‘This is a good one,’ said my husband, bubbling into his Famous Grouse. ‘Abbreviator: An officer of the court of Rome appointed to draw up the Pope’s briefs.’
‘But that can’t possibly be a joke intended by James Murray or his collaborators working on the volume for “A” in the Oxford English Dictionary in the late 19th century,’ I said. ‘Briefs isn’t recorded in that sense until the 1930s.’
‘You can always spoil a joke,’ retorted my husband, returning to a less beetrooty hue.
To be fair, Simon Winchester in his new book on Murray and the OED had explained the impossibility of an intended joke. In fact I don’t think Mr Winchester’s book is so bad at all. But one strange statement did catch my eye. Walrus he says is a ‘classic example of an extremely ancient word’. Well, walrus is cited first from 1655, so it’s older than briefs or knickers, but in language terms it is modern.
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