The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary Read Online Free PDF Page B

literally, “the chief personage in a drama”; the next three quotations demonstrate a subtle difference, in which the word means “the leading personage in any contest,” or “a prominent supporter…of any cause.” By general consent this second meaning is the more modern; the first is the older and now somewhat archaic version.
    The oldest quotation used to illustrate the first of these two meanings was that tracked down by the dictionary’s lexical detectives from the writings of John Dryden in 1671. “’Tis charg’d upon me,” the quotation reads, “that I make debauch’d Persons…my protagonists, or the chief persons of the drama.”
    This, from a lexicographical point of view, seems to be the English word’s mother lode, a fair clue that the word may well have been introduced into the written language in that year, and possibly not before. (But the OED offers no guarantee. German scholars in particular are constantly deriving much pleasure from winning an informal lexicographic contest that aims at finding quotations that antedate those in the OED : At last count the Germans alone had found thirty-five thousand instances in which the OED quotation was not the first; others, less stridently, chalk up their own small triumphs of lexical sleuthing, all of which Oxford’s editors accept with disdainful equanimity, professing neither infallibility nor monopoly.)
    This single quotation for protagonist is peculiarly neat, moreover, in that Dryden explicitly states the newly minted word’s meaning within the sentence. So from the dictionary editors’ point of view there is a double benefit, of having the word’s origin dated and its meaning explained, and both by a single English author.
    Finding and publishing quotations of usage is an imperfect way of making pronouncements about origins and meanings, of course—but to nineteenth-century lexicographers it was the best method that had yet been devised—and it has not yet been bettered. From time to time experts succeed in challenging specific findings like this, and on occasions the dictionary is forced to recant, is obliged to accept a new and earlier quotation and give to a particular word a longer history than the Oxford editors first allowed. Happily protagonist itself has not so far been successfully challenged on chronological grounds. So far as the OED is concerned, 1671 still stands: The word has for three hundred odd years been a member of that giant corpus known as the English vocabulary.
    The word appears again, and with a new supporting quotation, in the 1933 Supplement —a volume that had to be added because of the sheer weight of new words and new evidence of new meanings that had accumulated during the decades when the original dictionary was being compiled. By now another shade of meaning had been found for it—that of “a leading player in some game or sport.” A sentence supporting this, from a 1908 issue of The Complete Lawn Tennis Player , is produced in evidence.
    But then comes the controversy. The other great book on the English language, Henry Fowler’s hugely popular Modern English Usage , which was first published in 1926, insisted—contrary to what Dryden had been quoted as saying in the OED —that protagonist is a word that can only ever be used in the singular.
    Any use suggesting the contrary would be grammatically utterly wrong. And not just wrong, Fowler declares, but absurd. It would be nonsense to suggest that there could ever be two characters in a play, both of whom could be described as the most important. One either is the most important person, or one is not.
    It took more than half a century before the OED decided to settle the matter. The 1981 Supplement , in the classically magisterial way of the dictionary, tries to counter the excitable (and now, as it happens, late, Mr. Fowler). It offers a new quotation, reinforcing the view that the word can be used plurally or singularly as the need arises. George