You Could Look It Up (17 page)

One of England's more bloodthirsty lexicographical rivalries began in 1656, when Thomas Blount published the biggest English dictionary
to date,
Glossographia
. Two years later a dictionary called
A New World of English Words
appeared, compiled by Edward Phillips, nephew of the great poet John Milton. Phillips's title picks up on some of the excitement surrounding the discovery of the real New World, which was still a comparatively novel subject in 1658. But Phillips found himself in trouble because his
New World of English Words
was not actually all that new—many of the entries were lifted straight out of
Glossographia
. Blount, unamused, responded with a deliciously nasty pamphlet,
A World of Errors Discovered in the New World of Words
. “Must this then be suffered?” Blount asked.

A Gentleman … writes a Book, and the Book happens to be acceptable to the World and sell; a Book-seller … instantly employs some Mercenary to jumble up another like Book out of this, with some Alterations and Additions, and give it a new Title… . Thus it fared with my
Glossographia
, the fruit of above Twenty years spare hours.
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Blount insisted that Phillips's dictionary was “extracted almost wholly out of mine” and claimed that wherever Phillips added original material, he made it worse. It recalls a putdown often attributed to Samuel Johnson, but not actually spoken by him: “Sir, your book is both good and original. But the parts that are good are not original, and the parts that are original are not good.” Phillips must have smarted when he was smacked by Blount, but he was not improved by the scolding: in later editions he continued to pillage other dictionaries, including some that had criticized his first edition.

Such pilfering was not limited to England. In 1607, for instance, the Frenchman César Oudin published his
Trésor des deux langues françoise et espagnole
, a French–Spanish dictionary. Two years later the French section was lifted by Hierosme Victor, who used it in his
Tesoro de las tres lenguas, francesa, italiana y española
.
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And in the nineteenth century, the two most important American lexicographers—Noah Webster and Joseph Emerson Worcester—spent years accusing each other of thievery.

What seems strangest to moderns is that some reference book compilers were happy to confess their plagiarisms. When Robert James
published the proposals for his
Medicinal Dictionary
in 1741, he gave would-be subscribers a quick overview of the competition, then: “Their Attempts were indeed useful, and are therefore to be mentioned with Gratitude.” The authors of other medical reference works “have succeeded so well,” he wrote, “that often nothing can be added to the Accuracy of their Expositions; and such Passages we have carefully translated”—
translated
in its etymological sense of “carried over”—without even any “unnecessary Variations” in the prose. Having lifted all the good parts from the earlier medical dictionaries, James believed his book “will probably make them less necessary to future Students,” and “what is not to be found in
this
Dictionary, it will be generally in vain to seek in
any other
.”
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Although the word “plagiarism” is ancient—it comes from Latin
plagiarius
‘kidnapper'—the idea that lifting someone else's words might be wrong is modern. Medieval writers would not have understood the charge: for centuries, writers (and painters and sculptors and composers) were encouraged to copy the masters as closely as possible. Only in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did a notion of intellectual property become current, so that Samuel Johnson could define
plagiary
in 1755 as “A thief in literature; one who steals the thoughts or writings of another” and “The crime of literary theft.”

Today, getting caught brandishing scissors and paste can be enough to ruin a career. And yet every reference book writer spends a lot of time looking over rivals' shoulders. As lexicologist Sidney Landau points out in one of the best overviews of dictionaries, that is almost certainly a good thing:

Some of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century lexicographers publicly acknowledged their indebtedness to specific predecessors. Sad to say, very few twentieth-century lexicographers have done so. The pressures of the marketplace dictate that every dictionary be “new.” A really new dictionary would be a dreadful piece of work, missing innumerable basic words and senses, replete with absurdities and unspeakable errors, studded with biases and interlarded with irrelevant provincialisms.
5

CHAPTER
7

NEW WORLDS

Cartography in an Age of Discovery

Scientific cartography took a great step backward in the early Christian world. The Greeks had done sophisticated scientific calculations on the size and shape of the earth, and Islamic geographers were mapping the extremities of the known world. In Christendom, though, the cartographic enterprise was much less energetic. People who believed that all the answers could be found in the Bible also believed that calculation and observation were unnecessary. Cosmas Indicopleustes, a merchant and traveler, published a map in his
Aigyptiou Manachou Christianike Topographia
(
Christian Topography
, around
540
C.E.
) that rendered a flat earth with far more attention to the position of Eden than the position of the Scilly Isles. All his evidence was from the Bible. He had no truck with “the miserable Pagan belief that earth and heaven are spherical.” “What can be more absurd,” he asked, “than the Pagan doctrine? … The Pagans are at war with divine Scripture.”
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Not until
1410
did one of the ancient works of geography reenter European consciousness, when a Latin version of Ptolemy’s
Geographike hyphegesis
turned up. For the next century, Europeans were busy both rediscovering ancient knowledge about the world and discovering other things for the first time.

Beginning in the sixteenth century, as Europe underwent the cultural changes known collectively as the Renaissance, both the intellectual and the physical world got bigger. It was the great age of exploration, when European powers set out across the oceans and discovered that the
world was many times larger than their predecessors had imagined. Abraham Ortelius’s
Theatre of the World
described the globe early in the age of European expansion, while Johann Bayer’s catalog of the stars was the result of a different kind of exploration taking place around the same time.

After being neglected for centuries, the best cartographic works of antiquity were resurrected in the fifteenth century and discovered to be compatible with Christian understandings of the world. Ptolemy’s
Geography
was a newfound favorite; even Pope Pius II wrote a commentary on it, and his successor Julius II commissioned wall maps in the Loggia del Cosmografia in the Vatican.
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The
Geography
was first printed in 1475, and six editions appeared across Europe in the next quarter century, many of them supplemented with new maps of regions the ancient geographer never dreamed of.

The fifteenth century was also the beginning of Europe’s great age of exploration. Diego de Silves discovered the Azores in 1427, Portuguese explorers found Cape Verde in 1446, Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488, Christopher Columbus spied land in 1492, John Cabot landed in Newfoundland in 1497, and Amerigo Vespucci identified the Amazon in 1499. All of their discoveries were added to the best maps of the ancients, and brand-new maps were constantly being drawn. One of the greatest cartographers of the early sixteenth century was Gerardus Mercator, known as the “Ptolemy of his time.” He was born in Rupelmonde, in modern Belgium, and educated in Brabant. Mercator earned a living producing scientific and mathematical instruments, and in the mid-1530s he and some associates produced a globe. Mercator was involved because of his talent as an engraver, but he soon demonstrated a cartographic knack, and he began making his own maps in 1537, starting with views of the Holy Land and moving on a year later to a world map. As a friend of Mercator put it, his European map “attracted more praise from scholars everywhere than any similar geographical work which has ever been brought out.”
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It was a new era for cartography.

Even more important than Mercator, though, was one of his friends. Abraham Ortelius—known in his native Dutch as Ortels—was born in
Antwerp in 1528, and although he traveled throughout Europe, he always returned to the city of his birth. Antwerp was a perfect base for a sixteenth-century geographer. Now in Belgium, it was then part of the Seventeen Provinces, ruled by Habsburg Spain. When Ortelius was born it was a city of ninety thousand people and an intellectual hub, with the Plantijn printing house based there and the great humanist scholar Desiderius Erasmus in nearby Rotterdam. It was an artistic as well as an intellectual center, and some of the greatest artists of the day—Titian, Tintoretto, Bruegel—were active in the area. Most important for Ortelius, though, was Antwerp’s place at the center of the administration of a great commercial empire. Some of the biggest businesses in sixteenth-century Antwerp were the trade in sugar, pepper, and cinnamon, with imports coming from the Portuguese and Spanish colonies in the New World. Every day hundreds of oceangoing vessels docked in Antwerp. The trade in luxury goods from the empire poured money into the city, which became one of the largest in Europe, and one of the richest—according to historian Fernand Braudel, “the centre of the
entire
international economy.”
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This is the vantage point from which the great mapmaker saw the world. Ortelius took a job around 1547 as an engraver, reproducing others’ maps in print, and then as a map illuminator, hand-coloring engraved maps and mounting them on linen backing. Cartography was getting a boost from a new technology, as the old carved woodblocks were giving way to engraved copperplates, producing at least three benefits: maps could show much more detail; the plates could be kept and revised as necessary; and they could make many more impressions, leading to more copies at a lower price.

Like Mercator, Ortelius began strictly as an engraver, but cartography appealed to him as well. He traveled widely—to Italy, to Frankfurt, to Paris, to England—sometimes with Mercator. He drew on this firsthand knowledge of the world when he moved from engraving others’ work to making his own around 1564, when his first map—
Typus orbis terrarum
, a world map—appeared. He followed it up a year later with a map of Egypt and went on to produce important maps of Asia and Spain.

Ortelius was more than a craftsman: he was a serious thinker about geography and cartography. Christophe Plantijn published his
Synonymia
geographica
in 1578, a sophisticated theoretical consideration of the value of ancient sources of geographical information. Ortelius would revise the
Synonymia
several times, using the title
Thesaurus geographicus
for the later editions. The final edition, published in 1596, seems to have been the first work to propose a theory that would be demonstrated by science only in the twentieth century. Ortelius noticed that the contours of continents thousands of miles apart are curiously complementary, as if they had once been joined: the eastern coast of South America, for instance, seems as if it was meant to interlock with the western coast of Africa. Ortelius imagined that catastrophic forces—earthquakes, floods—might have somehow torn the continents apart. No one took this eccentric thought seriously for centuries, but the idea was revived in the early twentieth century, and in 1926 someone coined the term
continental drift
. The phenomenon was finally demonstrated convincingly in the 1960s—a third of a millennium after Ortelius had the initial brainstorm.