The Word Detective

Balderdash and Piffle, the TV show mentioned late in the book, was my first introduction to the OED and the concept of antedating. I became enamoured right away with the thought of trying to find the earliest occurrence of a word, and have long since thought “That'd be an interesting job” Turns out after reading this book that it probably wouldn't be my dream job. It still interests me for the detective/research elements but sounds quite tedious in ways that I hadn't considered.

I mistakenly thought the book would deal more with the hunting down of words and meanings (the title does kind of lean that way) but found it somewhat disappointing to discover much of it was about the history of an office department and how their ways of doing things involved through the years. I much preferred the asides where the author talked about this histories and changing meanings of certain words and would've enjoyed more of that.

In addition, I just couldn't warm to the author (outside of feeling sympathy for the issues with his daughter) As a reader, he seemed to speak down to me quite often - “If you didn't spot that, then you're not good enough to work here” (possibly, but I don't read books for criticism of my work ethic) and I'm surprised to see other reviewers describe him as funny, because I thought his attempts at humour were trying too hard.

Still, it was an enjoyable enough read, and I subscribed to the online OED afterwards (I still want to antedate words), so job done Mr. Simpson.