Doomed to Fail - Ep 195: The men who wrote the Dictionary - Professor James Murray & Dr. W. C. Minor

Episode Date: April 30, 2025

Today Taylor tells the story of "The Professor and the Madman" - how the Oxford English Dictionary was created in the late 1800s. Professor James Murray took up the almost impossible task of cataloging the entire English Language, and asked for the public's help. One volunteer sent in over 10k definitions (which all include quotes and several references) - his return address was the Insane Asylum at Broadmore. Was he a Dr. or a patient??  SourcesThe professsor and the madman - https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/the-professor-and-the-madman_simon-winchester/248697/item/5257676/?  Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

In a matter of the people of the state of California versus Hortonthal James Simpson, case number B.A.019. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. And we are back for another invigorating story with Taylor. How are you, Taylor? I'm good. I've been wearing the same pajamas for like three days.

I have the worst allergies I've ever had a whole entire life. So I'm like hopped up on allergy medication. What do you take? I don't know. I've been taking a Zyrtec and a Benadryl. Okay. Just trying to survive, like trying to be able to keep my eyes open, you know? Yeah, my allergies this spring are in particular been super, super intense. Ugh, it's been terrible.

But it's beautiful. It's beautiful. It's like gorgeous here. Like, you should come busy. Like, the weather's unbelievable. The wildflowers are everywhere. It's been so cool. I know. It's so pretty. I have like all these wildflowers around my house that I think are technically weeds and they probably are hurting my allergies, but they're also so pretty. I'm just leaving them. Yeah. Take more drugs. Yeah, exactly. Always good advice. Do you want to go ahead and introduce us?

Yes. Hello, everyone. Welcome to Dune to Fail. I am Taylor joined by Fars. And we bring you history's most notorious disasters and epic failures twice a week. And Fars, can you just, I'm going to take a screenshot of us. Can you do something, make a face? Okay.

I just want to, I feel like people want to see our faces, so I just made a screenshot. It's quite cute. Okay. Yeah. So today, thank you. You talked about some popes. last episode. Indeed.

Super fun. And I am going to talk about something a little bit different. And I'm, well, I am going to make you guess one thing, but like not everything. All right. Let's hear it. Okay. Oh, my God. I have a screenshot up and I'm confused because I'm like, are you frozen?

But no, I was a screenshot of the picture I just give you. So, okay. A few weeks ago, I was on vacation. I was at an Airbnb. And they had the book, The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester. Simon Winchester also wrote a book on Crackatoa. So this is my second book of his that I've read recently. And I'm going to look at others because we have a lot in common.

Me and Simon Winchester, the author. But there's also a movie called The Professor and the Madman. Have you heard of it? No. Okay. It stars Sean Penn and Mel Gibson. Guess who's the professor and guess who's the madman? Just knowing just that.

Is Sean Penn the professor? No. Interesting. Sean Penn is the madman. Yeah. What year was this, though? like 2009 ish

okay maybe more reason but I was going to say if you're not I was going to give another hint before I told you that the professor

has a Scottish accent which you know Mel Gibson loves to do so and I don't know and I also remember when you've seen Robin Hood Men in Tights right

probably but probably not enough to remember it now it came out like right like a year or two to after the Robin Hood with, what's his face from... Ethan Hawk. Yes, with wolves. No, Kevin Kosser.

Yeah. And Carrie Ellis goes, unlike other Robin Hoods, I can speak with an English accent. And it's so funny because he doesn't even bother to try to have an English accent. It doesn't even bother. Yeah. So, anyway, this is a story of the making of the Oxford English Dictionary, which is a website that you need to sign up to you to access and I couldn't get it to work. but it is something that was put together before computers, like indexing the entire English language.

Also, like, imagine writing indexes before computers. So hard. Yeah. Like, I love an index, but like, man, what a job. Yeah. So this is a story of three men. Two will get to know and one we won't know. There's Sir James Murray, Dr. William Chester Minor, and George Merritt.

So we're going to be in England, London and Oxford. London and Oxford, where the colleges are about an hour apart by train today. So maybe like a slower train in the Victorian times, but not too far away from each other. And we're in the late 1800s. So this is like Jack the Ripper time. It's Victorian. The Queens just had her Jubilee. We talked about that in the Jack the Ripper episode.

So it's like an exciting time to be alive unless you're poor, which most people are. Then it's terrible. As it is in any time. Yes. So the nerds in London want to make a dictionary and like, as a joke, but it's actually a huge deal to like actually write down every, every single word and its origin and quotations and cite it back to the first time that it was written down. There's some context around like why now, because it's not the first time, obviously. Like people have been trying to make dictionaries or ways to like look at the history of words forever. But at this point, the British Empire is huge.

It's like peak. And they're like, well, well, well. it looks like English is the winner. You know, so we need to make sure that we're writing down the proper way to speak in English so that everyone in the world will be able to know that because they plan to just colonize and forever. Had that been done by any other culture? Most likely, yes.

Okay. Yeah. And they have been in English as well, but not with the goal of being like entirely comprehensive. So in 1755, a man named Daniel Johnson did it, but it lacked some words, some of the the words were like too old fashioned and they wanted all of the words they wanted to know when they first came into literature what quotes they could use and it reminds me of there's a couple things that i've seen on instagram recently that are funny like have you heard that like the term

the bucket list comes from the movie the bucket list there's no way that's true it's true it doesn't it wasn't before that that's wild and then like the word toast for like like you're toast. If like you kill someone, Bill Murray said that improvised that in Ghostbusters because he was like burning something with his ecto, his proton pack and was like, your toast. And then that, then people started using that word. That's wild. And then another one that is, oh, we know gas lights in the movie gaslight. We've talked about that before because like words are always entering our vocabulary, is my point.

The other one that I saw recently in a couple different places online is that the name Madison for a girl is super popular. Like, I have a Madison on my softball team, all these things. And it comes from the 1998 movie Splash with Tom Hanks because in the movie, there's a mermaid, Darrell Hanna, who comes, like, gets legs and goes to New York City. And they ask her what her name is. And she looks at the street sign and says Madison, and they're like, that's not a name. And, like, that's a big plot point in the movie is that that isn't a name. Why would she be named to that?

And then after that, there's a huge, like, from zero to huge spike in girls named Madison. You know what I just learned? there's two people in America who are named February. That's cool. Good for them. Yeah. That's pretty. Yeah. I like that.

So anyway, words are changing all the time and we're adding words and all of that. Now it seems a little bit easier, but still very, very daunting. So in 1857, the London Philological Society and Philological Society is the branch of knowledge that deals with the structure, historical development, and relationships of a language or languages. So they're like really trying to. look at the language and where it came from. And they decide the best way to do it is to crowdsource the words. Like there's no way one person can just be like, okay, I know every word in English and I know where it came from. That would take lifetimes. But if a bunch of people are doing it, they can maybe get it done quicker. So they send out and ask to like everyone in the English speaking world that's like

help us to define and find the history of all of the words. So they said like read every book you have. If you find a word that you think you found in that book for the first time, send it in. There was like a very structured way to like put it on a note card, put the word in the top, top right, put the quote, put the where you found it, everything, and then send us these note cards. And some people were just doing it to get free books because they would like get the books and never send them back. It was kind of obviously like got unorganized like pretty, pretty immediately. And they did do some work in the 1860s. So there was a man named Herbert Coldridge, Frederick Fernival. They were the editors in the beginning, but it was kind of a disorganized mess.

And so for like 20 years, no one really worked on it. It just sort of existed as a project. So then in 1879, the Oxford University Press decided that they were going to take up the task, but they needed a new editor, someone to like really, really take charge and make this a thing. So we meet James Murray. So James Murray is Mel Gibson. He's our professor. He was born on February 7th.

1937 in Denholm, Scotland. He was super smart. He went to school until he was 14 until his parents couldn't afford it anymore. He got a job working at a school. He was a headmaster by the time he was 20, so he was really an academic guy. He married a woman named Maggie Scott. She and their daughter, Anna, died of tuberculosis, which they called consumption in like the first two years. So they had actually moved from Scotland to London for the better climate, which is hilarious because the climate in London is not cheerful and also it's dirty but like that the doctor said move away from the Scottish winters to London and he got a job at a bank but he didn't love it so it was like Green Gaut's kind of bank like he was like a bank teller and hated it you've had me a green got they said they like specifically said in the book that they had a green lamp which is what they have you know what I mean you can picture it it's a visor green lamb oh oh yeah got it you know what I mean like that's what's what it's sort of worked like so So he ended up marrying a woman named Ada Agnes Ruffin. And when they were married, so just to get an idea of, like, the circle that James Murray was in, their best man was Alexander Graham Bell.

Like, he's like hanging out with smarties. Alexander Graham Bell calls Murray the grandfather of the telephone because he just like bounced ideas off of him all the time. Man, good circle. Yeah. So he, him and Ada have. of 11 children, and she's more his speech. She's very supportive. In the film, they do this like really weird scene at the end where she dies and it shows, or they just like, she just kind of disappears off screen and then like all the time there are grandkids and it shows that like

their family kept going. So she was really supported him and all of his work. And so anyway, he's working at a bank. He likes reading etymology. He knows a shit ton of languages. He applied for a job at the British Museum. And this was in his letter and this was in the book and in the movie. They have Mel Gibson actually say this out loud as he's applying for the. the job, but he says he has an intimate acquaintance with Italian, French, Catalan, Spanish, and Latin, and to a lesser degree, Portuguese, Vaudua, that is, Provencial, and other dialects. He's tolerably familiar with Dutch, German, and Danish. He studies Anglo-Saxon and Gothic. He's engaged with the Slavonic languages. He has a useful knowledge of Russian, and he has sufficient knowledge of Hebrew and Syriac to read the Old Testament. He also said that he, to a lesser degree, knows Aramaic, Arabic, Coptic, and Phoenician. So, like, he knows a lot of languages. He's a smart, smart dude.

Yeah, you'd have to be a genius to keep all that straight in your mind. I wouldn't be able to recite what you just said off my memory. Yeah, he, like, very casually says, like, oh, yeah, oh, I guess, you know, and you know, I know a little Celtic, and I know Hebrew, and I know, he knows Paschito, which is, like, casual Hebrew. Like, I'd look that up. So he knows a whole bunch of things. So in April, he goes to, in April 1879, he goes to the Oxford University Press and gets the job as an editor of the dictionary.

On March 1st, he gets started. They thought it would take 10 years and be four volumes at the end. In the end, it takes actually over 50 years and it's 12 volumes. So it's a lot bigger than they expected it to be. It also doesn't make a lot of money because people buy it, but they don't like need to buy it twice. you know that kind of thing so 50 years mm-hmm wait wasn't the same people working on it was it no he doesn't make it to the end yeah no so he starts to do some cool things he builds a scriptorium which is like a nod to like ancient Rome

where you would have like the like scrolls like the library of Alexandria didn't have books in it it had scrolls you know so like that's what what he he named it after he built one where he was living and then later moved to Oxford but just basically basically a big shed with little cubbies for every letter of the alphabet with all these cards stuck into the cubbies for all the different words that they were trying to organize. He also looks like an old prophet. He has long white hair and like wears robes. He's a really long white beard. So he's here in his cryptorium. There's a really fun scene in the movie where they're trying to figure out the origins of the word art, which is like harder than I thought they thought it would be. And they're all really frustrated. And one of the guys who's working with him goes, this is just a. What about B and C and D and E? And he, like, throws something in the air and, like, runs out of the room. And you're like, yeah, dude, this is a big deal. There's a lot to do.

Like, just wait until you get to E. You have no idea. So he puts out a new letter asking for volunteer. So they had done that 20 years ago. Murray says, we're going to do it again. Puts out a new letter. It puts it a newspaper. Sends it to school.

Says, we need more volunteers to help us define words. He gets thousands of letters. And he becomes a stamp. collector, which is nice, because he's getting all these letters in and, like, organizing them. That's what they're doing. And he starts to get thousands of letters from one particular person, Dr. William Chester Minor, who's located at the asylum in Broadmoor, Crosthorne, in Berkshire in England. You got a mental asylum?

Mm-hmm. So, let's meet Dr. William Chester Minor. He's the American. He's our second character. The cute thing to note is that these two look exactly the same. Like, I have white man with a beard face blindness. I think they all look the same. These are two old white men with like long white beards.

They look the same. Yeah, it makes sense. They look like good buddies. So William Chester Minor was born on June 22nd, 1834 in Ceylon, which is present-day Sri Lanka. At the time, Sri Lanka was an American colony. And obviously, like in the book, the professor and the madman, they define a lot of words. Like at the beginning of each chapter, they define a word because it's a book about the dictionary. But one that I thought was cool is the word serendipity.

so this is like what they had to do for each word just for an example and so the word serendip used to be the name of Sri Lanka before it was named Sri Lanka it was called serendip and there's a Persian poem by a Persian fairy tale called the three princes of serendip where the three protagonists were skilled at making accidental yet happy discoveries so that's part of that like Persian fairy tale and then because of that story the princess of serendip the word serendipity was first used by Horace Walpole in 1754

to be to use it the way that we think it is now like finding something out of luck did you how on earth were they trying to find the first usage of the word yes so that was what it would do to go back that's what I'm saying it's almost impossible but that's why they had

people reading like thousands of books and then they would say like they didn't go they would like they picked a year like they went back to it was like it wasn't like forever but it well it was forever for like other some words but some words they were like let's just go back you know 500 years so like the furthest they went back in some cases was like chaucer you know like did chaucer use this word because before that things weren't even like like you can't part of the problem also with reading chaucer is that the words are spelled in ways that they're not always spelled that way you know so a uniform making a language uniform is really hard yeah now that you're we're talking about it i'm surprised it only took 50 years i know so yeah so that's like that's what i mean it's an example

so you had to know that sri lanka was called serendip you had to know that there was that persian poem called the three princes of serendip then you had to know that um horace walpole used the term serendipitous from that and then now it's a word we like use yeah it's well You know. So anyway, he was born in Sri Lanka to an American missionary, and his parents were both missionaries. His mom died when he was three. His dad kind of took him around Asia, so his dad could find a new missionary wife, which he did. And so he was able to have more kids and have a family in Asia. His dad was also a printer, which gave minor the opportunity to learn how to read really early. He read when he was three, all of those things. He was super smart, also spoke many. languages. When he was 14, it started to go through puberty and kind of like start to like girls. And they were like, okay, we got to give you like more stable environment. So they sent him back to America to live with an uncle and go to school. So he went to Yale medical school and became a surgeon. He did in the 1860s work on the Webster's Dictionary just for fun, which was like

obviously other people try to do it. It's got a lot going on. But he's a surgeon in the 1860s and it is the civil war. And that is a terrible time to be a surgeon. Yeah, it's butchery. It's like a little scary stuff. Yeah, you're not, like, in a beautiful operating room doing nice things. It is pretty terrible. He, yeah, it basically means, you know, cutting people apart. We've talked about how war brings newer weapons.

I've talked about that with, like, the Navajo Code Talkers went in with, like, bayonet World War I's guns, you know, and then we end up with an atomic bomb. So, like, your things, like, progress. quickly during times of war so the weapons were you know getting more and more advanced but the medicine was not the medicine was staying the same so it was a lot of like you know chopping something's like off like pretty pretty bad and so just like a lot of trauma also during this time he's in his like early 20s and later much much later minor is going to be diagnosed with schizophrenia when he's like an old man but if you are schizophrenic it usually starts to come out for men between the

the ages of 18 to 25. So even though, like, he didn't know that was happening and he wouldn't be diagnosed with it until much later, it's most likely that he was beginning to, you know, have the hallucinations and things like along schizophrenia around this time when he's in these, like, really horrible battles of the Civil War. Yeah, I'm sure. So he's in the Battle of the Wilderness, which just sounds awful. It's literally Grant and Lee are both there.

There are wildfires in the middle of it because they're shooting at each other. there is people bleeding and screaming just like absolutely horror show and some of the people who are there to help the Union Army are people from Ireland which I didn't know this but there were 150,000 Irish men came to United States to fight for the Union Army some of them were there just to like make money and like have an adventure some of them wanted to go back to Ireland you know with the skills that they learned in America to be able to fight the English all that stuff So they were there But a lot of them were like

This is way worse than we thought it was going to be So they deserted like while they were there And again like if you if you get far enough I'm never going to never going to find you Right You know But if they did find you You would be

This is a 50-50 Maybe this is true maybe this isn't But you would be branded with the letter D for deserter on your face So like awful disfiguration on your face so you couldn't yeah so you couldn't go home and like be a spy for the Irish army

because people would be really easily identifiable so it would like ruin your life in many different ways and so the story is that minor had to do at least one of these brandings so someone deserted they brought them back and they made minor because he was the doctor be the person to brand the guy's face

and that like traumatized him so much and he was so certain that the person he did it to was after him for the rest of his life. Yeah. I mean, I would see why. Yeah. So he's like, there are, there's an Irish man always out to get me. So he would always carry a gun with him, which was like not that, that common in those days and really wanted to like keep himself safe and really thought that there are Irish people after him. After this battle of the wilderness, he starts to kind of like be a little bit, you can tell

that he has a mental illness brewing. So I sent him to New York. And when I was in New York, he saw a lot of sex workers and got a lot of diseases which obviously made things worse yeah uh probably lost his mind yeah so he at one point he had gonorrhea and he tried to inject white wine into his urethro to cure it it didn't work he was a doctor yeah did not work so they were like okay we got to send you away from this big city so i sent him to florida and he was there for a little bit but he ends up in st elizabeth's hospital which is a asylum in Washington, D.C. for 18 months, but his condition doesn't really improve. He still thinks people are after him.

He, you know, gets discharged from the Army, and he has an Army pension, and he moves to London to try to start a new life. So in 1871, he moves to London, which he buys a gun because he's afraid that the Irish are after him, which, I mean, I'm afraid of Irish people, do you know, in England. Yeah, they're going to start.

Yeah. But he lives in Lambeth, which is a part of London. He runs the room at 41 Tennyson Street. And his landlady will say that he's always saying that the Irish are trying to get into his rooms. He thinks people are in the floor and the walls and the ceiling. They come at night and try to make him do things. So he says all of these things. You know, he's not doing great.

And now we're going to meet our third character, George Merritt. We'll never really meet him. We don't even see his face. But George Merritt was just a dude. he was a father of six with one on the way he was married to a woman named Eliza he had moved to London from the country for job opportunities and he worked

at a brewery called the Red Line Beer Brewery keeping the fire on it was called a stoker so you just like keep the fire going while they're boiling the hops however you make beer so he worked an early shift and a fun thing is the way he would

he woke up as he paid someone to knock on his window you know people did that before they were all on clocks so that's fun seems intrusive and I would not like that. So it's like a dude with a stick and he like, come to my house at like 745 and he like knocks me or with a stick and then goes to the next house and whatever. He hits like a, you pay extra for snooze.

Yeah. He was back every time of his. You throw a rock at him and you throw him like a quarter at him and he comes back like a pence or whatever. So he, it's early in the morning on February 17th, 1972, and George is on his way to work. It's probably still dark. It's like almost dawn.

He's on his way. and someone starts yelling at him and chasing him and calling him Irish and saying, you were in my room because Dr. Minor thinks that he saw someone run out of his room. So he follows that apparition out into the streets and the only person there is poor George walking to work. Poor guy. So he shoots him, which is something that does not happen very often. So even people hearing gunshots, they were like, what is this? It's like a very odd Victorian crime to have a gunshot.

But he shoots him, suffers his spine. George dies on the street. People are like, what's going on? The police come. Minor doesn't leave. He stays. They describe him as like a very tall, very well-dressed gentleman. He's literally holding a smoking gun.

And he's like, he was chasing me. I don't know what's going on. And then he was like, I also have a knife. And the police were like, just hang on to your knife for now. That's a lot going on. But they knew him because he also knew who he was because he knew he had been acting weird. Like, he was always just like kind of an odd guy in the neighborhood. In history, the papers it would be called the Lambeth tragedy.

And that is the end of George. But the murder of George is the reason that minor is going to be in the asylum. At his trial in April 1872, he was found not guilty by reason of insanity and sentenced to, they called it indefinite confinement in safe custody until her majesty's pleasure be known, which means like for life. and he goes to Broadmoor Asylum in Berkshire. He was 37 years old, and he would be there for the next 38 years in that thing. So, Murray is working on the dictionary.

Minor is living his life. He ends up in this asylum. And his life in the asylum is actually pretty okay. He has a $1,000 a month pension, which is $24,000. in today's money per month. That's pretty good. That's not bad. So he uses that for his like, you know, just for expenses and he has a really nice room.

He's deemed low risk. So he has a really nice room. He gets to buy himself nice furniture and he has a library. He ends up having two rooms and just like thousands of books. It's like a ton of books. It sounds really nice. He gets to watercolor. He gets to paint, you know, he gets to just kind of hang out in there.

somehow he gets one of the flyers from from Murray with the ask to send in words for the dictionary it's possible that the widow Eliza Merritt George's widow brought him a book that had the flyer inside of it and that's how he saw it she did visit him and he did give her some of his pension so that she was able to take care of her children which was very nice

in the movie they fall in love kind of in like a weird way but that's most likely not true But they did develop some sort of friendship. Yes. Okay. But he looks awful. Like he's just like, got it's like big scraggly beard.

He looks awful anyways. Yeah. He's got a weird face. Yeah. It's like a pizza slice. So she does, she does bring in books and maybe one of them had this. But either way,

somehow he got in a hold of the ask to write words to the dictionary. So he starts writing to Dr. Murray and contributing to the dictionary. And he does it far more than any. other person. And it's an extreme, extreme detail. So they use quotes. I mean, again, like he used quotes and he was really good at finding quotes. He was really good at, you know, answering arguments. Like they had a big, a lot of trouble finding the word art. Like specifically, they're like, you know, when did we first use the word art? Like, how do you even find that? And he was able

to just like go back and look into the volumes, request more volumes and find it. There's proof that Like, even in the 1880s, they were speaking together via letter. Before about a decade, Dr. Murray didn't know that Miner was in the asylum because he was a patient. So what he just thought that he was, like, working there? Yeah. So there's a couple ways that it could have happened. The romanticized version is that Murray goes to Broadmoor and asks for the superintendent because he assumed that Dr. Miner was a superintendent because he was, like, so smart. and so prolific. And then he meets him either in his cell or like out in the yard and he's chained. And he's like, oh, you're a patient here. But more likely, they set out a first edition of the letters A through Ant. Like they published A through Ant. There's just so much to do. They published A through Ant and they had a party and they assumed that that minor would come and he didn't. So Murray was talking about him and someone was like, oh, I know, I can't believe you're talking to that guy. He's in jail, essentially, you know. And then he figured it out. So he knew.

but he didn't like tell him that he knew but later it just like was assumed that he knew yeah he was a patient there so they're like this must be good and like rehabilitating for minor you know now he has something to do like his office his office which is also like his cell and broadmore is just like you know full of stuff he has a desk he has all these things in the movie they make he's like I need a carpenter and the carpenter makes him these awesome shelves and I'm like how do I get a carpenter once again because I'm just come to my house and make me shelves seems bloody easier then. But he's not doing well.

He is still sick. He still thinks people are in the walls. So there are like, you know, weeks and months where he cannot contribute, sometimes that he can. But sometimes when they try to do other things to him, like electroshock and like in the movie for some reason, they like, and I didn't see this anywhere else, but they were like make him throw up a bunch to take pictures of him.

And that was like part of the thing. It was like, whatever. They're trying to figure out how to make him better. um they he says you know these people are coming into my room at night and forcing me to do terrible things like they're forcing me to do terrible sexual things so eventually that's too much for minor and he cuts off his own penis geez do you know how long into a stay he did this i think it was like 20 years in wow yeah and he like did it he had a knife because he had a knife like opening letters you know and he did it with that um the guard who found

him was traumatized for life, obviously, because he was covered in blood. And he did other things to himself. Like he was just like getting worse and worse. His mental state was deteriorating. So Murray sees him deteriorating. He's like, you know, you're my friend and I want you to have the best care. So they, his brother, minor's brother comes from the United States to try to bring him back to the United States so that he can be with his family as he's getting older. And then Murray, professor does a a plea to the UK Home Secretary

and asks him to be sent back to the United States and the Home Secretary grants it that Home Secretary is a 35-year-old Winston Churchill. That's fun. That's not fun. So it goes back to the U.S. and he dies at the retreat of the elderly

insane in Hartford, Connecticut in 1920. So once he moved, he stopped contributing, but he contributed so much to the dictionary. For Murray, we can call him Dr. Murray as well. Oxford gave him an honorary doctor in 1914. Before that, he was knighted by King Edward of the 7th in 1908. So he's like, sir, Dr. Murray, all those things.

And then the dictionary was released in installments. Murray spent the rest of his life working on it. He finished, because it's never really finished, because there's always new words, you know, but he completed for sake of completion. through D, H through K, O, P, and T, before he died of pluracy in 1915. Yeah, pretty far. Yeah, pretty good.

So he died in 1915, and the book was complete in 1928 is when it was finally finished in its many, many, many volumes of all of the words, Dr. Minor contributed almost 10,000 words over 20 years. This guy looks like Gandalf. They both look like Gandalf. They both look like Gandalf. That's exactly what it is. You said you have old white guy blindens.

I don't think that's black. I think they're doppelgangers. I think they're legitimately like, they just slit at birth or something. I know. It's not fun to, like, found each other and, like, loved words together. Yeah, it's great. It's sad that one of them cut his dick off, but. Yeah, sad that he killed someone and thought that there were a bunch of people on his walls.

I mean, do you fear, that guy shouldn't have been in his place. He wasn't. I know. Okay. I'll make that clear. He was not. He didn't do any of those things. Poor George was just walking to work.

I know. He's suffering for mental illness. I get it. He could stand by fire all day and make beer. Sweet, that is a fun story. Is that fun? Yeah. How did you pick this topic?

I found the book at my Airbnb. Oh, okay. And I just was like, this is cool. I feel like I would want to learn about this. I love how we both find these little rabbit. holes that take us down yeah totally yeah I thought it was super fun

very cool well thank you for sharing maybe we can cover webster next week oh yeah you can be a dictionary podcast I mean I would be curious about like some version of like what other who else had a dictionary because remember the brother's grandma

tried to do a German one okay yeah you know at some point well they never got that far though yeah and I think that like but I think that like When you are thinking like that, like they were, you're like, I, because they were doing the same thing, I think that the Oxford Press and the societies are trying to do here is be like, we need to write down our language and say like the correct way to use it, you know, when, because before the printing press, like, you just didn't do that, you know? Another thing about the dictionary is how hard it must have been to make those pages. Like every time they made a change, the poor printer had to like adjust the letter by letter.

in the printing press like what a job well the reason i'm also thinking about is like the fact that english is the universal language you know like is it because somebody did this i think it's because of colonialism but i think this was the time that it was the opportunity to do it before obviously like i know but that but that theory would mean that from which an earlier example then we should all have been speaking roman universally and then we should have all spoken turkish universally we should all speak in persian universe like there's a ton of countries that have taken over a ton of the country or the world and but not at the same time that like the printing press was available oh you mean like it's it's it's serendipity it's serendipity there you go exactly

it comes back around oh god yes good job good job great work very fun taylor thank you for sharing Very fun story, very cool, very interesting. And you guys got to look up these two guys. They look like an image of like a wizard. It's incredible. It's incredible. Cool. Anything else to share?

No, I'm going to do some of our requested ones next week. I'm going to look at that list. So thank everyone for that. If you have anything that you want us to do, let us know we are approaching our 200th episode. That's super exciting. That is very exciting. I can't believe we got this far. Me either.

Kudos to us. Pat on the back to us. Yeah. Thank you to everyone on Patreon, Morgan, Nadine, and Juan. Appreciate you. You can find us there. And on anywhere in the internet

at Dooms to Fail Pod, please tell your friends. Oh, shout out to my buddy Daniel who wrote in complimenting your episode, Taylor's saying it's one of the best he's ever listened to about the Navajo Code Talkers. Thank you. I really appreciate that, Daniel.

That's awesome. You haven't heard that one. You go back and listen to that one. But yeah, I think that's all we got. we can go ahead and cut things off there. Cool. Thank you. Thank you.