Where does 'avocado' come from?

Few of us, when we pick up the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) to look up a word, ever think of the hard work that must have gone into compiling the millions of words from all corners of the world, and the men responsible for the daunting exercise. Simon Winchester, British journalist and bestselling author, tells a large part of the OED story in his two books, describing just how fraught with uncertainties the entire project was. The Meaning of Everything, is a historical narrative detailing the hows, the whys and the whos, especially the two stalwart early editors Henry Coleridge, who embarked on the project in 1857, and James Murray, who held the job for the longest duration, and their eccentricities.

The second, The Professor and The Madman, tells the story of the encounter of the scholarly Murray with WC Minor, one of the prolific contributors to the OED, who was an American Civil War veteran, a certified lunatic incarcerated in an asylum, a murderer and a man with an extraordinarily discerning eye for words and their meanings. Gargi Gupta caught up with Winchester during his debut appearance at the Zee JLF this year, for a chat. Edited excerpts:

What do you think James Murray would have made of the babble here in Jaipur?

He'd have been fascinated. He'd have gone about listening to everybody, I expect, taken the night train from Delhi to Kolkata, probably.

In your book, the OED comes across as a 'crowdfunded' enterprise where the editors asked people from all over the world to write in words and quotations illustrating their meaning. And yet today the OED has become something of an authority giving a stamp of approval to what a word should mean. Isn't that ironic?

Yes, it has become the seal of post-imperial approval to the English language. To me it's endlessly curious. And yet there are words in English from all over. Avocado, for instance, is from Aztec. Berserk comes from Iceland.

How did the two books on the OED come about?

Some years after I had written The Professor and the Madman, I was approached by the editor of Oxford University Press, who said my book was a footnote to history and asked whether I would be interested in writing the history to which the book was a footnote?

What is it that you're working on now?

I'm working on a book on the history of precision. How did it all come about and whether we are becoming slaves to precision? Is it a good thing or not?

Isn't that too abstract?

The OED shows that 'precision' is a fairly modern word. But precision as a concept – to indicate making something with the exact dimensions, again and again – goes back to 1775, to an Englishman called John Wilkinson. It helped with manufacturing and all sorts of things. But now it's gone to extreme lengths like, in order to plant a satellite on a particular mountain in Mars, the angle that your rockets have to go at has to be calculated to 10 to -15 millimetres. Because if you make it any less precise then it'll go wide off the mark. It's also become nearly silly now. There's a new type of weighing machine called the Watt Balance and there's one in Spain that can measure things to one times ten to -28 grams. Why do we need that? I write about the fetishisation of precision.

Nearly all your books fall in into the genre of popular social history. They're serious and yet easy to read. And yet you're no expert. Do you face criticism in this regard?

Three of my books have been about geological subjects – The Map, Krakatoa, and 1906. At first, geologists were irritated that an outsider started writing about their profession. But some years after the first book, they wrote to me to say that the number of students studying geology had increased and also that a lot of them said that they were studying geology because they had read my books – thank you for making geology cool again.

You've written about such a wide variety of subjects. How do you pick them?

I read very widely. Precision came from a reader who wrote to say that I've read all your books and often thought that there isn't a good book about precision, how it came about, why it's important, and what's to come of it. I think you're the man to write it. My editor was a bit reluctant because initially there wasn't an obvious narrative.

But mostly one book has led to the other. The one about William Smith was because my editor of The Professor and The Madman said that the book was a success because it was about an unknown, ordinary person, who made a major contribution to society; the trajectory of his life was dramatically up and dramatically down; and there was an episode of grotesque bodily mutilation. Could I find someone else like that? It was a tall order, but in the end I did. William Smith spent 15 years making this map with a very dramatic life trajectory. He went bankrupt, his wife went mad and became a nymphomaniac.