The Professor and the Madman essays

The Professor and the Madman essays The Professor and the Madman, written by Simon Winchester, is a biography about the making of the Oxford English Dictionary. Winchester, who is an author, journalist, broadcaster and foreign correspondent, has written for many magazines and newspapers distributed worldwide. In an interview between Winchester and a host of C-SPAN, Winchester was asked where the idea for the book came, he replies Well, it came to me in a rather bizarre way. I was reading a book on lexicography in the bath one morning, as one does, I suppose, just before breakfast, and it was a booka wonderful book called "Chasing The Sun" by a man called Jonathan Green. And it had a referenceit said, `Readers will be familiar with the extraordinary story of Dr. W.C. Minor, an American lunatic murderer, who was a prodigiously energetic contributor to the OED.' And I remember sitting up in the bath, Archimedeslike, dripping and saying, `Well, I know nothing about this.' Winchesters main foundation for this book is to clarify the tale of the making of the Oxford English Dictionary The formation of the Oxford English Dictionary began in 1857 and took seventy years to finish. Tens of thousands of individuals organized the expansive language into 414,825 exact definitions. The story begins with the grisly murder of George Merrett, by William Chester Minor the former U.S. Army officer and qualified surgeon. On February 17th of 1872 in the early morning William Minor had been sleeping, when he awoke to some noises of someone in his flat. He sat up and saw someone standing at the foot of his bed. He proceeded to chase the individual into the street, and shot at the person as they attempted to flee. He ended up shooting the first person that came into view apparently, and this person was George Merrett. Merrett had never met W.C Minor and had been heading home after a long day at work. W.C Minor was arrested. While in pri...