In this he was much like the chief editor of the OED at the time, the medievalist and college rugby player Robert Burchfield, whom Simpson was destined to succeed.īut the book begins even earlier, with Simpson’s first encounter with Hilary, a young woman likewise bound for university to study English literature, who years later-and in retrospect, inevitably-would become his wife.
John Simpson’s The Word Detective comes alive from the very first sentence of the introduction, in which the author makes known his desire, since his earliest days as a “cub lexicographer,” to “pick away at the stereotypes imposed on lexicographers” by the general public, the media, and even lexicographers themselves.įrom an American perspective, it could be said that Simpson actually fits the stereotype of a British lexicographer: A student of English literature “at university” (when not engaged in such classic English pursuits as cricket and field hockey), he gravitated to literature of the Old, Middle, and Early Modern English periods, and in graduate school became a full-fledged medievalist. Anyone who thinks that the longtime chief editor of the revered Oxford English Dictionary ( OED) might have written a stuffy or plodding autobiography will be happily disappointed.
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