β Scribed by Rolf Nelson
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
The creation of the Oxford English Dictionary began in 1857, took seventy years to complete, drew from tens of thousands of brilliant minds, and organized the sprawling language into 414,825 precise definitions. But hidden within the rituals of its creation is a fascinating and mysterious story - a story of two remarkable men whose strange twenty-year relationship lies at the core of this historic undertaking. Professor James Murray, an astonishingly learned former schoolmaster and bank clerk, was the distinguished editor of the OED project. Dr. William Chester Minor, an American surgeon from New Haven, Connecticut, who had served in the Civil War, was one of thousands of contributors who submitted illustrative quotations of words to be used in the dictionary. But Minor was no ordinary contributor. He was remarkably prolific, sending thousands of neat, handwritten quotations from his home in the small village of Crowthorne, fifty miles from Oxford. On numerous occasions Murray invited Minor to visit Oxford and celebrate his work, but Murray's offer was regularly - and mysteriously - refused. Thus the two men, for two decades, maintained a close relationship only through correspondence. Finally, in 1896, after Minor had sent nearly ten thousand definitions to the dictionary but had still never traveled from his home, a puzzled Murray set out to visit him. It was then that Murray finally learned the truth about Minor - that, in addition to being a masterful wordsmith, Minor was also a murderer, clinically insane - and locked up in Broadmoor, England's harshest asylum for criminal lunatics.
π SIMILAR VOLUMES
"Everything leaves marks, even water..." Two children watching their parents argue inside a greenhouse, an armoured boy and his troubled sister, a human statue who's lost the ability to move and a floating six year old tethered to the backyard fence: the characters in Jan Carson's debut story collec
Thirty years. A time of quiet celebration for Sarah and Abraham. Thirty years since their arrival, penniless, in Manchester. So much behind them. The years of struggle, sustained by the closeness of family, faith and inheritance, shot through by the joys of love, of children and grandchildren. It
Thirty years. A time of quiet celebration for Sarah and Abraham. Thirty years since their arrival, penniless, in Manchester. So much behind them. The years of struggle, sustained by the closeness of family, faith and inheritance, shot through by the joys of love, of children and grandchildren. It