Mind Your Language | 10 July 2004

I had just looked up a phenomenon that a sharp-eared reader had heard on the wireless — the remarkable ‘double is’ — in Robert Burchfield’s New Fowler’s, when the telephone rang and I heard that he was dead. Dr Burchfield was a New Zealander, born in 1923, who developed a fascination for language in Trieste where he was serving during the second world war. As a Rhodes Scholar he read English at Magdalen, Oxford, where C.S. Lewis was a Fellow. Lewis was a mediaevalist, but it was J.R.R. Tolkien, the Merton Professor of English Language, who proved to be the ‘fisherman who drew me into his philological net’, Burchfield recalled. He worked with C.T. Onions on the Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, (1966), but the four volumes of the Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary are his monument. They appeared between 1972 and 1986, providing new words, missed words, earlier citations, and words from ‘world English’.