The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language

Autopeotomy

The Oxford English Dictionary is the greatest work of reference ever written, and it’s largely the result of a Scotsman who left school at fourteen, and a criminally insane American.

The Scotsman was a former cowherd called James Murray, who taught himself Latin, German, Italian, Ancient Greek, French, Anglo-Saxon, Russian, Tongan … well, nobody’s quite sure how many languages he knew. It’s usually estimated at 25. Murray became a schoolteacher and then in the 1860s he moved to London for his wife’s health and became a member of the Philological [word-loving] Society.

The Philological Society was trying to produce an English dictionary that would be more complete than any other. They eventually did a deal with the Oxford University Press, and James Murray, who at the time was still a teacher, became the editor.

The idea of the Oxford English Dictionary was that it would trace the development of every word in the English language. Each word would then have its meanings defined in chronological order with quotations given as evidence. Getting the quotations was a simple business; all that had to be done was to read every book ever written in English.

Even Murray couldn’t do that alone, so he advertised for volunteer readers,[11] people who would fight their way through all the books that could be found, copying out significant-looking sentences.

Now, let’s leave Murray there for a moment and turn our attention to the island of Sri Lanka in 1834, where we will find a missionary couple from New England who are trying to convert the island’s pagan population to Jesus. He is called Eastman Minor, she is called Lucy Minor and has just given birth to a son: William Minor.

The Minors were hyper-religious and at a very early age they decided that little William was much too interested in girls. Maybe they were just being Puritan and repressive, but given subsequent events it’s possible that they were on to something.

Either way, the Minors decided that William’s fascination with the opposite sex was a) a problem and b) probably something to do with the Sri Lankans. So they packed their son off to a boarding school back in the healthy cold shower that was nineteenth-century America.

There’s no record of William Minor’s sex life at boarding school, which is a blessed relief. All we know is that he ended up in Yale studying medicine, and that meant that when the American Civil War broke out he signed up in the Union Army as a field surgeon.

Being a doctor is a pleasant business in general. You cure people and that makes them happy. Even if you don’t cure them, they are still reasonably grateful that you tried. However, Minor was assigned the rather unhippocratic job of branding deserters.

If a chap got caught running away from the Union Army, he would have a big capital D branded on his cheek to inform everybody that he was a deserter and a coward. Minor was the man with the brand. At least one of the people he was forced to disfigure was an Irish immigrant, a fact that will be important later.

After the war, Minor was posted to New York, but he spent so much of his time in the company of prostitutes that the army got embarrassed and transferred him to Florida. It’s a rather impressive feat to visit so many prostitutes that you become a scandal in New York. It’s also an impressive feat to visit so many prostitutes that the army feels you’re overdoing it. William Minor’s parents may just have been right.

The next thing Minor did was to go utterly mad, and the army decided to discharge him completely. Minor moved to England to convalesce and settled in Lambeth in London, which was (coincidentally) full of prostitutes at the time. However, the prostitutes weren’t the real problem. The real problem was the branding of the deserters, which still preyed on Minor’s mind.

One day Minor met an Irishman called George Merret and, for no reason at all, decided that Merret was one of the men he had branded, on a mission of revenge. Minor took out a gun and shot Merret dead. This was unreasonable, as Merret didn’t have a D burned onto his cheek. It was also, technically, illegal.

At the ensuing trial it was decided that William Minor was absolutely bloody crazy and he was confined in Broadmoor, the brand-new asylum for the criminally insane. Broadmoor wasn’t actually that bad a place. It was a hospital, not a prison, and Minor was rich enough to afford a manservant and all the books he could read. It was at Broadmoor that he came across Murray’s advertisement for volunteer readers.

Minor had a lot of time on his hands, and also the advantage of being criminally insane, which is always a plus in lexicography. So he started reading. He read and read and read and took note after note after note, and sent the notes to Murray. He sent Murray hundreds of notes, then he sent him thousands. Minor contributed so much to the Oxford English Dictionary that Murray would later say that the whole of the development of the modern English language, from Tudor times to the present day, could have been illustrated using only Minor’s examples.

But Minor never said who he was. He seems to have been rather embarrassed about the murder, and Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum is hardly the most fashionable address in England. All Minor’s letters to Murray were signed W.C. Minor, Crowthorne, Berkshire, which was technically true, as Crowthorne is the nearest town to Broadmoor.

It wasn’t until the 1890s that James Murray discovered that his star contributor, the man on whom his dictionary was based, was an insane murderer. When Murray did find out, he immediately set off to visit Minor, and the two became firm friends. They were rather different people, but by coincidence they looked like brothers. They both had huge beards and flowing white hair, and they both loved words. Murray tried to give Minor emotional support but it didn’t really work, as Minor, in 1902, deliberately sliced off his own penis.

This is called an autopeotomy and should not be attempted without due consideration. Minor did have a good reason. He had decided during his confinement that his parents and the army were right and that all his troubles came down to his excessive sexual appetite. Minor may have been correct, but most men intent on curbing their sex drive would have had the good sense to merely chop off their testicles (as the early Christian writer Origen did). The problem with an auto­peotomy is that, among other things, it becomes difficult to pee. William Minor was in trouble, and agony.

Murray took up Minor’s case and in 1910 persuaded the Home Secretary to have Minor released and deported to America. Minor went back and died in his own country, but he took with him copies of the six volumes of the OED that had so far been completed. Whether these consoled him for the loss of his membrum virile, history does not record.

Now, who was the Home Secretary who released Minor, and what weapon did he help to name?