You Could Look It Up (67 page)

There is much to love about Google, Wikipedia, and other online reference sources. Encyclopedias and unabridged dictionaries are hard to tote around; computers can be small, and phones fit in a pocket. Reference books need constant updating, which pushes old editions into landfills; online sources can be revised several times a day without any additional cost or waste. Information is now more timely than it has ever been: by the time the news announces the death of a prominent person, the relevant Wikipedia page has been updated.

And yet Google and Wikipedia have serious limitations. Wikipedia, for instance, shows a strong presentist bias: the first George to serve as president of the United States, Washington, has a Wikipedia entry of roughly 19,000 words; the most recent President George, this time W. Bush, gets 27,000. Wikipedia also famously favors the fashionable. The English-language entry for Zoroaster—the prophet who developed the world's first monotheistic religion—gets fewer than 8,000 words, and the religion he founded another 9,000; combined, the two entries are the length of Lady Gaga's entry. Thomas Aquinas weighs in at just over 37,000 words on his life and major works; Michael Jackson warrants five times the space. The notorious and infamous do well: the account of O. J. Simpson's life and criminal trials occupies nearly 21,000 words, more than the entries for Florence Nightingale and Mother Teresa combined. Popular culture tends to fare much better than high
culture. Perhaps we should expect the pages on the
Legend of Zelda
video games to get more space in Wikipedia than Shakespeare's
Hamlet
, but those pages, at more than 160,000 words, are more than four times the length of
Hamlet
itself.

Anxiety about reliability may be the greatest problem with these online resources. Google serves up “hits” without regard for the authority of the source; Wikipedia is assembled by uncredentialed volunteers. As a result, some teachers forbid reference to them. Middlebury College's history department, for instance, voted to ban citations of websites in student papers.
19
That is almost certainly an overreaction, not least because some online resources are every bit as thoroughly vetted as print resources, and some are just scanned versions of authoritative print encyclopedias. Even Wikipedia, for all its lapses, is valuable. Physicist Freeman Dyson captures the paradox well: “Among my friends and acquaintances, everybody distrusts Wikipedia and everybody uses it.”
20
I confess that, even though I adore dusty dictionaries and surround myself with them, I wrote hardly a page of this book without turning to Google, Wikipedia, or both. But these free online sources need to get more reliable, and, just as important, users need to become more sophisticated in evaluating the sources they use.

The bigger danger, to my mind, is that Wikipedia, despite being noncommercial, still poses many of the dangers of a traditional monopoly, and we run the risk of living in an information monoculture. We are in a strange position in the second decade of the third millennium. More information is more readily available to more people than at any time in human history—not merely an incremental increase on previous ages, but an exponential explosion. A rural twelve-year-old with a $250 laptop and a slow Internet connection now has access to more information than the wealthiest scholars and librarians at the richest universities just a generation ago, and anyone with a smartphone owns orders of magnitude more information than fit in the Library of Alexandria. But the new world order remains nervous-making. The information at our fingertips is more diverse than ever before, but in some ways it is more limited. Google has become the first—and, for many people, only—stop for seeking information on everything.

This is the paradox of research in the “postgoogluvian era.” We are now nearer to the encyclopedic dream than any society has ever been. From one source—not a library, not a set of books, but a computer connected to most of the other computers around the world—we come closer than ever before to having all the world's information at our fingertips. I hope my survey of attempts to collect the world's information from the third millennium
B.C.E.
through today serves as a reminder of the sheer variety of information sources out there and helps to keep us attentive to the need for multiple sources of information, multiple ways of organizing the world, multiple points of view. I hope, too, that the lesson about the impossibility of ever achieving the encyclopedic dream induces a healthy skepticism about the sources we do have.

A BRIEF
ETYMOLOGICAL
GLOSSARY

abecedarium
Used in the Old English period to refer to the alphabet, taking its name from
A, B, C, D
. It was later used to refer to dictionaries, glossaries, and primers.

almanac
A mystery: it shows up in the thirteenth century, and it seems to come from the Arabic
al-manakh
—except that no one has found
manakh
in Arabic. Chaucer was the first English writer to mention this kind of book, which provided information on the calendar and positions of the stars and planets. Later almanacs have included information on holy days, weather, tide tables, and planting dates.

annals
Latin
annus
‘year’ provides the root; annals are histories organized year by year.

atlas
In Greek mythology, Atlas was a Titan who bore the weight of the heavens on his shoulders. Gerardus Mercator included a depiction of Atlas on his collection of maps, and since then the word has been applied to cartographical compilations that cover a wide area.

bibliography
Greek
βιβλ
ον
(
biblion
) ‘book’ and
γράφειν
(
graphein
) ‘to write’. A relative newcomer to English, showing up with its meanings “the study of books” and “a list of books” only in 1814.

book
Most Germanic languages have a form like
book
; they may be derived from
beech
, perhaps because early books were made from the bark or wood of beech trees. Like Latin
liber
(source of French
livre
, Spanish
libro
, and Italian
libro
) and Greek
βιβλ
ον
(
biblion
), English
book
has been applied to various forms of text packaging, from scrolls to codices to e-readers. Its meanings are slippery: it can refer to a section of a longer work (as in an epic poem), or one volume in a multivolume set, or the whole title in however many volumes; it can mean both a single copy and a full edition. See also
codex
.

catalog(ue)
Greek
κατά
(
kata
) ‘down’ and
λέγειν
(
legein
) ‘pick, choose’ combined to form
κατάλογος
(
katalogos
) ‘register, list’, which made its way into Latin as
catalogus
, then into French as
catalogue
. When it appeared in English in 1460 it meant any list; since the 1660s it has implied “systematic or methodical arrangement, alphabetical or other order.” The French phrase
catalogue raisonné
is sometimes used in English for a systematic list of all the works of an artist.

chronology
Χρόνος
(
chronos
) is Greek for “time”;
λογ
α
(
logia
) has many meanings, but “discourse” is one.
Chronology
has long meant the understanding of the passage of time, but since the seventeenth century, at least in English, it has also meant a timeline, a list of events arranged in chronological order.

codex
Latin
caudex
means tree trunk, or a tablet made from its wood. Eventually the word came to mean a book formed by hinged leaves joined along a spine, as opposed to a scroll. The word
codex
is also the source of the word
code
, in the sense of both “legal code” and “cipher.”

companion
See
vade mecum
.

concordance
From Latin
concors
‘concord, agreement’. Originally a collection of parallel passages “in concord” with one another. The
OED
’s definition of the modern sense is elegant: “An alphabetical arrangement of the principal words contained in a book, with citations of the passages in which they occur.”

corpus
The Latin word for “body” has expanded to mean “A body or complete collection of writings or the like; the whole body of literature on any subject” (
OED
). In the 1950s, another sense arose: “The body of written or spoken material upon which a linguistic analysis is based” (
OED
).
Corpus linguistics
refers to studies based on a defined collection of texts, like the 350-million-word
Russian National Corpus
, the 650-million-word
Bank of English
, the 2.5-billion-word
Oxford English Corpus
, or the 4-billion-word
Deutsches Referenzkorpus
.

database
Latin
data
‘things given’ started being used in English in the seventeenth century.
Base
, from Latin
basis
‘lowest point’, started being used in English for architectural foundations in the fourteenth
century. The two words were first combined in Harvard’s
Quarterly Journal of Economics
in 1955, which called for a “data-base … for this kind of stabilization policy.” Soon it was understood to signify structured information stored in a computer.

definition
Latin
finis
means end or boundary;
definire
is to terminate something—to mark its boundaries. That was one meaning of
define
when it was used by Chaucer in 1384, but he also used it to mean “To state exactly what (a thing) is; to set forth or explain the essential nature of.” The noun
definition
followed quickly. Lexicographers and philosophers of language argue over whether they provide true
definitions
or merely
explanations
.

dictionary
Latin
dico
means “I say”; speech is
dictio
; spoken things are
dictiones
. In 1225, an English monk, Joannes de Garlandia, coined the Latin word
dictionarius
to refer to a collection of words. The Romance languages inherited the term, as in French
dictionnaire
, Italian
dizionario
, and Spanish
diccionario
. They provide information about words—generally the grammatical classes to which a word belongs, its origin or etymology, and one or more definitions. Dictionaries can be
monolingual
,
bilingual
, or
polyglot
; they can be
general
or
specialized
; they can be
synchronic
(looking at the language at one moment) or
diachronic
(looking at language change over time). Other terms for what we call a
dictionary
have included
abecedarium
,
alphabetum
or
alphabet
,
alvearium
or
alveary
,
biblioteca
,
declaration
,
descriptio
,
expositor
,
glossarium
or
glossary
,
hortus
,
lexicon
,
liber floridus
,
manipulus
,
medulla
,
promptuarium
,
promptorium
,
repertorium
,
summa
,
tabula
,
terminarius
,
thesaurus
or
thrésor
or
treasury
,
vocabularius
or
vocabulary
,
vulgaria
, or
wordbook
. The word
dictionary
is also sometimes used for more encyclopedic collections, as with a
biographical dictionary
.