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SPEAKER_08: Hey everybody, we want to let you know that we are doing our traditional Pacific Northwest swing for our live show next year. In fact, the end of January next year, very early next year. And we're starting out in Seattle, Washington on January 24th at the Paramount Theater.
SPEAKER_07: It's huge. That's right. Then on to Portland on January 25th at Revolution Hall, the place we always are. It's kind of our home away from home in Portland. And then we're going to wrap it all up at the thing that started the Pacific Northwest tour in the first place all those years back, SF Sketchfest. We'll be at the Sidney Goldstein Theater on Friday, January 26th. Right, Chuck?
SPEAKER_08: That's right. And remember, you can go to stuffyoushouldknow.com, click on tours in order to get to the correct ticket link or go to the venue page only. Do not go to scalper sites. That's right.
SPEAKER_07: And we'll see you guys in January. Okay.
SPEAKER_02: Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
SPEAKER_07: Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. There's Chuck. Jerry's here too. And this is Stuff You Should Know.
SPEAKER_08: Uh, I believe a doo doo doo doo is in order. Why? Because we're debuting a brand new writer.
SPEAKER_07: Oh yeah. Great idea, Chuck. Thank you for doing that. Yeah.
SPEAKER_08: Welcome aboard, Allison Miller. Allison came to us. This is by way of Livia, right? As a recommendation. Yep.
SPEAKER_07: We said, Livia, you're great. You know any other great writers? She said, actually, I got one I can recommend. And here we are. Yeah.
SPEAKER_08: And Allison Miller did a, uh, how it works here is we do like sort of a test article. And this is that test article. So it obviously worked. And Allison is a historian and researcher and just did a fantastic job. So welcome, welcome to the fam, Allison. Welcome, Allison.
SPEAKER_07: Here, I'll coordinate you too. Yeah, you do it better than me.
SPEAKER_08: So I was hoping you would chime in. I just put some enthusiasm in.
SPEAKER_07: I think that's the difference. That's right. So yeah, we're talking about the OED today, the Oxford English Dictionary. And I have to say, Allison knocked this one out of the park. I get the impression that she may or may not have read significant portions of the OED in her lifetime. I think Allison is smart. So, um, she kind of starts off by talking about different kinds of dictionaries, which is significant because the OED, the Oxford English Dictionary, is a specific kind of dictionary. It's not a regular, average, Joe, you know, work at a dictionary, like some other dictionaries. The Oxford English Dictionary is a historical dictionary. So it not only tells you the definition of the word, there may even be multiple definitions, by the way, I don't know if you've ever looked at a dictionary before, but sometimes one word can have more than one definition. It's nuts, right? That's what I've heard. The OED says, and by the way, here's where that word came from. And here's examples of its first use to its probably most recent use or one of its most recent uses, so you can see how this specific word in the English language evolved over time. Yeah, I didn't know that. It's pretty ambitious.
SPEAKER_08: It is, and historical dictionaries, they don't say like, well, that meaning is not something that people use it for anymore, like macaroni, whatever the heck they meant in that song.
SPEAKER_07: The Yankee Doodle, the Indy one? Yeah. I took that as a reference to pot.
SPEAKER_08: But my point is, they don't say like, let's get rid of that old definition. Like the whole idea for the OED is that the English language is alive, and so the OED is alive. And we're going to leave it in there and go forward in time. But if you want to look up these old usages and these old meanings, it's all right there for you in this massive, massive dictionary whose aim was to include every word in the English language and every usage of that word up until now.
SPEAKER_07: Starting in 1150 CE.
SPEAKER_08: Yeah, as far as the words go. They didn't start the dictionary then, but they went back to Middle English to get what we now have as a third edition, more than 600,000 entries of which we have 850,000 definitions. See? Three million of those quotations, which is amazing. And although I think we're locked in with the beginning and the end, because the first word is a, there's no way you can get before that in line. No.
SPEAKER_08: And the last word is zizava. And there's no way that someone could create a word that is after Z-Y-Z-Z-Y-V-A. It would have to be Z-Z-Z-Z-Z.
SPEAKER_07: Or Z-Z-Top. I'm surprised they didn't mention Z-Z-Top.
SPEAKER_08: Yeah, don't talk to me about cartoon sleep bubbles. So I think we're locked in as, actually Allison has a great title for this. The O-E-D colon A to Zizia. I'm sorry, Zizava. I already messed it up. Well, it's a tough word.
SPEAKER_07: Z-Y-Z-Z-Y-V-A. It's fun to spell out loud because you say it like that with some oomph, but it's a tough word to say. Did you define it?
SPEAKER_07: No, go ahead. It's a weevil. Yeah. And it always was. So one thing about the O-E-D, you might say, well, like, wow, that's a lot of information packed into one tome. You'd be right. If you don't know much about the Oxford English Dictionary, you may at least have the idea that it's enormous, that it's way bigger than your average dictionary, because those 600,000 entries with 850,000 definitions in three million quotations, when you put them all together, it takes up a lot of space. In fact, by my estimate, it takes up something like an eighth of the entire internet.
SPEAKER_08: Should we read some of this, these fast stats? Oh, yeah, let's do that. So I believe this is the first volume. The first, yeah, the whole first edition, I think.
SPEAKER_08: Yeah, the whole first edition. So this isn't even the current edition. This is the one that we finished up in 1928. At the time, it had 415,000 words, half a million definitions, 1.8 million quotations. But this is the part I wanted to get to, 178 miles of type, 50 million words, four feet of shelf space, and 10 or 20 half volumes. So that Encyclopedia Britannica set you grew up with in your hallway, that's basically what this dictionary's first edition looked like.
SPEAKER_07: Yeah, and back in 1930, 1928, I guess, when it came out, you paid about today's equivalent of 3,360 pounds, Sterling, for a dictionary. About four grand in US dollars today. And according to the Bank of England, that was equal to 228 days wages for a skilled worker in 1930. Imagine spending most of your year's salary on a dictionary.
SPEAKER_08: Yeah, I think the point has got to be that very, like you had to be a very well-heeled person trying to impress other people by owning a copy of this thing back then, right?
SPEAKER_07: Yeah, or a library. Well, exactly.
SPEAKER_07: So yeah, that was the first edition. It's gotten even bigger as we've seen over time. And so now, finally, the internet was born, I think, to house the third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, which is where we're at now. And one thing that they do, which is pretty sharp, as the dictionary comes out, new words are being added to it all the time. They're probably finding less and less old words that they hadn't included. But like you said, the English language is living, so it's expanding and contracting and adding new words to it all the time. So by the time those things go to press and that last volume of the edition comes out, there's words that are left over that are just constantly being added. So I think on a quarterly basis, they release supplements, essentially, that have new words that came out or were coined since the volume that contained that letter was published in the latest edition.
SPEAKER_08: That's right. And we'll get to how those supplements figured in back then and what they do with those today. But the other really unique thing about the OED is that it is and always has been from the very, very beginning, a crowdsourced work. Right from the beginning, the editors who were, we're going to talk about the original editors here in a minute, they said, hey, public, we need help. So if you're into this, you've got a little time. If you like to read, if you're a linguist, you're into words, if you love language, go back to Chaucer, start reading, and find these words that we're looking for. Find usages of these words descend into us by hand on, they call it a slip, a little four by six sheet of paper and mail it into us. And you could very well have a hand in creating the Oxford English Dictionary. Yeah, pretty cool.
SPEAKER_07: And they got a really great response to it. I think still do today.
SPEAKER_08: Oh, for sure. But that's also explains why you have, you know, quotes from Chaucer and Shakespeare. And also, as Allison points out, quotes from like a social media post as a usage example of a word. Yeah, she also used an example that came from the most recent quarterly update
SPEAKER_07: from September 2023, Porch Pirate appears in there. And so it's a really good illustration of what the OED does. They explained that it's someone who steals packages from doorsteps. Everybody knows that. But did you know that it first came about from a news segment on KFOR from Oklahoma Cities, one of their local broadcasting stations?
SPEAKER_08: Yeah, so they'll have that. Wait, you did know that? No, well, no, I said they would have that. I got you. As like the example or whatever. And then if you want to dig deeper and just say, well, what about this word porch? Then they'll take you back to the 1300s with the definition of porch. And then examples of these, what they call senses, like that's when a not a not a tense, it's a sense. It's like how the word is used, basically. Yeah, and it might not be used that way anymore, necessarily.
SPEAKER_08: Yeah, but they will have all of them listed. And you can see sort of the evolution of not only the word porch, but when you eventually get to something like Porch Pirate.
SPEAKER_07: Yeah, so it's pretty, pretty neat stuff. Like that's what they do. And they've been doing this for 100 something years since I think the first volume of the first edition came out in, I think, 1884. Right?
SPEAKER_08: Yeah, and those supplements you were talking about, I promise to kind of explain how they do things now. They were, for many, many years, they were released just like, hey, here's this extra thing. But it created a problem if you're like, well, wait a minute. Now I have to look up a word in two different places if it has a more modern usage. And so eventually they started combining them. I think they finally did that in, what, 1989, where the supplements were actually worked into the main edition. Yeah, just the first edition.
SPEAKER_08: Yeah, so they finished that in 1989. A couple years before that, they had finally put it on a CD-ROM. And then, like you said, it only exists today. Well, I mean, you can get copies, but they're not releasing, I don't think, print editions any longer. It's just an online subscription type thing now.
SPEAKER_07: Yeah, and usually, I mean, it's pay, right? So, yeah, subscription. So usually you can log in through your library. Pretty neat. They're also in the midst of putting out a third edition, so look for that in the next century. That's right. I say we take a little break, Charles, and then we'll come back and talk about the history of the OED, how we got here.
SPEAKER_08: Let's do it.
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SPEAKER_07: So the OED is not the first English dictionary ever. In fact the first one ever was from 1604. It's called the Table Alphabetical of Hard Usual English Words by Robert Cawdrey and he basically just put this together to help people I guess explain themselves in English better. It was I think words that were commonly used but not necessarily commonly understood. So that was the first one but I guess the OED really traces its spiritual roots to a more recent phenomenon that the Brothers Grimm had started which was essentially a dictionary of a language in order to show the history of that language ostensibly in order to prove how great that language actually was.
SPEAKER_08: Yeah we shout out to a couple of great episodes we did many years ago. One on the Brothers Grimm and was there one on the just the fairy tales?
SPEAKER_07: Yes they were like it was a two-parter right yeah.
SPEAKER_08: Yeah that was that was a good series so go back and listen to that but Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm did what you said they were like hey we want to create a German dictionary from Martin Luther on it would eventually they died before it came out but it was called I believe the the first fascicle and the fascicle is just the first part basically like hey we finished A through J or whatever. Right. I think the first fascicle came out when they were alive but of the Deutsches Wurterbuch Wurterbuch. I love it.
SPEAKER_08: And I believe they they died in the the late 1859 for Wilhelm in 1863 and it finally came out in 1961 in full so they weren't even close and she points out to Alison that Jacob died at the F's he was working on the word fruit or diffruct. Yeah I want to say that was pretty pretty good.
SPEAKER_07: Oh you want to say it? I want to say it too Deutsches Wurterbuch which means literally German word book right? Yeah this is more like Buch. Deutsches Wurterbuch.
SPEAKER_08: Wurterbuch yeah there you go. Yeah I said it way better in my head I think I tried too hard.
SPEAKER_07: That's all right. So like I was saying behind the the Grimm's the whole initiative is not just like documenting definitions for German words they wanted to trace the history of the German language because they suspected that far in the distant past all of these disparate groups of people who are now members of separate nations were all members of the same Germanic speaking tribe and that this had been like a glorious amazing civilization that was now fractured and maybe if we understand it a little better it can come back together and dare I say take over the world
SPEAKER_08: yeah it's like easy brothers Grimm yeah they had a good idea I see where this is headed it got a
SPEAKER_07: little perverted along the way although it may have been a bad idea from the beginning you know
SPEAKER_08: yeah this this does link up very oddly with our episode that we just recorded on tectonic plates it does I think the lesson here is anytime you have a social or cultural movement to go back
SPEAKER_07: and find how how great your specific culture is or was that's a that's a red flag for everybody else yeah probably so so the oed it was basically the same thing they're like well you've got your
SPEAKER_08: German book but what's greater than the English language let's do that for ourselves we're going to make an English word book yeah that's what it's called so the the gentleman scholars and
SPEAKER_08: that's in quotes from Britain got together to form the Philological Society in London in 1842 from the Greek phyllos love and logos words so philology is just the love of words it's really very plain and kind of wonderful yeah and it's the study of the language and the and the written language and a lot of philologists will say like Greek and Latin are what we're concentrating in but this at this time there were people like oh wait a minute English seems to really be pretty important too I know it's not Latin or Greek but maybe we should look forward and get down with this English dictionary and they said yes in 1857 after that that's when it was that's when the the Grimms put out their first fascicle in fact was around the same time they said they got a head start on us but I think we can catch up and do a great job as well and in fact they did
SPEAKER_07: yeah and as a matter of fact word got out about this and everybody was like hey this is a great project the members of the Philological Society in England were kind of celebrated culturally for for trying to do this thing for documenting the English language and how great it was so what they decided to do first was to find out all the words that weren't already in other dictionaries of English or any dictionary that contained English words unregistered words is what they called them and they were going to make a dictionary of unregistered words to basically complete everything and there was a guy Richard Cenovics Trench RC Trench who gave some lectures against this idea and essentially said rather than patch an existing garment let's make a brand new garment from the cloth and it's going to be the most beautiful garment anyone's ever seen it's going to the color dream coat well yeah plus sequin shoulder pads the whole shebang and to me that's that's the height of amazing fashion so
SPEAKER_07: he actually convinced the Philological Society to to veer a different way and to rather rather than just take you know the the words that hadn't been defined and define them and make that take on the entire English language going back to 1150 forward and again when you're doing this so just think about going into the deep past and saying okay we're going to do all words from 1150 to 1850 that's daunting enough but they were also signing up for essentially a never-ending unfinished work because as we've seen every time they put in an edition there's any number of new words that have come along or that they didn't they didn't have before like it's an ongoing never-ending process they'll never be done with the OED and I suspect that probably drives some members of the OED staff completely mad maybe and you also have to keep in mind that they did this
SPEAKER_08: without a publisher secured and in fact did work for about two decades without a publisher even so they were just working on what was then called the New English Dictionary was the the I guess the working title and their first editor was a dude named Herbert Coleridge and if you're thinking I wonder if he was yes he was he was the grandson of Samuel Taylor and there were several predictions in here they were all wrong as to how big this project would be and how long it would take but Herbert was the first one to be way off base and said it'll be about 7,000 pages and will be done in a decade not how it worked out they started working they started building this thing from you know from a forward and they made a list of books like basically the the English language literary canon and said all right volunteers you all wrote in said you had some time so start reading read these books and look out for these words and when you find them put them on a slip word for word send them into us again that's a four by six inch piece of paper it was all very sort of regimented right and they said please read these books and we like English literature because the whole point of this is to talk about how great we were and how great our works and language is yeah so that's what that's why they first were like we're gonna
SPEAKER_07: look through the the great works of English language only because this is the highest use of these words so these are the best examples these are the quotations we want to use they were very narrow-minded in that since they were really until the 20th century they were very much centered on that that's what they were going to use to derive their quotes from because it would just demonstrate how great the English language was look at how these amazing English writers used it right so Herbert Coleridge died in 1861 I get the impression he was only working on it for a few years but he was because he died right right four years later yeah so it was like four years right but he really threw himself into it so much so that he apparently on his deathbed he had definitions like slips scattered about like on his on the quilt of his deathbed he died working yeah and he had contracted tuberculosis and when the doctor was like this is not ever going to get better it will get better but you're going to be dead that's how it's going to get better Herbert Coleridge was like oh I must start Sanskrit tomorrow which is taken to mean that he had never learned Sanskrit he was a polyglot he studied all sorts of different languages and he had never gotten to Sanskrit now that he realized he was going to die he needed to start on it tomorrow yeah ironically dying of what was then known as consumption and later TB so that's a
SPEAKER_08: that's a new usage and a new entry yeah 1879 we're skipping forward and like I said this is 20 years after they started this is when they finally found that publisher at the time they were known another sense as Clarendon later to be known as the Oxford University Press and even though they didn't specifically call it the Oxford English Dictionary until later I believe the very first publishing in 1928-28 was called a New English Dictionary on Historical Principles and so we should mention that after Coleridge died it just the whole thing kind of
SPEAKER_07: like lost momentum he was a real driving force as the first editor but you know a few I think 20 or so years later it started to pick up again and it was thanks to a new editor named James Murray who I believe is the third editor of all and he took this ball and ran with it and he is the person that you can point to as the the one who ultimately got the OED published he was the yeah he was the true driving force of it yeah absolutely Murray was Scottish came from a
SPEAKER_08: just sort of a regular working class middle class background was the son of a tailor apparently his father was a very smart man and known for being a smart and sober person and James as a child was a prodigy was a language prodigy right learned his ABCs before he was 18 months was apparently reading and writing in Greek by seven left school at 14 was studying four languages and eventually came to London to be the headmaster of a school there and that is where in London he joined up with the Philological Society and like you said he was he was the guy he was also the guy who had another 10-year completion prediction he said this will take 10 years from now yeah and after five years of that 10-year prediction they had a through ant no
SPEAKER_07: yes wow I would just see that and be like well I quit he's like a lot of that was on
SPEAKER_08: boarding you understand geez man that's crazy yeah but it also goes to show how little they
SPEAKER_07: actually had gotten done apparently under Coleridge's command yeah everyone was just
SPEAKER_08: they wanted jokes about a grandpa yeah like come on tell me what was Sammy really like so
SPEAKER_07: the one thing that you said I think from the start was that this was a crowd-sourced project yeah and it's not like the OED makes a secret about this they're very deferential to the volunteers that have worked for them over the years because they just could not have done this without them it was just too big of a of an undertaking to for just a small group of people that to have done by themselves and there were a lot of different people there's a book out there called the dictionary people right what's it about isn't that what it's called I don't know oh where
SPEAKER_07: is it yep the dictionary people I think it's fairly new and the author had worked at the OED and before she left she had gotten from the archives she'd come across James Murray's address book and it was pretty thick because it had the names and addresses of all a lot of the volunteer correspondents that were working contributing quotations to the dictionary and so she decided to write a book tracking down who these people were and that's what she came up with this book called the dictionary people and she found some pretty interesting stuff for example about one in six by her estimate were women including James Murray's wife and daughters he drafted them and got a lot of support and help from them apparently the editing the OED did not pay much but he had dedicated his life essentially to it and his family supported him in that which is pretty great and then there are a lot of other women contributed too right yeah the daughter of
SPEAKER_08: Karl Marx Eleanor Marx contributed and it was apparently fired by Murray for not doing the assignment properly not sticking to the assignment and by the way Sarah Ogilvy is who wrote the dictionary people yeah I'd like to check that out I bet it's a good book yeah another writer that Allison found from this book to highlight his name Marganita Lasky who's alive from 1915 to 1988 Marganita contributed 13,000 quotes to 20th century supplements and Marganita was a critic and a journalist and a novelist and kind of made the rounds on TV shows and stuff back in the day starting in the the late 50s and into the 60s and you know when people are volunteering like this they can sort of like guide their like have their own path forward and how they want to tackle the project almost and who they want to highlight or words they want to highlight and at some point Marganita Lasky got into sort of away from the highbrow thing and said I want to start you know looking at domestic manuals and all these old ancient cookbooks and you know modern newspapers and famous diaries and just a really unique approach to come up with some of those 13,000 entries yeah and that was a that was a real change remember I said that they had really kind of had
SPEAKER_07: their blinders on just looking for you know the pinnacle of English literature for quotations under James Murray he was like no we're gonna not only look for new sources we're also going to include slang we're gonna include like vulgar words like we're like if it's an English word we're gonna include it because we're documenting the entire English language so that was a huge sea change for the direction of the dictionary and apparently he was under a tremendous amount of pressure to not to not go that way to kind of stick with the original plan and he said no he said nine no he said no I mentioned knickers is that underwear that's what knickers are right
SPEAKER_08: okay I thought so as soon as I said it I was like wait a minute did I say the wrong word you were thinking of Fanny and what's a knickerbocker a knickerbocker is a think I think it's the short
SPEAKER_07: pants that were like kind of cinched at the knee that you think of with like a little news boys so the New York Knicks named after the knickerbockers that's what they were I don't know if they did or
SPEAKER_07: not no they were named after the knickerbocker like the story club that Washington Irving was a member of oh really are you making no I'm pretty sure that's okay I sometimes get things
SPEAKER_07: wrong yeah but I well this is off the dome so okay so back to Murray he's working with his
SPEAKER_08: wife and 11 kids at his house mainly and not only at his house but mainly in his little shed that he had built behind the house in the garden called the script orium and they worked on it here he once they got a through ant in 1884 he was like we need some help here so they hired a second editor named Henry Bradley and then not too long after that added two more co-editors so you essentially had a team of four editors at that point that were working with teams and teams of people so a lot of people working Murray at his script orium there at home but then he moved to Oxford and built another larger script orium there behind his house and things were getting so busy the local post put a P.O. box right there by his little front driveway by his sidewalk and it's still there yeah if you look it up this beautiful red P.O. box with a little placard saying that you know Murray lived here and this was this the post to gather these slips that helped create the O.E.D. I saw
SPEAKER_07: and actually Atlas Obscura that the placard doesn't say that it just says that the guy who created the O.E.D. lived here and they just walk right past the the post office box that's literally in front of the placard they don't even mention it the most amazing part of the story it's one of the it's one
SPEAKER_07: of the greatest grossest government oversights in history so thousands of people contributing at
SPEAKER_08: this point Murray is still beating the drum and like writing open letters to newspapers and stuff saying hey we we're still doing this we you know trying to keep that fire going and people it wasn't just people in England people from all over the world were contributing and I think when they finally they had so many slips because you know they're filing these as they get them alphabetically they're sliding them in and they have these lexicographers working around the clock as well when they finally put out the first supplement in 1933 they still had a hundred and forty thousand slips left over it's so nuts again I would have been like well I quit yeah it's just too daunting
SPEAKER_07: I can barely talk about this stuff yeah I think 33 that's the first year they officially called
SPEAKER_08: it the OED okay that everyone was kind of calling it that anyway were they really yeah okay crazy
SPEAKER_07: so they kind of went with the the change the English language changed the name of the dictionary for them yeah because whatever that long thing I a new English dictionary on historical principles
SPEAKER_08: it was the printed by the Oxford English press so everyone was just calling it that anyway so yes I guess it was a sense plus OED sounds better than the Ned you know yeah yeah sure do you want to
SPEAKER_07: take another break and come back and talk about arguably the most interesting contributor of all sure okay during the holidays many suffer from SAD or streaming annoyance disorder sad is caused by too many streaming apps and passwords and the inability to find something to watch but prime video simplifies your streaming so you can find your holiday happy place runner by your favorites head on hundreds of channels and get classics or new releases like candy cane lane starring Eddie Murphy included with prime in one app with one password find your holiday happy place prime video restrictions apply see amazon.com slash Amazon prime for details people are excited about
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SPEAKER_08: so Murray dies of pleurisy in 1915 did not see the first final edition put out which is very sad that would be what 13 years later but did put out most of the fascicles by that point just wasn't compiled into the one edition different people jr tolkin worked for a year on this in 1919 lots of volunteers but as you promised oh and murray was also knighted in 1908 troubles wow yeah apparently knighted but still a bit of an outsider in the the hoity-toity oxford you know literati yeah always felt like an outsider and wasn't even given an honorary degree until like the year before he died or something yeah and when he walked across the stage what he didn't realize
SPEAKER_07: is that one of the faculty had taped a kick me sign to his back so he didn't he never understood why the audience was laughing when he grabbed his honorary degree it was very sad he never got it
SPEAKER_08: so you promised to talk of the most interesting perhaps most celebrated volunteer and that is one dr william chester miner if you've seen the movie or read the book the professor and the madman the book was by simon winchester and the book starred mel gibson as murray and sean pen as the quote-unquote madman chester miner i have not seen it apparently it's not very good and mel gibson and the director tried to you know they didn't support the movie in the press and they tried to get their i don't know if they get their name removed but they basically disowned it really
SPEAKER_07: i thought mel gibson was the one whose movie it was whose idea well it was his production company
SPEAKER_08: yeah but he he apparently he took him to court because he didn't get final cut like they said and he didn't get to shoot for a week in oxford like he wanted to and he's basically like this thing is garbage because you didn't let me do what i wanted to yeah and so i'm not supporting it shawn pin just went what that stinks because apparently the book was just amazing the professor
SPEAKER_07: and the madman i know and it's such a great story but i heard other people defend it and say you
SPEAKER_08: know it was pretty good i had great acting and like he just you know got his knickers in a in a wad so um where the the madman is dr william chester miner you said right that's who the
SPEAKER_07: references and um the reason that they call him the madman is because at the time he was diagnosed with either dementia prae cocks or paranoid schizophrenia and today we would call either of those just plain old schizophrenia spectrum disorder um but this was the uh mid 19th century and dr miner um was suffering from this at a time when they did not understand what they were dealing with they just knew that this guy was pretty bad off and needed care essentially for the rest of his life um he had started out as a military doctor i believe he graduated from yale medical school and entered the civil war uh as a military doctor pretty much right off the bat um and there's some stories about when his symptoms began allegedly it was from things he was exposed to during his time in the civil war one is there's a story that he supposedly had to brand a deserter an irish deserter from the union with a d on his face and that having to do that to that poor man just made him snap essentially or brought his symptoms on is a different way to say it or he was involved in the battle of the wilderness um in outside of spotsylvania um virginia either we don't know we just know that yes this man definitely had schizophrenia we don't know how it came on or if there was even any trigger but we just kind of joined him around the the time after the civil war when he's still in the army but he's really starting to show symptoms yeah and also by the way this is how we knew that allison really has the goods as a
SPEAKER_08: researcher and writer because allison was like hey be careful with his stuff because you know there are a lot of stories out there and just don't don't buy up everything you're reading here right music to our ears she also told us how to um pronounce zizava right that's true the first
SPEAKER_08: writer to ever include pronunciation it's nice uh so um like you said uh an army doctor an army surgeon um working at the u.s general hospital in new haven connecticut also a flute player apparently a very ambitious guy and because of uh you know kind of how his schizophrenia played out were delusions of persecution a lot of delusions of being attacked sexually and you know i think that speaks for itself they got pretty bad and he apparently would wander red light districts of places where he lived he said this is because of his disorder he was sent to an asylum in washington while he was still in the army although he would get his discharge in 1870 while he was still there he thought he could get better if he went to the uk and get treatment there and so in 1872 in london he found himself in the waking from a delusion that he was being attacked i think sexually attacked by an irish republican and got up from bed and ran out to the street like guns blazing thinking he was shooting at his tormentor and killed a an innocent man a brewery worker named george merit who was on his way to work that early morning yes so that was enough for the british government he'd already been discharged from the
SPEAKER_07: army i don't know if you said or not by the time he made it to the uk and in the uk the the the authorities were like okay we're going to introduce you to one of our asylums called broadmore and in broadmore this is the 19th century you did not want to be in an asylum of any sort in the 19th century they were horrible terrible places where humans were treated like about as bad as humans can be treated and yet either he was charming or wealthy enough or a combination of both he was able to play his flute he was able to wear his own clothes go on walks and very importantly he was able to bring his personal library of very rare books from the 17th and 18th century with him and they actually gave him another cell to serve as a personal library essentially and i'll bet sean penn playing that flute is something to see i mean that above anything else is why i want to see that movie it's like in uh anchorman he pulls it
SPEAKER_08: from his sleeve and yeah it's very fake hey aqua long no no no no no no no no no no no no no no
SPEAKER_08: not again yep it just happened uh he stayed in touch this is kind of interesting uh here that
SPEAKER_08: he did stay in touch with the wife the widow of the man that he killed and uh she brought him books even uh which is amazing and kind of a nice ending to that story yeah uh i don't know the ends and outs maybe i don't know maybe he did her a favor maybe he was a bad guy no uh no apparently
SPEAKER_07: he wasn't he was a joking oh yeah well he apparently contacted her and apologized made some sort of restitution i took that to mean like gave her some money but she accepted his apology she didn't have to do that so i think it says a lot about both of them yeah for sure uh when it came
SPEAKER_08: to the oed he really poured himself into this as a as an avid reader and had all those rare books like you said but didn't do the thing that they said which was hey read these books and look for these words he said nope here's what i'm gonna do i'm gonna uh read a book at a time and i'm gonna start i guess it says with one letter i guess you started with the letter a and just started looking through all the books for all the letter a's and then again for the letter b's and so on and so on yeah and it was a fruitful way to search for quotations using specific words because
SPEAKER_07: i think within just a couple of years he had generated and sent in between five and six thousand slips of quotations to uh james murray and as the years went on they no one seems to know how many he sent in but he um i mean tens and tens of thousands of slips came directly from dr minor during his time in broadmore yeah they eventually met in person i mean this was a
SPEAKER_08: relationship that spanned a couple of decades yeah hundreds of quotes a week and they met in 1891 finally apparently the superintendent of the asylum had both men at his house and they met a few more times after that i watched the trailer of the movie today and i'm not sure how accurate it is but it seems like they'd met here and there over the years and in the book it was like you know mel gibson doing a pretty bad scottish accent saying like you and i are partners you complete me
SPEAKER_08: it was kind of like that and i and i'm not really sure if that was uh the real case in real life well so apparently the from what i saw james murray considered um just as a decent human being
SPEAKER_07: he needed to go support dr minor whether dr minor was contributing or not i think it helped that dr minor was contributing but they they did have some sort of friendship or relationship it went beyond just you know the editor and the contributor kind of thing all right well maybe it wasn't and supposedly dr um minor kept like finding excuses anytime james murray was like well let's meet you know i'm just across like the the city let's meet for lunch or something and dr minor would be like i can't you know i broke my foot or my sister's coming to visit whatever and then finally i'm not sure how he finally found out either dr minor admitted to it or james murray found out somehow but he finally did find out that he was institutionalized and then he started to go visit him oh okay pretty neat and then he saw him off um after dr minor was released from broadmore
SPEAKER_08:
SPEAKER_07: so he could go back to be institutionalized in america it was clear that he wasn't going to be around too many more years um james murray saw him off at the docks and gave him six unpublished volumes of the first edition that hadn't come out yet yeah he had a very sad end uh to a sad life
SPEAKER_08: he had those delusions of being sexually violated uh and in december 1902 he tied a tourniquet around his penis and he cut it off in what he called uh in the interest of morality because what he believed is that he had delusions that he was being taken out of the asylum for years and years at night uh and forced to have sex with uh women uh all around you know the asylum and in town and so he cut his penis off and after that things uh really just weren't the same for him uh it seems like things went pretty downhill pretty quickly um although he died in 1920 so that was you know another 18 years of suffering yeah as far as um his contributions that really went downhill
SPEAKER_07: after that man yeah very sad but super super interesting story and great job allison this
SPEAKER_08: was really really cool yeah thanks a lot allison this was great great start welcome to the team
SPEAKER_07: uh and what chuck since i said welcome to the team do you think it's time for listener mail
SPEAKER_08: i think so okay i'm gonna call this cost of goods uh in that episode what episode was it were you talking about the cost of goods i think the harlem globetrotters is where it originally came from
SPEAKER_07: yeah like why is it so expensive to go to mba game these days or get a meal or whatever
SPEAKER_08: we had a lot of people that write in so i don't think we even settled on a final um point yeah i'm still looking around there were a few different theories but this one for
SPEAKER_08: matt i'm going to read uh hey guys i have a partial explanation for the question why does it cost so much more for a nice meal than it used to even adjusting for inflation uh balmol b-a-u-m-o-l balmol's cost disease might help explain this refers to the rising costs associated with service or labor-intensive industries over time despite no corresponding increase in productivity so imagine a restaurant in the 1950s you have a server take your order chef cooks the food someone else cleans up after you're done fast forward to today despite all the technological advances you still need that server to take the order you still need the chef you still need the staff to clean uh the humans have not been replaced by machines or software in a lot of these cases you can't speed up the chef the way you can double the speed of a factory machine without sacrificing quality so if you own a restaurant you still need roughly the same number of workers that you've had that you needed in the 50s roughly yet wages for the staff have gone up over the years that's a whole other rabbit hole the restaurant has to pay its staff more over time without getting more meals per worker so what do you do you pass it on to the customers by the way this also explains why stuff like health insurance and child care have also gotten way more expensive relative to other stuff you still need the same number of daycare workers per kid and nurses per patient that you did in past decades uh this was a good one matt we got some other ideas and i imagine it's kind of all these things probably but bow mall's cost disease is a great explanation and that is from matt farmer yeah thanks a lot matt that was a good one
SPEAKER_07: it's uh the whole thing's brewing i don't know what it's going to turn into but that'll definitely be part of it for sure perhaps a josh clark solo 10-part series the cost of goods with josh clark
SPEAKER_08: i don't think so no no i'm going to make you do it with me oh no no no so uh that was from matt
SPEAKER_07: right yeah matt farmer matt farmer thank you very much for that and if you want to be like matt
SPEAKER_07: farmer and show off your braininess and try to answer a burning question we have we love that kind of thing you can send it to us via email to stuffpodcast at iheartradio.com
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