John Ayto, editor
BREWER’S DICTIONARY OF PHRASE AND FABLE
1,523pp. Weidenfeld and Nicolson. £25.
US: Collins. $55.
0 304 35783 9
Elizabeth Knowles, editor
THE OXFORD DICTIONARY OF PHRASE AND FABLE
805pp. Oxford University Press. £20 (US $40).
0 19 860981 7
In the Dictionary of Dictionaries, if they ever get round to compiling one, the Revd Ebenezer Cobham Brewer (1810–97) will be blessed with a long and appreciative entry for the Dictionary of Phrase and Fable that bears his name. Perhaps he had an inkling that this was the work that would survive him, since he lived to transform the first edition of 1870 into the second of 1894–5, with the help of the recently published New English Dictionary.
Successful as Brewer’s Dictionary of Miracles or Guide to the Scientific Knowledge of Things Familiar had been, his Dictionary of Phrase and Fable was a reference book in a different league, a “sweep-net of a book”, as Brewer called it, positioned within sweeping distance of history, literature, religion, science, classical mythology, popular culture and the lexicography of slang. “Phrase and fable” was in itself a gift to the language, making for a malleable “bric-a-brac” dictionary – a concept antithetical to the straightforwardly snobbish “who’s who” or the imperial “national biography”. Its power, as its creator proudy put it, was to snag “anything that comes within its reach”.
The first edition of Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable contained approximately 20,000 “examples of what we have thought to be the best suited for popular purposes”, chosen from “fully thrice” that amount of material available in manuscript. In John Ayto’s edition, the seventeenth, the dictionary contains some 19,000 entries, including 1,500 additions, and is introduced as “the reference book that reaches the parts others cannot”. It does not reach as far as Heineken, the name of the lager to which the world owes that particular paraphrase. Perhaps advertising slogans are deemed to be in bad taste. Companies like Cobb & Co, Wells Fargo, Guinness and Coca-Cola may have the requisite archaic ring to their names, but the lines that they once used to chat up their customers (“Guinness is good for you”; “Wouldn’t you really rather have a Buick?”, etc) apparently do not.
That said, Brewer’s has always exceeded the immediate expectations of its title. This time round, it draws on politics (“Something of the night”) and television (“You are the weakest link. Goodbye!”) – categories which sit easily alongside recent coinages such as “Chiantishire”, “lager lout” and “yuppy flu”. “IDS”, ill-placed as ever, squeezes in between the Welsh giant Idris (not the drinks manufacturer who borrowed the name) and Iduna, daughter of Svald, wife of Bragi, and guardian of the golden apples with which the gods renewed their youthful good looks. “Chunnel” also lingers, despite failing to “create a secure position for itself in the English language”. Presumably “IDS” will be perpetuated in some extremely specialized form of political history.
Brewer’s now faces direct competition from the Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, which has appeared in its second edition, again under the editorship of Elizabeth Knowles, and presents itself as much the same sort of assortment of “useful and enjoyable” information. The contest resumes six years after the simultaneous appearance of the first Oxford and the Millennial Brewer’s. The champion weighs in at four-and-a-half pounds (including Post-it notes and other bookmarks), while the challenger is just shy of three. Both books begin with “A” and end with “Zwinglian”. Both define dotcoms and ducks, yorkers and yuppies. Both are more pleasant to use than Google or Wikipedia.
The two books differ over such crucial matters as where to place “Something rotten in the state of Denmark” (under “Rotten” or “Something”?) and “Stonewall Jackson” (filed under S in Oxford, although it is Brewer’s that explains how the nickname came about, under J). The Faerie Queene’s Gloriana appears in both books, but only one of them mentions Una and Duessa (Oxford), and only the other discloses the identities of the real-life counterparts to Sir Artegal and Sir Calidore (Brewer’s). (Ebenezer Brewer himself wrote that Spenser was a greater poet than Ariosto, and that the first book of The Faerie Queene is “by far the best”, but these opinions have long since been suppressed.) Oxford includes Disneyland and “Elementary, my dear Watson”. Brewer’s admits Teletubbies and Sir Charles Grandison. And whereas the word “Dyke” prompts from Oxford the story of a “small Dutch boy”, Brewer’s goes straight for the “colloquial term for a lesbian, especially one of mannish appearance”. Nor does the phrase that commemorates the boy appear in Brewer’s under either “finger” or the verb “to stick”.
Ultimately, Brewer’s is not the heavier book because Ayto has introduced a “liberal sprinkling of terminology from popular culture” – Beavis and Butthead, Lara Croft and Rosie the Riveter – “to counterbalance Brewer’s traditional strengths in the ‘higher’ variety”, and Knowles has not done the same to Oxford. On the contrary, Oxford justly prides itself on being up to date and down to earth. Brewer’s outweighs Oxford because it gives eighteen separate case histories under “Fakes”, while also directing the reader to Ossian; it lists over four pages of English place-names, not to mention their Irish, Scottish and Welsh counterparts; “Zodiac” prompts a full page of illustrations, as does “Heraldry”; Oxford mentions that there are seven heavens in Islam, but it is Brewer’s that details the differences between them. When it comes to such minutiae, there is no competition.
On other subjects, the two dictionaries complement each another. In combination, they show that the fabulous theory that “hell hath no fury like a woman scorned” dates back to Euripides’ Medea, and particularly exercised London playwrights in the seventeenth century, including Beaumont and Fletcher, Colley Cibber and (most famously) William Congreve. Brewer’s tidily glosses the idea of “Hamlet without the prince”, but Oxford cites as its source an issue of the Morning Post in September 1775. If Oxford has a general tendency towards concision, it also refreshes parts that Brewer’s overlooks altogether, including Ewing (“name of the dysfunctional oil-rich Texas family around whom the television soap Dallas was centred”), “Dr Livingstone, I presume” and the possibly “ritually cursed” site of the Romano-British town Calleva Atrebatum. Only those turning to Oxford to confirm the meaning of the aforementioned “yorker” will be reminded of a handy rhyme which goes: “Yorkshire born and bred, strong in the arm and weak in the head”. It shows its youth in preferring “kudos” to “Kultur”, and “newspeak” to George Sand. Brewer’s, by contrast, still records that there have been three men in history nicknamed “The Stammerer”, as it did in the nineteenth century.
Reading these dictionaries in tandem exposes how arbitrary are the boundaries of a realm of knowledge dictated by “popular purposes”, although the Revd Brewer claimed that it had “definite scope and distinct speciality”, and how invariably they are informed by individual aims and interests. For all Knowles’s declared interest in the changes in phrase (and fable?) since September 2001, it is Ayto, in the dictionary that congratulates itself with plenty of front matter on its Victorian origins, who includes an entry on “Weapons of Mass Destruction”. And it is Ayto’s dictionary that drily refers to the “New World Order” as “A state of affairs held by some commentators to have arrived with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991”. Though you must turn back to Oxford to learn that it was the senior George Bush who made the phrase his own, that dictionary maintains a neutral tone on the matter. By contrast, Brewer’s concludes that “The term has unfortunate echoes of Hitler’s plans for a ‘New Order’ in Europe, and the ‘New Order in East Asia’ declared by the Japanese government in 1938”. Given these warning words, perhaps it is the politicians who are most in need of a good sweep-net? “Every dog is allowed one [sound]bite”, they will learn to say, as well as “up like a rocket down like a stick”, and, in the supposed last words of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, as he stood upon the scaffold: “Put not your trust in princes”. The House of Commons would soon be a-roar with witticisms.
