Lesson Seventeen: Listen to Madmen

Imagine the shock to the delicate Victorian disposition when they learned that the most prodigious private contributor to the original Oxford English Dictionary (OED) was not only a murderer, but a permanent resident of an asylum for the criminally insane.

You can practically see the women fainting in their parlors.

It started innocently enough when Professor James Murray, newly appointed editor in chief of the OED, made a public call for contributors to help with the monumental task of finding, referencing, and publishing the entire English language.

Keep in mind, it was not only the English language as it existed in 1875 that they wished to chronicle, but rather, the entire history of the English language, beginning with Chaucer, and spanning over 1,000 years of linguistic twisting and reshaping.The task was true mind-boggling. It would not have been possible without the efforts of hundreds of volunteer contributors.Ordinary members of the public took up the call and were asked
to submit not only an unusual word, but supporting quotations cited from historical literature, in order that light be shed on the specific meaning of the word.They hoped to demonstrate how meaning had changed over the centuries.

Language is a remarkably malleable entity, changing and evolving since the first, prehistoric utterance.

There were other dictionaries prior to the OED. Most notably Dr. Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language published in 1755, but none was to be so utterly complete and editorially pure as the great Oxford English Dictionary.

The task turned out to take over 70 years, during which time, Dr. William Chester Minor, surgeon, US Civil War veteran and certified lunatic, contributed over 12,000 entries over a 40-year span. By far the largest single contributor.

Professor Murray, a man not prone to hyperbole, said, “So enormous have been Dr. Minor’s contributions … that we could easily illustrate the last four centuries from his quotation alone.”

I should note that Dr.Minor was not some kind of romantic victim of circumstance, cast into an asylum by a cruel turn-of-fate. He was truly mad, landing in the asylum after shooting to death an innocent man on the streets of London. (He thought the poor fellow was an Irish bandit set to rob him.) At his trial he was found Innocent by Reason of Insanity and sent to the Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane, where he lived out the duration of his life. During his time there he often complained of “Irish Gypsies” (he had a problem with the Irish) sneaking into his cell at night, damaging his cherished, and sizable, library of books, and performing indecent acts on him. Late in life he cut off his own penis, in a ‘religiously’ motivated act of self-mutilation.

What Dr.Minor proved, no matter how crazy, is that you can never be certain where good ideas will come from. Certainly, Professor Murray never would have dreamed such a great contribution could come from so far outside his academic circle of “peers.” In fact, he didn’t have a clue about Dr. Minor’s circumstances until after nearly 15 years of correspondence. Once he learned the truth, he could have dismissed Minor’s contribution as the work of a madman. But he didn’t. Professor Murray had the good sense to differentiate between the substance and the source.

Professor Murray even made a trip to see Dr.Minor in the asylum, and the two men enjoyed a pleasurable afternoon of conversation.

So how about you? Do you dismiss ideas because they come from too far outside your circle? Or is there room for the metaphoric madman to touch your life?

Ideas are everywhere. Judge them by the substance, not the source.



Principles of Persuassion by Shane Spark