Haunted Dictionary

Here is an odd little story concerning the Concise Oxford English Dictionary

Many years ago when the Oxford English Dictionary was being compiled one of the major contributors was a Doctor William C. Minor, who surprisingly enough turned out to not be English but American. More surprisingly he was a resident of Broadmore (the criminal lunatic asylum) having murdered an Irishman in an unprovoked attack in a street in London. The poor chap was as "nutty as a fruit cake"; he was convinced that all Irishmen were out to get him and in addition he was inordinately fond of "wanking". Nevertheless he did have a very extensive personal library at Broadmore which he used to assist the compilers of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary providing them with early examples of words and their meanings.

When they discovered the truth about the "Surgeon of Crowthorne" as he called himself it came as a terrible shock to everyone involved with the dictionary and they stopped using the poor chap as a reference.

A little while later Dr Minor decided it was time to stop wanking and cut his own penis off (OUCH!!). He later became ill and with the assistance of Winston Churchill no less was repatriated to the USA in 1910 where he died in 1920 (still totally nuts, but finally diagnosed as being schizophrenic, poor chap).

If you don't believe me then, it is all well documented in Simon Winchester's excellent book "The Surgeon of Crowthorne" (see Wikipedia's entries on The Surgeon of Crowthorne and William Chester Minor). The picture at the top of this entry shows Dr Minor (sans willy I presume). .

But Dr. Minor's ghostly influence over the Oxford English Dictionary is still apparent.

If you take a copy of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary and rest it on its spine and let it go it will naturally, unless you've abused it, fall open at its centre. That's not much of a surprise, but, the first word defined at the top of the centre page can cause embarrassment or amusement - it is, on my copy and on every other copy I've tried, "MASTURBATE".

Does Dr Minor haunt the Concise OED?