl Marx, Eleanor Marx, contributed and it was apparently fired by Murray for not doing the assignment properly, not sticking to the assignment. And by the way, Sarah ogilvie Is wrote the Dictionary People. Yeah, nice, I'd like to check that out. I bet it's a good book. Yeah. Another writer that Allison found from this book to highlight his name Marganita Alaski, who's alive from nineteen fifteen to nineteen eighty eight. Marganita contributed thirteen thousand quotes to twenty Century Supplements and Marginita was a critic and a journalist and a novelist and kind of made the rounds on TV shows and stuff back in the day, starting in the late fifties and into the sixties. And you know, when people are volunteering like this, they can sort of like guide their like have their own path forward and how they want to tackle the project almost and who they want to highlight or words they want to highlight. And at some point Marginita Alaski got into sort of away from the high brow thing and said, I want to start, you know, looking at domestic manuals and all these old ancient cookbooks and you know, modern news newspapers and famous diaries, and just a really unique approach to come up with some of those thirteen thousand entries.
Yeah, and that was a that was a real change. Remember, I said that they had really kind of had their blinders on just looking for, you know, the pinnacle of English literature for quotations. Under James Murray, he was like, no, we're gonna not only look for new sources, we're also going to include slang. We're gonna include like vulgar words, like uh huh. We're like, if it's an English word, we're going to include it because we're documenting the entire English language. So that was a huge sea change for the direction of the dictionary, And apparently he was under a tremendous amount of pressure to not to not go that way, to kind of stick with the original plan, and he said no, he said nine.
No, he said no, Uh, I mentioned nickers. Is that underwear? That's what nickers are, right? Okay, So as soon as I said it was like, wait a minute, did I say the wrong word?
You were thinking of Fanny?
And what's a knickerbocker?
A knickerbocker is a think. I think it's the short pants that were like kind of cinched at the knee that you think of with like a little newsboys.
So the New York Knicks named after the Knickerbockers. That's what they were.
I don't know if they did or not. No, they were named after the Knickerbocker, like the story club that Washington Irving was a member of.
Oh really, are you making homposite?
No, I'm pretty sure that's correct. I sometimes get things wrong.
Yeah, but I well, this is off the dome, so I'll look it up.
Okay.
So back to Murray. He's working with his wife eleven kids at his house mainly, and not only at his house, but mainly in his little shed that he had built behind the house in the garden called the Scriptorium, and they worked on it here a once. They got a through aunt in eighteen eighty four, he was like, we need some help here, so they hired a second editor named Henry Bradley, and then not too long after that added two more co editors, so you essentially had a team of four editors at that point. That we're working with teams and teams of people, so a lot of people working. Murray at his scriptorium there at home. But then he moved to Oxford and built another larger scriptorium there behind his house, and things were getting so busy the local post put a po box right there by his little front driveway, by his sidewalk, and it's still there. Yeah, if you look it up, this beautiful red PO box with a little placard saying that you know, Murray lived here and this was the post to gather these slips that helped create the OED.
I saw, and actually I was obscure that the placard doesn't say that. It just says that the guy who created the OED lived here. And they just walk right past the post office box, so it's literally in front of the placard. They don't even mention it.
The most amazing part of the story.
It's one of the it's one of the greatest grossest government oversights in history, so thousands.
Of people contributing. At this point, Murray is still beating the drum and like writing open letters to newspapers and stuff, saying, hey, we were still doing this. We you know, trying to keep that fire going. And people it wasn't just people in England. People from all over the world were contributing. And I think when they finally they had so many slips because you know, they're filing these as they get them alphabetically, they're slotting them in and they have these lexicographers working around the clock as well. When they finally put out the first supplement in nineteen thirty three, they still had one hundred and forty thousand slips left over.
It's so nuts. Again, I would have been like, well I quit. Yeah, it's just too daunting. I can barely talk about this stuff.
Yeah. I think thirty three, that's the first year they have fecially called it the o ED Okay, but.
Everyone was kind of calling that anyway, were they really yeah, okay crazy, So they kind of went with the change. The English Language changed the name of the dictionary for them.
Yeah, because whatever that long thing, I a new English dictionary on historical principles. It was printed by the Oxford English Press, so everyone was just calling it that anyway. So yeah, I guess it was a sense plus oed.
Sounds better than the NED, you know. Yeah, sure, do you want to take another break and come back and talk about arguably the most interesting contributor of all Sure?
Okay?
So Murray dies of pleurisy in nineteen fifteen. Did not see the first final edition put out, which is very sad that would be what thirteen years later, but did put out most of the fascicles by that point, just wasn't compiled into the one edition. Different people JRR Tolkien worked for a year on this in nineteen nineteen. Lots of volunteers, but as you promised. Oh and Murray was also knighted in nineteen oh eight. I didn't those troubles.
Wow.
Yeah, apparently knighted, but still a bit of an outsider in the hoity toity Oxford. You know, Literati always felt like an outsider and wasn't even given an honorary degree until like the year before he died or something.
Yeah, and when he walked across the stage, what he didn't realize is that one of the faculty had taped a kick me signed to his back, so he didn't He never understood why the audience is laughing, and he grabbed his honorary decree. He was very sad he never got it.
So you promised to talk of the most interesting, perhaps most celebrated volunteer, and that is one doctor William Chester Minor. If you've seen the movie or read the book The Professor and the Madman, the book was by Simon Winchester, and the book starred mel Gibson as Murray and Sean Penn as the quote unquote Madman Chester Minor. I have not seen it. Apparently it's not very good. And mel Gibson and the director tried to you know, they didn't support the movie in the press, and they tried to get their I don't know if get their name removed, but they basically disowned it.
Really, I thought mel Gibson was the one whose movie it was, whose idea.
Well it was his production company, yeah, but he apparently he took him to court because he didn't get final cut like they said, and he didn't get to shoot for a week in Oxford like he wanted to. And he's basically like this thing is garbage because you didn't let me do what I wanted to. So I'm not supporting it. John Ben just what.
That stinks because apparently the book was just amazing. The professor and the Madman, I know.
And it's such a great story. But I heard other people defend it and say, you know, it was pretty good. I had great acting, and like he just you know, got his knickers in a wad.
So where the madman is doctor William Chester Minor, you said, right, let's references. And the reason that they call him the mad man is because at the time he was diagnosed with either dementia prey cox or paranoid schizophrenia, and today we would call either of those just plain old schizophrenia spectrum disorder. But this was the mid nineteenth century and doctor Minor was suffering from this at a time when they did not understand what they were dealing with. They just knew that this guy was pretty bad off and needed care essentially for the rest of his life. He had started out as a military doctor. I believe he graduated from Yale Medical School and entered the Civil War as a military doctor pretty much right off the bat. And there's some stories about when his symptoms began. Allegedly it was from things he was exposed to during his time in the Civil War. One is there's a story that he supposedly had to brand a deserter, an Irish deserter from the Union with a D on his face, and that having to do that to that poor man just made him snap essentially, or brought his symptoms on is a different way to say it. Or he was involved in the Battle of the Wilderness outside of Spotsylvania, Virginia. Either way, we don't know. We just know that, yes, this man definitely had schizophrenia. We don't know how it came on or if there was even any trigger, but we just kind of join him around the time after the Civil War when he's still in the army, but he's really starting to show symptoms.
Yeah. And also, by the way, this is how we knew that Alison really has the goods as a researcher and writer, because Alison was like, hey, be careful with his stuff because you know, there are a lot of stories out there, and just don't don't buy up everything you're reading here right, music to our ears.
She also told us how to pronounce right, yeah.
That's true. The first writer to ever include pronunciation it's nice, so like you said. An army doctor, an army surgeon working at the US General Hospital in New Haven, Connecticut, also a flute player, apparently a very ambitious guy. And because of you know, kind of how his schizophrenia played out were delusions of persecution, a lot of delusions of being attacked sexually, and you know, I think that speaks for itself. They got pretty bad, and he apparently would wander red light districts of places where he lived. He said this is because of his disorder. He was sent to an asylum in Washington while he was still in the army, although he would get his discharge in eighteen seventy. While he was still there, he thought he could get better if he went to the UK and get treatment there, and so in eighteen seventy two in London, he found himself in waking from a delusion that he was being attacked, I think sexually attacked by an Irish Republican, and got up from bed and ran out to the street like guns blazing, thinking he was shooting at his tormentor, and killed an innocent man, a brewery worker named George Merritt, who was on his way to work that early morning.
Yes, so that was enough for the British government. He'd already been discharged from the army. I don't know if you said or not by the time he made it to the UK. And in the UK the authorities were like, Okay, we're going to introduce you to one of our asylums called broad Moore and in Broadmore. This is the nineteenth century. You did not want to be in an asylum of any sort in the nineteenth century. They were horrible, terrible places where humans were treated like about as bad as humans can be treated. And yet either he was charming or wealthy enough, or a combination of both. He was able to play his flute, he was able to wear his own clothes, go on walks, and very importantly he was able to bring his personal library of very rare books from the seventeenth and eighteenth century with him, and they actually gave him another cell to serve as his personal library essentially. And I'll bet Sean Penn playing that flute is something to see. I mean that, above anything else, is why I want to see that movie.
It's like in The Anchor Man, he pulls it from a sleeve in. Yeah, it's very.
Fake, Hey aquolog No, no, no.
Oh no, not again.
Yep, it just happened.
He stayed in touch. This is kind of interesting here that he did stay in touch with the wife, the widow of the man that he killed, and she brought him books even, which is amazing and kind of a nice ending to that story. Yeah. I don't know the ins and outs. Maybe I don't know. Maybe he did her a favor. Maybe he was a bad guy.
No, apparently he wasn't. He was a choking Oh well, he apparently contacted her and apologized, made some sort of restitution. I took that to mean like gave her some money. But she accepted his apologies. She didn't have to do that. So I think it says a lot about both of them.
Yeah, for sure. When it came to the OED, he really poured himself into this as as an avid reader and had all those rare books, like you said, but didn't do the thing that they said, which was, hey, read these books and look for these words. He said, Nope, here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna read a book at a time, and i'm gonna start I guess it says with one letter. I guess he started with the letter A and just started looking through all the books for all the letter a's, and then again for the letter b's, and so on and so on.
Yeah, and it was a fruitful way to search for quotations using specific words, because I think within just a couple of years he had generated and sent in between five and six thousand slips of quotations to James Murray. And as the years went on, no one seems to know how many he sent in, but he I mean tens and tens of thousands of slips came directly from doctor Minor during his time abroad.
More. Yeah, they eventually met in person. I mean this was a relationship to span a couple of decades. Yeah, hundreds of quotes a week, and they met in eighteen ninety one. Finally, apparently the superintendent of the asylum both men at his house, and they met a few more times after that. I watched the trailer of the movie today, and I'm not sure how accurate it is, but it seems like they'd met here and there over the years. And in the book, it was like, you know, mel Gibson doing a pretty bad Scottish accent, saying like you and I have partners.
You complete me.
It was kind of like that, and I'm not really sure if that was the real case in real life.
Well so, apparently from what I saw, James Murray considered it just as a decent human being, he needed to go support doctor Minor. Whether doctor Minor was contributing or not. I think it helped that doctor Minor was contributing, but they did have some sort of friendship or relationship, but it went beyond just you know, the editor and the contributor kind of thing.
Well maybe it wasn't.
And supposedly doctor Minor kept like finding excuses anytime James Murray was like, well let's meet, you know, I'm just across like the city, let's meet for lunch or something, and doctor Mom would be like, I can't, you know, I broke my foot, or my sister's coming to visit whatever. And then finally, I'm not sure how he finally found out, either doctor Miner admitted to it or James Murray found out somehow, but he finally did find out that he was institutionalized, and then he started to go visit him. Oh okay, pretty neat and then he saw him off after doctor Minor was released from brob Moore so he could go back to be institutionalized in America. It was clear that he wasn't going to be around too many more years. James Murray saw him off at the docks and gave him six unpublished volumes of the first edition that hadn't come out yet.
Yeah, he had a very sad end to a sad life. He had those delusions of being sexually violated, and in December nineteen oh two, he tied a tourniquet around his penis and he cut it off in what he called in the interests of morality, because what he believed is that he had delusions that he was being taking out of the asylum for years and years at night and forced to have sex with women all around the asylum and in town. And so he cut his penis off. And after that, things really just weren't the same for him. It seems like things went pretty downhill pretty quickly, although he died in nineteen twenty so that was, you know, another eighteen years of suffering.
Yeah, as far as his contributions, that really went downhill after that.
Man, Yeah, very sad, but super super interesting story and great job Allison. This was really really cool.
Yeah, thanks a lot, Alison. This is great, great start. Welcome to the team. And what Chuck? Since I said welcome to the team, do you think it's time for listener now?
I think so?
Okay, I'm going to call this cost of goods?
In that episode? What episode was it where you're talking about the cost of goods?
I think the Harlem Globetrotters is where it recently came from.
Yeah, like, wwhy is it so expensive to go to NBA game these days or get a meal or whatever? We had a lot of people that write in, so I don't think we even settled on a final point.
Yeah, I'm still looking around.
There were a few different theories, but this one from Matt I'm going to read, Hey, guys, I have a partial explanation for the question why does it cost so much more for a nice meal than it used to even adjusting for inflation? Bal mal bauml bal Mal's cost disease might help explain. This refers to the rising costs associated with service or labor intensive industries over time, despite no corresponding increase in productivity. So imagine a restaurant in the nineteen fifties, you have a server, take your order, chef cooks of food, someone else cleans up after you're done. Fast forward to today. Despite all the technological advances, you still need that server stake the order. You still need the chef, You still need the staff to clean. The humans have not been replaced by machines or software. In a lot of these cases, you can't speed up the chef the way you can double the speed of a factory machine without sacrificing quality. So if you own a restaurant, you still need roughly the same number of workers that you've had that you needed in the fifties. Roughly, Yet wages for the staff have gone up over the years. That's a whole other rabbit hole. The restaurant has to pay its staff more over time without getting more meals per worker. So what do you do You pass it on to the customers. By the way, this also explains why stuff like health insurance and childcare have also gotten way more expensive relative to other stuff. You still need the same number of daycare workers per kid and nurses per patient that you did in past decades. This was a good one, Matt we got some other ideas and imagine it's kind of all these things probably, but balml's cost disease is a great explanation. And that is from Matt Farmer.
Yeah, thanks a lot, Matt, though, was a good one. It's the whole thing's brewing. I don't know what it's going to turn into. That will definitely be part of it, for sure.
Perhaps a Josh Clark solo ten part series The Cost of Goods with Josh Clark.
I don't think so. No, no, I'm going to make you do it with me.
Oh no, no no. So that was from Matt right, yeah, Matt Farmer.
Matt Farmer, thank you very much for that. And if you want to be like Matt Farmer and show off your braininess and try to answer a burning question we have. We love that kind of thing. You can send it to us via email to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
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