Logicians have long warned people about the fallacy of mistaking chronology for causation. There’s a name for it: post hoc ergo propter hoc, meaning “after this, therefore because of this.” The mere fact that something occurs, and then something else follows, doesn’t mean that the first caused the second.
Yet historians and lawyers well know the necessity of sorting out timelines to understand causes. When there are many strands to a story, it’s helpful to prepare a “chronology of relevant events.”
These prefatory remarks are by way of setting up the following chronology — without any claims of causation.
July 1979. As an undergraduate at an Oxford summer school, I met Robert W. Burchfield, chief editor of the Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary. In a fascinating lecture, he defended the editorial policy of including culturally offensive words. He also touted the superiority of Oxford’s definitions over Merriam-Webster’s.
Afterward, he invited me to join him for a beer. I asked what his policy was about usage notes for jargon and questionable neologisms. What about newly invented verbs such as containerize (dating from 1962), prioritize (1954), slenderize (1923), and winterize (1913)? (They seemed new in 1979.) I declared my admiration for Fowler’s Modern English Usage, which included the entry “new verbs in -ize.” It said that the suffix -ize “is now being employed with a freedom beyond reason.”
As I recall it, Burchfield scorned Fowler as an “amateur,” but I persisted in my praise. I also asked why the Oxford English Dictionary wasn’t being computerized, so that the Supplement could be merged into the main dictionary. Burchfield declared that it would never happen: It was too costly to be feasible.
August 1979. Having recently begun corresponding with John Simon — the prescriptive language commentator (later NR’s film critic) — I recounted Burchfield’s views. Simon asked whether he might quote me in his forthcoming book, Paradigms Lost. I agreed.
October 1980. Simon’s Paradigms Lost appeared, with this passage in the introduction: “Even the Supplements to the Oxford English Dictionary are amazingly permissive under Robert Burchfield’s editorship. A young correspondent of mine from the University of Texas, Bryan Garner, having attended a lecture of Burchfield’s at Oxford, put some questions to the eminent lexicographer. Here is Garner’s account: ‘I also asked Mr. Burchfield about the status of prioritize and containerize in the Supplements. Yes, they appear, along with privatize. I find it interesting that Mr. Burchfield accepts these -ize neologisms with such equanimity, without bristling — that he (it seems) disdains those who fight against them, while, as he admits, he would never use the words himself.’”
December 1981. Burchfield reviewed Simon’s book in the Guardian. He didn’t react well to the passage: “A well-primed young Texan, one of Simon’s ‘moles,’ asked me if I intended to include prioritize and containerize in the Supplements. Yes, I replied, along with privatize. Apparently I didn’t ‘bristle.’ Ergo peccaveram.”
January 1982. Oxford University Press released volume 3 of the Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary. In the preface, Burchfield announced a change in policy: “Here and there in the present volume, I have found myself adding my own opinions about the acceptability of certain words or meanings in educated use. Users of the dictionary may or may not find these editorial comments diverting.”
The entry for prioritize, for example, contained this notation: “A word that at present sits uneasily in the language. — Ed.” In the 1982 and 1986 volumes of the Supplement, many more such remarks appeared than in the first two volumes.
August 1985. I signed a contract with Oxford University Press to publish my first book, A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage (1987). One result was that I developed a warm friendship with Burchfield until his death 19 years later. In all our meetings and correspondence, we never mentioned the “mole” episode.
April 1986. Burchfield announced that he would undertake a wholesale revision of Fowler’s Modern English Usage. Burchfield and I routinely compared notes on English usage.
December 1996. Burchfield’s New Fowler’s Modern English Usage was issued. It was all Burchfield’s own prose, almost devoid of Fowler. In a lengthy entry on verbs ending in -ize, Burchfield concluded: “The language has a large number of established words ending in -ization and –ize, but the arrival of words of this type continues at a rate that, rightly or wrongly, makes many fastidious users of the language uneasy. . . . The creasing of brows about them will continue.”
October 2007. Charlotte Brewer, an Oxford don, published her book Treasure-House of the Language: The Living OED. She expressed surprise that in the last two volumes of the Supplement, Burchfield, “whose early published work displays impersonal scholarly reticence, turned out to be the first, and possibly the only, editor of the OED to bring personal, often idiosyncratic, judgements on individual words and usages openly into the Dictionary.” She called these “Johnsonian ipse dixits.”
July 2008. John Simon called to say he needed to downsize his library. He gave me about 100 of his language books, including three by Burchfield. Two weeks later, some four years after Burchfield’s death, the mail astonished me with a copy of Paradigms Lost from a British bookseller. It was Burchfield’s copy with Simon’s inscription and a 1980 letter mentioning me. The bookseller sent it as a gift. Small world.
Did I, in my youth, play some role in Burchfield’s decision to start including Johnsonian ipse dixits in the OED? Regardless of whether I did, I’m now sympathetic with the more recent OED editors who, when computerizing the big dictionary, removed most of them. My current view is that while they’re at home in a usage guide, they’re out of place in a general dictionary. But that view hasn’t necessarily been finalized.
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