A logophile's asylum

Ian Brookes, editor-in-chief
The Chambers Dictionary Chambers Harrap, 1,839pp. Edinburgh: Chambers Harrap. £35.
0 550 10185 3

For a snap judgement on a dictionary, I use the Pavlova test. Turn to the entry for this antipodean confection, a muscular structure of meringue and fruit with a tutu of whipped cream, and see whether your favourite lexicon tells you the dates of Madame Pavlova’s visits Down Under. Observe whether it favours New Zealand or Australia as the origin (several thousand bloggers are happy to give their opinions); a dictionary with unlimited space would discuss the rival claims of Henry Sachse (Perth, 1935) and Davis Dainty Dishes (Davis Gelatine Co, NZ, 1927) together with the outsider claim of Dr Pavlov, a tribute to the specialist in mouth-wateringness. Further study would record whether it specifies the fruit content. I like to think that the choice of strawberry, kiwi fruit (erstwhile Chinese gooseberry), mango, or passion fruit might relate to a balletomane chef dreaming of the Dying Swan, dying of, respectively, TB, chlorosis, jaundice, or a broken heart. And at the very least let it not omit “pav” (Aust. informal). The Chambers Dictionary’s score on this scale is subminimal. No location at all, no mention of rivalry, no specification of fruit, no pav; though it does give the dancer’s dates (not perhaps of prime lexical significance), and in passing I acquired the valuable “ockerism” (“or Ockerism”), defined curtly as “boorishness in Australians”.

I am shocked by my favourite reference book making so poor a showing. Chambers has always fought above its weight (unlike Pluto, here still of course a grown-up planet, and without the new – and rejected – sense for pluton of a Pluto-like component of the solar system); and it does so by cramming in additional, often improbable words, and economizing on chatter. Better to cut the Anzac banter, and include in the saved inches the odd-looking “pashm”: “the fine underfleece of Himalayan goats”, the source of pashminas.

“Pavlova”, so curtly deserted, belongs in the World Food department, along with “chermoula” from North Africa, “cevabcici” from Serbo-Croatia, “nori” (red seaweed used as sushi wrap), “wrap” in general (“a snack, consisting of a flatbread wrapped around a filling; the flatbread itself”), together with “quark” (the remarkable cheese that looks like the exudate from some inorganic industrial process), not to be confused with the particle-physicist’s quark, which comes in six varieties of particle, or rather subparticle. The latter quark is more helpfully explained than the “hadron”, defined as “one of a class of subatomic particles, including baryons and mesons”, but with no clue to the nature of the class. You need to have heard of leptons to find out more. Near “lepton” you will also find “Lesbian rule”, incomprehensibly explained as “an adaptable standard, from the pliable lead rule orig used by Lesbian masons”; Chambers may well consider that the precise rituals of the ancient freemasons of Mytilene are not a matter for speculation.

Chambers never forgets its origins, and Scotticisms are pleasingly many: here’s “haar” and “haaf”, and “douce”; and “mutchkin”, defined, perhaps without a trace of chauvinism, as three-quarters of an imperial pint, or one quarter of an old Scottish pint, and “snigger”, which last is to do with catching salmon with a weighted hook, apparently an illegality, which caused me once the wildest of surmises, when a newspaper (the Kirkintilloch Bugle, if I’m not mistaken) ran the headline MAN FINED FOR SNIGGERING AT LOCH NESS: I thought it was my first real case of political correctness run mad.

It must be hard for the young to believe that a whole class of words were once excluded from dictionaries because of their meanings, and as hard for the older to realize just how long ago the taboo words shed their stars and filed in, lining up to be classified. Chambers is broad-minded, but not eager: it does not struggle to keep up with obscure lexical usage in the rougher regions of the net. Any web-haunter will know that “Cum” is no longer restricted to Chorlton-cum-Hardy or Stow-cum-Quy, “DP” stands for more than data processing, “bukake” is on every tongue; but still Chambers sounds seriously uncomfortable explaining “dogging”: “the pastime of visiting isolated public places, usu at night, to engage in, or observe people engaging in, sexual activity, e.g. in parked cars (sl).”, and rather more urbanely, defining “troilism” (pawkily) as “sexual activity between three people (of two sexes)”. “Polyamory” is a recent redefinition, a more theory-based activity, and may feature a larger number of participants of many sexes, some of whom may be chaste. And Chambers finds room for “fuck-me”: “sexually alluring, or perceived as such, as in fuck-me boots”. “Sweet fuck all” is glossed as “nothing at all” in one place, and “sweet fanny adams” given the same meaning in another: but there is nothing to tell us that they are related.

Chambers rightly regards as squandered any pages not listing extraordinary words: lacing the merely exotic with the bizarre, they may see themselves as the koftgars or kokanees of lexicography (koftgar: “someone who inlays steel with gold”; kokanee: “a landlocked sockeye”). There is a modest allotment of fore- and after-matter: scales of winds and quakes, weddings and wine bottles, a select list of SI units, a handful of foreign alphabets, a list of forenames, a list of (mostly national) internet-domain names, planets (including one ex-planet) and selected planetary satellites, and a list of the first 111 chemical elements, arranged alphabetically.
Since the Periodic Table, which groups elements according to nuclear structure and predicts chemical affinities, is one of sapiens’s greatest intellectual achievements, I think it would have been worth the extra proofreading to display it in full. It is difficult to trace through the body of the dictionary the officially authorized names given to those artificial elements, created in accelerators, existing in most cases for a few instants in a handful of atoms, subject to decades of claim and counterclaim, political passion and expediency. The Russians lost the Cold War, and as a consequence lost the war of elementary names: Kurchatovium became Rutherfordium, Russian laboratories gave way to Californian, and Dubnium floated around the advancing wave of nomenclature, looking for some unclaimed atomic number to attach itself to. It was finally attached to element 105, displacing Joliotium, Hahnium, and Nielsbohrium (which was awarded element 107, but shorn of its first syllable).

The preliminary matter includes a foreword in praise of English by Melvyn Bragg, retained from the much made-over 2003 edition, and a summary description of varieties of English: American, Canadian, Indian, South African, Australasian and Singapore/Malaysian. The absence of West Indian is startling: but Chambers might argue that Jamaica Creole, for example, is a foreign language, of English derivation, rather than a dialect; or alternatively that the history of Caribbean English is told throughout the volume: but it doesn’t give “fingle” – one thing a duppy might very well do to you; “duppy fingle a man food-mek im sick”. Nor could I find Anancy the cunning spider, even as an adjective, nor Jack Mandora, whoever, whatever he is, who appears at the very end of every tale. And what of classifications of ethnic mixtures, which plainly have a place, if a disgraceful one? The Reverend R. Bickell writes (in The West Indies As They Are, London, 1825): “The nearest to a Negro is a Sambo, the next a Mulatto, next a Quadroon, next a Mustee, next a Mustiphino, after which the shade is lost, for the children of a Mustiphino, by a white man, are accounted white by law”.

Bickell says that Mustiphino is a word the dictionaries don’t record: he’s still right. Chambers misses it, but deals with the rest. “Wicked” and “massive”, which might be accounted characteristic of London Black speech, are not restricted by race or register – as that shrewd sociolinguist, Ali G, has repeatedly demonstrated.

Every dictionary, whatever its size, seeks to reflect the world’s diversity. Chambers, surely double the weight of and several times the number of entries in it than in the hand-friendly volume I used for crosswords ten years or so ago, seeks to maximize diversity at the sacrifice of some detail. But if it attempts to reflect in particular the diversity of the biological world, it cannot succeed. Estimates of the number of species currently living vary hugely: some millions of species, possibly many millions. Let us guess the number of genera as one-tenth of that. The barest list of genera would make a volume as large as this dictionary. We need another volume about the same size for the zoology, and probably a few (or many) more to index flowering plants, fungi, protozoa, bacteria and protists. And consequently I wonder how the dictionary-maker justifies his selection. For every listed genus, there will be scores, if not hundreds, of names equally well established, equally colourful, equally diversity-containing. A solution would be to list only the orders, classes and higher-rank categories (but here are the Acalepha, jellyfish and medusae, succinctly described but with no indication that the name unites groups now separated; and that consequently the term was discarded more than a century ago).

A few conclusions: Chambers is better than ever, and especially recommended to logophiles who thrill to an instruction like “zomboruk: see zumbooruk”. And bin the Pavlova Test.