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Book: The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary
Quotes of Book: The Professor and the Madman:
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  1. Simon Winchester _ The Professor and the Madman:

    Here was an inescapable irony of the Civil War, not known in any conflict between men before or since: the fact that this was a war fought with new and highly effective weapons, machines for the mowing down of men-and yet at a time when an era of poor and primitive medicine was just coming to an end. It was fought with the mortar and the musket and the minié ball, but not yet quite with anesthesia or with sulphonamides and penicillin. The common soldier was thus in a poorer position than at any time before: He could be monstrously ill treated by all the new weaponry, and yet only moderately well treated with all the old medicine.
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  2. Simon Winchester _ The Professor and the Madman:

    In Victorian London, even in a place as louche and notoriously crime-ridden as Lambeth Marsh, the sound of gunshots was a rare event indeed.
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  3. Simon Winchester _ The Professor and the Madman:

    He was mad, and for that, we have reason to be glad. A truly savage irony, on which it is discomforting to dwell.
    book-quotemadness

  4. Simon Winchester _ The Professor and the Madman:

    I am a nobody. ... Treat me as a solar myth, or an echo, or an irrational quantity, or ignore me altogether.
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  5. Simon Winchester _ The Professor and the Madman:

    Defining words properly is a fine and peculiar craft. There are rules-a word {to take a noun as an example} must first be defined according to the class of things to which it belongs {mammal, quadruped}, and then differentiated from other members of that class {bovine, female}. There must be no words in the definition that are more complicated or less likely to be known that the word being defined. The definition must say what something is, and not what it is not. If there is a range of meanings of any one word- having a broad range of meanings, having essentially only one-then they must be stated. And all the words in the definition must be found elsewhere in the dictionary-a reader must never happen upon a word in the dictionary that he or she cannot discover elsewhere in it. If the definer contrives to follow all these rules, stirs into the mix an ever-pressing need for concision and elegance-and if he or she is true to the task, a proper definition will probably result.
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  6. Simon Winchester _ The Professor and the Madman:

    One newcomer, asked why he had killed his wife and children, told the superintendent: "I don't know why I am telling you all of this. It's none of your business As a matter of fact it was none of the judge's business either. It was a purely family affair.
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  7. Simon Winchester _ The Professor and the Madman:

    His life was merely a slow-moving tragedy, an act of steady dying conducted before everyone's eyes.
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  8. Simon Winchester _ The Professor and the Madman:

    All of a sudden his books, which had hitherto been merely a fond decoration and a means of letting his mind free itself from the grim routines of Broadmoor life, had become his most precious possession. For the time being at least he could set aside his imaginings about the harm that people were trying to inflict on him and his person: It was instead his hundreds of books that now needed to be kept safe, and away from the predators with whom he believed the asylum to be infested. His books, and his work on the words he found in them, were about to become the defining feature of his newly chosen life.
    book-quoteescapism

  9. Simon Winchester _ The Professor and the Madman:

    An end to timidity - the replacement of the philologically tentative by the lexicographically decisive." - on the making of the Oxford English Dictionary
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  10. Simon Winchester _ The Professor and the Madman:

    Any grand new dictionary ought itself to be a democratic product, a book that demonstrated the primacy of individual freedoms, of the notion that one could use words freely, as one liked, without hard and fast rules of lexical conduct.
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  11. Simon Winchester _ The Professor and the Madman:

    And after that, and also for each word, there should be sentences that show the twists and turns of meanings-the way almost every word slips in its silvery, fishlike way, weaving this way and that, adding subtleties of nuance to itself, and then perhaps shedding them as public mood dictates."
    book-quotewords
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