“Always
excepting the Oxford [English] Dictionary. If you can manage to lift one of the volumes of this
from its shelf, you will find it the best reading of all, infinitely varied in
its contents, and full of elegant and brief extracts from the English literature
of all times.”
I
recognize a kindred spirit. The most valuable gift of the Digital Age is having
effortless access (no hernia-inducing volumes) to the OED. Macaulay, who died in 1957 at age seventy-seven, would have
loved it. Some surf the web; I surf the Dictionary,
and waste hours tracing etymologies and juicy citations, and looking up the
definitions of words I pretend to know. Take “umbrage,” or rather, consider the
word umbrage. When someone said, “I
take umbrage at that,” I understood it to mean offense or touchiness. I was
close. After reading Macaulay’s “Taking Umbrage” (Personal Pleasures, 1936), I decided to look it up in the OED. From the Latin umbra, it first meant “shade” or “shadow,” and later the foliage
that creates shade or a shadow. As usual in our infinitely elastic English, the
word morphed across centuries, mutating, adopting and abandoning new meanings. Around
1700, the modern sense emerged: “displeasure, annoyance, offence, resentment.” English-speakers
have been taking umbrage since at least since 1683, and it turns out you can
also give umbrage, which is useful to know.
Macaulay
obviously was familiar with the word’s etymology. She begins her essay with an
anecdote. In a shop, she waits for a clerk while customers who entered after
her are being waited on. She articulates the pleasure we take in taking
umbrage: “I will not, even by a look, convey that I demand to be served; I
coldly stand and wait: I have taken umbrage. I am wrapped in silence, an
umbrageous mantle; I am shadowed about and umbraged with my pride; I have taken
pet. I have joined the great company of the umbraged of all time. How they hover
and shadow umbrageously about.” All of which reminds me of a Monty Python
sketch. Macaulay goes on to celebrate the umbrageous tradition among writers,
including Milton, Pope, Swift, Marvell and Jonson. She writes:
“With
what gusto have these beaten their pens into swords, envenomed them, and
plunged them into the quivering breasts of rivals, calumniators [delicious
word], mockers, and reviewers.”
Macaulay
is best-known, if at all, as a novelist, especially for The Towers of Trebizond (1956) and its first sentence: “`Take my
camel, dear,’ said my aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her
return from High Mass.” But I prefer her essays, travel books (see Fabled Shore: From the Pyrenees to Portugal,
1949) and the always rereadable The
Pleasure of Ruins (1953). Her prose balances learning and lightness. In her
three-paragraph “Improving the Dictionary” from Personal Pleasures, she captures the allure of lexicography:
“On
a blank page at the beginning of the Supplementary Volume [published in 1933] of
my [OED], I record emendations,
corrections, additions, earlier uses of words, as I come on them in reading.
Ah, I say, congratulating myself, here Messrs. Murray, Bradley, Craigie and
Onions are nearly a century out; here were sailors, travellers and philosophers
chattering of sea turtles from the fifteen-sixties on, and the Dictionary will
not have them before the sixteen-fifties. And how late they are with estancias,
iguanas, anthropophagi, maize, cochineal, canoes, troglodytes, cannibals and
hammocks. As to aniles, or old wives’ tales, they will not let us have this
excellent noun at all.
“Thus
I say to myself, as I enter my words and dates. To amend so great a work gives
me pleasure; I feel myself one of its architects; I am Sir James Murray, Dr. Bradley,
Sir William Craigie, Dr. Onions, I belong to the Philological Society; I have
delusions of grandeur. Had I but world enough and time, I would find earlier
uses of all the half million words, I would publish another supplement of my
own, I would achieve at last my early ambition to be a lexicographer.
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