The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language (21 page)

Indo’cibleness Indo’cilness Indoci’lity

[
indocilitas indocilité indocilità
(L.)]

unaptness to learn or be taught.

You sit back with a smug smile on your face, until your friend asks who this Nathan Bailey guy is anyway? ‘Well,’ you mumble, ‘he’s a schoolmaster from Stepney.’

Not that impressive.

But Doctor Johnson, on the other hand, was the foremost scholar of Britain. So his definition of indocility:

Indoci’lity n. s. [
indocilité
, Fr.
in
and
docility.
]

Unteachableness, refusal of instruction.

Well, that had the authority of Dr Johnson behind it. It did not, though, stop Bailey’s dictionary outselling Johnson’s by a country mile.

Then came Noah Webster, who was an immensely boring man and can usefully be skipped; so that we can get straight on to the OED, which is the greatest dictionary ever. Nor is that opinion a case of anglocentric chauvinism, as the OED was largely the result of the collaboration between a Scotsman and an American. Its story also involves murder, prostitutes, and all sorts of other fun stuff. In fact, those of a weak disposition should skip the following chapter, as the story of the
Oxford English Dictionary
is too scary for most and will probably give you nightmares.

Still here? Right, for those who wish to continue, what is the medical term for slicing off your own penis, and how does it relate to the OED?

Autopeotomy

The
Oxford English Dictionary
is the greatest work of reference ever written, and it’s largely the result of a Scotsman who left school at fourteen, and a criminally insane American.

The Scotsman was a former cowherd called James Murray, who taught himself Latin, German, Italian, Ancient Greek, French, Anglo-Saxon, Russian, Tongan … well, nobody’s quite sure how many languages he knew. It’s usually estimated at 25. Murray became a schoolteacher and then in the 1860s he moved to London for his wife’s health and became a member of the Philological [
word-loving
] Society.

The Philological Society was trying to produce an English dictionary that would be more complete than any other. They eventually did a deal with the Oxford University Press, and James Murray, who at the time was still a teacher, became the editor.

The idea of the
Oxford English Dictionary
was that it would trace the development of every word in the English language. Each word would then have its meanings defined in chronological order with quotations given as evidence. Getting the quotations was a simple business; all that had to be done was to read every book ever written in English.

Even Murray couldn’t do that alone, so he advertised for volunteer readers,
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people who would fight their way through all the books that could be found, copying out significant-looking sentences.

Now, let’s leave Murray there for a moment and turn our attention to the island of Sri Lanka in 1834, where we will find a missionary couple from New England who are trying to convert the island’s pagan population to Jesus. He is called Eastman Minor, she is called Lucy Minor and has just given birth to a son: William Minor.

The Minors were hyper-religious and at a very early age they decided that little William was much too interested in girls. Maybe they were just being Puritan and repressive, but given subsequent events it’s possible that they were on to something.

Either way, the Minors decided that William’s fascination with the opposite sex was a) a problem and b) probably something to do with the Sri Lankans. So they packed their son off to a boarding school back in the healthy cold shower that was nineteenth-century America.

There’s no record of William Minor’s sex life at boarding school, which is a blessed relief. All we know is that he ended up in Yale studying medicine, and that meant that when the American Civil War broke out he signed up in the Union Army as a field surgeon.

Being a doctor is a pleasant business in general. You cure people and that makes them happy. Even if you don’t cure them, they are still reasonably grateful that you tried. However, Minor was assigned the rather unhippocratic job of branding deserters.

If a chap got caught running away from the Union Army, he would have a big capital D branded on his cheek to inform everybody that he was a deserter and a coward. Minor was the man with the brand. At least one of the people he was forced to disfigure was an Irish immigrant, a fact that will be important later.

After the war, Minor was posted to New York, but he spent so much of his time in the company of prostitutes that the army got embarrassed and transferred him to Florida. It’s a rather impressive feat to visit so many prostitutes that you become a scandal in New York. It’s also an impressive feat to visit so many prostitutes that the army feels you’re overdoing it. William Minor’s parents may just have been right.

The next thing Minor did was to go utterly mad, and the army decided to discharge him completely. Minor moved to England to convalesce and settled in Lambeth in London, which was (coincidentally) full of prostitutes at the time. However, the prostitutes weren’t the real problem. The real problem was the branding of the deserters, which still preyed on Minor’s mind.

One day Minor met an Irishman called George Merret and, for no reason at all, decided that Merret was one of the men he had branded, on a mission of revenge. Minor took out a gun and shot Merret dead. This was unreasonable, as Merret didn’t have a D burned onto his cheek. It was also, technically, illegal.

At the ensuing trial it was decided that William Minor was absolutely bloody crazy and he was confined in Broadmoor, the brand-new asylum for the criminally insane. Broadmoor wasn’t actually that bad a place. It was a hospital, not a prison, and Minor was rich enough to afford a manservant and all the books he could read. It was at Broadmoor that he came across Murray’s advertisement for volunteer readers.

Minor had a lot of time on his hands, and also the advantage of being criminally insane, which is always a plus in lexicography. So he started reading. He read and read and read and took note after note after note, and sent the notes to Murray. He sent Murray hundreds of notes, then he sent him thousands. Minor contributed so much to the
Oxford English Dictionary
that Murray would later say that the whole of the development of the modern English language, from Tudor times to the present day, could have been illustrated using only Minor’s examples.

But Minor never said who he was. He seems to have been rather embarrassed about the murder, and Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum is hardly the most fashionable address in England. All Minor’s letters to Murray were signed
W.C. Minor
,
Crowthorne
,
Berkshire
, which was technically true, as Crowthorne is the nearest town to Broadmoor.

It wasn’t until the 1890s that James Murray discovered that his star contributor, the man on whom his dictionary was based, was an insane murderer. When Murray did find out, he immediately set off to visit Minor, and the two became firm friends. They were rather different people, but by coincidence they looked like brothers. They both had huge beards and flowing white hair, and they both loved words. Murray tried to give Minor emotional support but it didn’t really work, as Minor, in 1902, deliberately sliced off his own penis.

This is called an
autopeotomy
and should not be attempted without due consideration. Minor did have a good reason. He had decided during his confinement that his parents and the army were right and that all his troubles came down to his excessive sexual appetite. Minor may have been correct, but most men intent on curbing their sex drive would have had the good sense to merely chop off their testicles (as the early Christian writer Origen did). The problem with an autopeotomy is that, among other things, it becomes difficult to pee. William Minor was in trouble, and agony.

Murray took up Minor’s case and in 1910 persuaded the Home Secretary to have Minor released and deported to America. Minor went back and died in his own country, but he took with him copies of the six volumes of the OED that had so far been completed. Whether these consoled him for the loss of his
membrum virile
, history does not record.

Now, who was the Home Secretary who released Minor, and what weapon did he help to name?

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Technically, the adverts went out before Murray was appointed, but we’re trying to keep this simple.

Water Closets for Russia

William Minor was released on the orders of the Home Secretary Winston Churchill. Churchill is remembered by lexicographers as a man of words. He wrote a novel called
Savrola
that appeared in 1899 to reviews that can be given the usual euphemism of ‘mixed’. He invented the phrases
out-tray
,
Iron Curtain
,
social security
and
V-sign
. He invented the words
seaplane
,
commando
and
undefendable
. He popularised
crunch
in the sense of
the vital moment
; and won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1953. With all these linguistic achievements, it’s easy to forget that in his spare time Churchill was also a politician.

As William Minor sailed,
sans
willy, back to America, Europe was getting ready for war. In 1911, Winston Churchill was moved from the position of Home Secretary and became First Lord of the Admiralty, where he was in charge of developing new and more lethal methods of killing the enemy.

One of the ideas that he oversaw was the
landship
. The oceans of the world were, at the time, dominated by the Royal Navy. Britannia ruled the waves. Huge steam-powered gunships chuffed around the globe making sure that the Sun never set on the British empire. These ships were covered in iron, so that they were immune to enemy fire, and they had huge guns mounted on them, so that they could destroy others. However, on land Britain was not so invincible. The British army still consisted of men and horses, which are made of flesh rather than iron and could be killed in their millions.

So, under Churchill’s supervision, a plan was hatched to take the principle of the iron-clad warship and apply it to land warfare. The British started to design the
landship
. It would be iron, like a warship, it would motorised, like a warship, and it would have guns mounted on it, like a warship. It would be a destroyer, but it would be used in the field and not in the sea.

The idea was pushed forward by an officer called Ernest Swinton. Plans were drawn up and manufacturers approached, but everything was done in deadly secrecy. No mention of
landships
was ever made in public, which is why they aren’t called
landships
today.

The landship was such a secret that not even the workers in the factory where they were built were to know what they were. By the outbreak of war in 1914, Russia was fighting on the Allied side, so Swinton decided that a good cover story for the new weapons would be to say on all documents that they were
Water Carriers for Russia
, but when Swinton told Churchill about his ruse Churchill burst out laughing.

Churchill pointed out that Water Carriers would be abbreviated to WCs and that people would think that they were manufacturing lavatories. So Swinton had a quick think and suggested changing the name to
Water Tanks for Russia
. Churchill could find no objection to this codename, and it stuck.

Well, it didn’t all stick.
Water Tanks for Russia
was a bit cumbersome, so
water
got dropped. Then it turned out that the tanks weren’t going to Russia at all. They were going to the trenches on the Western Front, so
Russia
got dropped too. And that’s why tanks are called
tanks
. If Winston Churchill hadn’t been so careful about lavatorial implications, they might have been called
carriers
. If Swinton hadn’t been so careful, they would definitely have been
landships
.

The tank was a very useful weapon of war, but unfortunately the Germans were even then building their own secret weapon, and theirs had a name that was quite ungentlemanly.