February 2012 Host:  Jennie

The Professor and the Madman A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the

Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester

Sara and Evan

Colleen and Evan

Mom (Jaci) and Evan

Summary

This is an unusual yet extraordinary tale of how madness and genius intertwined that lead to the making of the Oxford English Dictionary.  The compilation of the dictionary began in 1857 and was led by the legendary James Murray, with hundreds of volunteers submitting entries.  Murray taught himself biology, geology, and etymology (he even tried to teach Latin to cows) and was fluent in several languages. His love of the written word made him instrumental in creating the dictionary.  It was later discovered that one individual, Dr. W.C. Minor, an American Civil War Surgeon, submitted definitions for over ten thousand words.  He had went mad amid the horrors of the war and endured nightly demons which led to his killing an innocent man, after which he was incarcerated in an asylum for the criminally insane.  Other interesting tidbits about the Civil War brought forth in this book was why the Irish so frequently deserted the army and the branding of those deserters that were caught.  Some instances at the conclusion of this book are somewhat bizarre and demented.  The author succeeds in bringing history to life and how one mad man, who never lost his intellectual or linguistic abilities, submitted thousands of definitions to the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary.

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