A few words from Arthur Conan Doyle
A few words from Arthur Conan Doyle is an article written by Jon L. Lellenberg published in the A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (Vol. 1, No. 1) in september 1989.
The article examines Arthur Conan Doyle's contributions to the English language, using the Oxford English Dictionary to show how his writing introduced hundreds of influential usages, especially through Sherlock Holmes and his historical novels. It argues that while Conan Doyle rarely coined entirely new words, his inventive, vivid deployment of existing language shaped modern English so deeply that even "Sherlock Holmes" itself became a dictionary entry.
A few words from Arthur Conan Doyle
According to the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary, more than 400 new words enter the English Language every year – proof of a remarkably vigorous language and worldwide English-speaking community. For over sixty years, the OED has been the definitive authority on English vocabulary, illustrating historical and contemporary usages with some two million literary and journalistic quotations. Arthur Conan Doyle's career as a writer encompassed its creation. The OED's first fascicle of the letter A appeared in 1884, and the final section was published in 1928: twelve massive volumes, a marvel of lexicography thousands of pages long, recording, defining, and documenting the English Language. Since then, five equally massive supplements have also been published, recording the continuing growth and development of the language. The OED's first Supplement and Bibliography was published in 1933, superseded since then by a modern four-volume Supplement appearing between 1972 and 1986. In considering what to add to their record of English words and usages, the OED's editors kept constantly before them 'the opposing concepts of permanence and ephemerality, retaining vocabulary that seemed likely to be of interest now and to future generations.' (1)
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Conan Doyle certainly did his part to enrich the language, contributing fresh and new meanings to the rich store of English vocabulary. Researching this, however, is an intriguing challenge, for the 15,385 pages of entries in the OED proper are enough to daunt even a Jabez Wilson. Fortunately they are now on CD-ROM, making it practical to run down all the quotations and entry words from Conan Doyle's works in twelve volumes of the OED published through 1928. That has been done, (2) and a long list it is: some 400 quotations from 21 of Conan Doyle's books. Six are Sherlock Holmes: A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of Four, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Memoirs, The Return, and His Last Bow, for a total of 76 quotations. The other books are Micah Clarke (137), The White Company (68), A Duet (21), The Tragedy of the Korosko (20), Rodney Stone (15), The Firm of Girdlestone (11), Round the Red Lamp (9), The Great Boer War (8), The Captain of the Pole-Star (7), The Green Flag (7), Sir Nigel (5), The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard (5), The Stark Munro Letters (5), The Refugees (4), and The Parasite (1).
Those approaching Conan Doyle from an immersion first and foremost in Sherlock Holmes may find entry-words from the Canon sometimes hard to pick out from the entire list. Conan Doyle's OED-worthy use of thumbless does not come from The Engineer's Thumb, but from The White Company, and his use of thumb-mark comes from Micah Clarke; though its line 'it is impossible to get the thumb-marks of any two men to be alike' strikes a Sherlockian note, and was surely perspicacious for 1887, when the novel was written. Not to deny Sherlock Holmes as a rich source of Doylean contributions to the OED – in one instance, a single sentence in The Naval Treaty contributed new usages to three different OED entry-words: 'She was a striking-looking woman, a little short and thick for symmetry, but with a beautiful olive complexion, large, dark Italian eyes, and a wealth of black hair.'
Some Canonical entry-words in the OED are Sherlockian bell-ringers like tantalus and dottle. Others are now-familiar British slang like fiver and ripping, or American slang like deader and woozy. Some betray medicine's influence on Conan Doyle's writing: when Holmes adorned the wall of 221B 'with a patriotic V.R. done in bullet-pocks', for example, Conan Doyle chose a fresh use of the medical term meaning 'a spot or mark like a pustule'. Other examples show the equally strong influence of sports, such as A Study in Scarlet's 'I told you that, whatever happened, Lestrade and Gregson would be sure to score.' The influence of medicine and sports on Conan Doyle's writing crops up again and again: to mention but two more examples, 'the line of white pain-drawn faces' from Micah Clarke, and 'We get hard knocks and no thanks, and why should we do it?' from The Tragedy of the Korosko.
Few words were actually coined by Conan Doyle, of course. Mostly he created new, fresh uses of existing words. Expressions like 'turning with a whisk on his heel' from Rodney Stone, and 'It was in this way,' he went on sinking his voice,' from Micah Clarke, and 'his occasional shabbiness in money matters' from A Duet, are typical examples of Doylean originality which the OED has noted. The unusually large number of quotations from Micah Clarke, Conan Doyle's fine tale of the Monmouth Rebellion, may largely be accounted for by his use of archaic (or archaic-sounding) words and expressions to give his historical novel its period feeling – but he did it with an innovative verve not equalled again in his career. (Not that some of his OED-worthy usages do not stand on their own regardless of period: like 'splitting a flask with our gallant Colonel', 'a score of unpronounceable fights in the Styrian Alps', or the very Doylean exhortation 'Strike quick, strike hard, and keep on striking.')
One word for which Conan Doyle does get first credit from the OED is snackle, defined as 'to secure, to make fast'. Jefferson Hope uses it in A Study in Scarlet: 'This young man here had the bracelets on my wrists and as neatly snackled as ever I saw in my life.' In fact the OED records no other use before or since, and says the word is 'of obscure origin'. Perhaps snackle was Conan Doyle's attempt at the sound of American slang; but it may have been simply a misprint for shackle that survived from Beeton's Christmas Annual into all subsequent book editions of the first Sherlock Holmes story. Since the manuscript is lost, we shall never know for sure.
More likely examples of Doylean innovation are some of his evocative expressions to describe sounds in print. Perhaps the most truly original is the modest word snick, from The Naval Treaty: 'suddenly there came from the window a sharp metallic snick.' The OED knows no earlier use of it to mean 'a sharp noise, a click'. Other Doylean examples are 'the phit-phit-phit of the bullets' (Korosko), 'getting so squeaky in the upper notes' (A Duet), 'a whip whistled in the darkness' (Rodney Stone), and 'much creaking of locks and rasping of bolts' and 'a splintering crash from inside the Cathedral' (Micah Clarke).
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Though Conan Doyle would be loath to agree, posterity's judgement is that Sherlock Holmes is his greatest work. The OED seems to concur today, even though the name Sherlock Holmes appeared in only one OED quotation (from a December 9, 1899, London Daily News item), under the entry thought-reading: 'Do you think your thought-reading gift could be turned to practical service in detective work – a thought-reading Sherlock Holmes?' For when the OED's Supplement and Bibliography was published in 1933, Sherlock Holmes had become sufficiently permanent a term in the English language to merit its own entry, with the following definition:
- SHERLOCK HOLMES. The name of the amateur detective who is the chief figure in the detective stories of A. Conan Doyle (1859–1931 [sic]) collected under the titles Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, etc.; used typically for a person who indulges in investigating and solving mysteries. Hence SHERLOCK (HOLMES) v.intr., to play the detective.
Five examples of the use of Sherlock Holmes were given in that historic entry, the earliest from an 1899 Introduction to Science: 'a coincidence that would hardly be devised in the fertile brain of a Sherlock Holmes.' Bernard Shaw followed in 1903, calling a character in Man and Superman 'a regular Sherlock Holmes'; and an obscure 1929 novel Roper's Row supposedly coined a peasant turn of phrase with the passage: 'Let's do a little Sherlock Holmesing.' (1929, it turned out later, was not the first time that the expression had appeared in print.) When the final volume of the OED Supplement appeared three years ago, it noted several more uses and permutations of Sherlock Holmesing, beginning now in 1922 with James Joyce's Ulysses: 'He had meantime been taking stock of the individual in front of him and Sherlock-holmesing him up.')
By 1986, in fact, Holmes rated two entries in the OED Supplement, one under Sherlock Holmes and an even longer one under Sherlock alone. No great surprise to find Sherlock used as a noun or a verb by writers like Dorothy Sayers, in 1928, or Rudyard Kipling, in 1932: 'We aren't exactly first-class Sherlocks,' he wrote in Limits and Renewals. No big surprise either to find Baker Street Irregulars like Howard Haycraft and William S. Baring-Gould contributing new usages of their hero's name. Stronger evidence of Holmes's universality were less likely creators of usages, writers as diverse as John Galsworthy, in his 1920 play Foundations ('Don't call the police! Let me do the Sherlocking for you'), and Jack Kerouac, in 1957's beat epic On the Road ('They tried some amateur Sherlocking by asking the same questions twice').
Watson finds a place in the OED today as well, identified as 'the name of the doctor who was the stolid, faithful assistant and foil of Sherlock Holmes – used allusively of one who acts similarly as a stooge or dupe, esp. for a detective.' The earliest example is from Ronald A. Knox's 1927 mystery The Three Taps: 'Watson-work meant that Angles tried to suggest new ideas to her husband under a mask of carefully assumed stupidity.' Other usages of Watson followed, by Dorothy Sayers, P.G. Wodehouse, Agatha Christie, and some others less obviously owing homage to the creator of Sherlock Holmes.
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What about words or expressions created by Conan Doyle? Are there any? Yes: at least several memorable ones, from Sherlock Holmes.
However, the first, grimpen, was perhaps included in the OED a bit facetiously. The OED defines grimpen as '? A marshy area', compounding that diffident question mark with a comment that the word's etymology uncertain. The OED cites Watson's marvellous passage in The Hound of the Baskervilles as the word's first known use in English literature: 'Life has become like that great Grimpen Mire, with little green patches everywhere into which one may sink and with no guide to point the track.' But grimpen might have gone unrecognised by the OED, had it not been picked up by no less a poet than old Possum of closet Sherlockians, T.S. Eliot, whose 1940 poem East Coker includes the lines:
- We are only deceived
- Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.
- In the middle, not only in the middle of the way
- But all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble,
- On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold,
- And menaced by monsters, fancy lights,
- Risking enchantment.
For surely Conan Doyle meant Grimpen (Mire) as a proper place name — and the OED lets us know that it is in on the joke with its final example: Baring-Gould's prosaically factual comment in The Annotated Sherlock Holmes that, 'as is well known, Watson's 'Great Grimpen Mire' is Grimspound Bog, three miles to the north and east of Widecombe-in-the-Moor.'
More familiar today is the term 'smoking gun' or 'smoking pistol. It came into common use during Watergate, to mean (the OED Supplement says) 'a piece of incontrovertible incriminating evidence.' The OED Supplement cites a 1974 New Yorker article, though that reference implies that the term was already in use by then. Curiously, the Supplement entry for smoking gun, pistol calls it an 'American term - failing to link its origin to a Doylean passage actually cited in the OED proper as the term's first use. Smoking is defined there as 'emitting or giving out smoke.' The usages illustrating that definition begin with a 1374 quote from Chaucer — and the ninth, with which we are concerned, comes from The Gloria Scott: 'The chaplain stood with a smoking pistol in his hand.' (For fans of American political scandals, there is another OED-worthy contribution to English vocabulary, from Sir Nigel: 'With his own hands he had shredded those august documents.')
The OED four-volume Supplement is not on CD-ROM, alas. Its 1986 bibliography lists five additional Conan Doyle titles: His Last Bow, The History of Spiritualism, The Lost World, The Maracot Deep, and The Valley of Fear. But the prospect of reading through the Supplement's 5,601 pages of fine-print entries to track down Conan Doyle's contributions is daunting. I do have one last example of Doylean originality to offer at this time, however, from The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes. That book is not even mentioned in the OED's bibliographies, and yet this particular Doylean expression may be his least likely contribution of all to the language. The OED Supplement gives Conan Doyle credit for inventing the term wonder-woman — of all things! It was used by Sherlock Holmes to describe Violet de Merville in The Adventure of the Illustrious Client: 'a wonder-woman in every way.'
Who would have thought it? Wonder-woman — from the same writer who called suffragettes 'window-breaking Furies' in His Last Bow. (3) The creator of Sherlock Holmes never loses his ability to surprise us.
(1) The totality has now been integrated in a new 1989 Second Edition of the OED: twenty volumes containing some 22,000 pages, 290,000 entry-words, and 2,500,000 quotations.
(2) With Peter E. Blau's help, exploiting the Library of Congress's CD-ROM facilities and resources. Using Conan Doyle as the key-word in the CD-ROM search was not enough: for a full count, searches had to be run for Doyle, A.C. Doyle, A. Conan Doyle, C. Doyle – and for Strand Magazine!
(3) This imaginative use of Furies to describe suffragettes is not in the OED. Why not? we may well ask.
- Article courtesy Christopher Roden, founder of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (1989-2003).
