A long article by Andrew Dickson entitled “Inside the OED: can the world’s biggest dictionary survive the internet?” appeared in The Guardian on 23 February.

It’s a sweeping effort whch manages to include most of the usual suspects including Robert Cawdrey, Samuel Johnson, James Murray, Simon Winchester, Peter Gilliver, Bernie Paton, Michael Proffitt and yours truly.

It’s always nice to read a review by someone who’s on the same wavelength, and this one from John Kelly at Mashed Radish made my day.

He has a cool bio pic too. And he lives in Dublin.

My contribution to the media’s obsession with “Top 10” lists can be found here.

Dot Wordsworth talks about “niche” – “an English word that turned into a French one” – in the Mind Your Language column in The Spectator, here. The article is based on my discussion of the word in The Word Detective, and I’m helpfully described as “not our man in the burka, but the former chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary“.

Among all the media evaluations of David Bowie’s life, it was quietly gratifying to see a Time article by Katy Steinmetz (David Bowie and the Oxford Dictionary Had a Mutual Love Affair) highlighting the references to Bowie and his music that have found their way into the OED.

The article couldn’t have been written without all the work that began at the OED in the 1980s on digitising the dictionary, and including new words to capture new usage. Katy – who interviewed me a few years ago about the OED – rightly ties these references to the cultural changes of the period. And that’s what words do …

As the article says:

“Part of what makes the OED so unparalleled is that it is a historical dictionary. Its editors don’t just define words using their guts or brains. They use evidence. They are investigators who gather quotations from all spans of time to show what a word has meant to people, and from that they derive their definitions.

Like figures ranging from F. Scott Fitzgerald to the Fonz, Bowie shows up in words spanning the alphabet, the same one that he arranged so beautifully and artfully for so many years.”

Just back from the Athenaeum in London where, at the kind invitation of my friend John Wilson, I gave a talk about – wait for it – the Oxford English Dictionary. None of the OED’s original editors were members of the Club, though it turns out that my predecessor Robert Burchfield was. Like the OED, the Athenaeum is often thought of as a refuge for the literary: Dickens and Thackeray were members, for example, and it is said that their famous handshake at the doors of the Club in 1863 may have indicated their reconciliation after Thackeray had objected so strongly to Dickens’s public separation from his wife. But that had all been brushed under the carpet this week, and they were the friendliest audience I have encountered for a while. I often find this a helpful thing to say about audiences. Both the OED and the Athenaeum are in fact full of scientific, philosophical, and even military content. My prime example of the importance of non-literary sources for the English language was that the British hero and Athenaeum founder, the gallant Duke of Wellington, was the first person (according to the OED) to introduce the British public to the word ganja.