R. W. Burchfield 1923-2004

My memories of Bob Burchfield begin and end with lunches. I first met Bob in September 1970, while a graduate student of Angus Cameron, the founding Editor of the Dictionary of Old English at the University of Toronto. Bob had been invited, as a historical lexicographer, to take part in the second international planning conference for the new Dictionary, together with Old English specialists and computer scientists. As Angus's student, I was fortunate enough to be seated next to him at one of the conference lunches where he magnanimously kept the conversation going by focusing on my interests and not on his great enterprise. It has only been through reading Roberta Frank's report of that conference that I came to know Bob's crucial role in helping shape the future of the Dictionary of Old English. His shrewd questioning, his straight-talking (on the need for editorial authority), his practical wisdom (on the time constraints against the listing of synonyms and antonyms), and his passionate articulateness (on the inclusion of simple etymological information and personal- and place-name elements), all contributed to setting the new dictionary on a surer footing. The last time I saw Bob was at another lunch, nearly thirty-two years later, at the home of Eric and Mary Stanley. It was easy to share with him both my challenges and joys because he knew, as few others could, what they might be. I am sad our conversation is now over.

I knew Bob long before he became editor of the second Supplement. He at once threw himself into the task, delighted with the little house in Walton Crescent assigned to him. He showed it off, and pointed to the shelving for slips, inherited from NED and the first Supplement. He was not pleased when I thought the house too small, with walls insufficient to hold the slips that would be needed, especially since not all the rooms were for his Supplement.

Collecting quotations required readers: since the early thirties nothing had been read for OED. Friends and colleagues were urged by me to help. One of them, charged with reading The Times, told me that each daily issue took her a week to read thoroughly and write out slips. Many technicalities in subjects, such as radio, television, the gramophone, electronics, and electrical devices, needed to be traced all the way. When I was teaching at Yale I received a message from Bob that a passage in a late seventeenth-century book on commensuration was given in a technical journal as early in the history of a word: two copies of the book were extant, the British Library copy was lost — could I, please, read the Yale copy? For me Bob's Supplement provided occasional excitement: for him it was a daily organizational challenge. He was justly proud of the colleagues he had recruited: John Simpson, Edmund Weiner, Lesley Brown (editor of the New Shorter), John Sykes (co-editor of the Oxford Duden). He laid the foundations for Oxford lexicography after his Supplement.

Bob Burchfield was one of a cohort of remarkable students, including Grahame Johnston, Harry Orsman, Bill Ramson, and George Turner, most of whom studied under Professor Ian Gordon at Victoria University College in the aftermath of World War II, and who subsequently had notable careers as lexicographers of English in Australia and New Zealand.

His specialist interests arose from the rich but sometimes conservative philological tradition in English studies rather than from general linguistics, but he never let this get in the way of championing an increasingly diverse range of sources of English words. In the 70,000 new entries in the OED Supplement Burchfield and his team ensured that slang, technical terms, and regional varieties of World English, whether from New Zealand, India, or Canada, were more appropriately represented.

Bob Burchfield was the master scholar of our generation. But he also straddled the great gulf between those two antithetical activities, scholarship and journalism. I met him through Lizzy (Elizabeth Burchfield), the best publisher's publicity manager whom I have ever done business with. She read the papers and recognised a ‘story’. Bob was patient, tolerant, witty, and humorous with the visiting hack. He taught me to be descriptive rather than prescriptive, open rather than closed, broad rather than narrow, open-minded rather than grumpy about changes in the English language and grammar. I have even come to enjoy the Maori fauna and flora in his majestic Supplement. Whatever I write about English usage and grammar carries the mark of the Master. The New Fowler's Modern English Usage is misnamed. It is, of course, properly called by all of us ‘Burchfield’. I am proud (and lucky) to have been his friend. His influence on English at all levels will live as long as Johnson's.

Historical lexicographers usually labor in obscurity, editing or reviewing entries in the seclusion of their offices, and then seeing them into print without fanfare or controversy, but not Bob Burchfield. When he agreed, in the quiet decade of the 1950s, to take on the task of preparing a supplement to the OED covering the new words, and the new uses of old words, of the twentieth century, he would not have expected that his career would take a different turn and that he would become a public figure. From 1972, however, when the first volume appeared — and indeed even before that — he was called upon to articulate the purposes of the historical dictionary and defend the work of the lexicographer, which he saw as describing words ‘as objectively as possible to form a permanent record of the language of our time, the useful and the neutral, those that are decorous and well-formed, beside those that are controversial, tasteless, or worse.’ He was not the first to enunciate this objective view, of course, but he did so, in various forms and in various media, in his always eloquent, genial, and uncondescending way, and his printed remarks on the subject will be read and reread, both by me and other lexicographers and by the public, long after his more important — indeed, immeasurable — contribution to the English vocabulary of the twentieth century has been subsumed (anonymously) by OED3.