Harmless drudges

I was in Kilkenny's spanking new library filling in time before a visit to the dentist. It is, as all public libraries, richer in 400s "Language" than 500s "Science & Math". But I snagged (423.0922) The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary (2023) by Sarah Ogilvie. And I was rewarded in the snagging - it's great. 
The famous post-box [L cropped under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 from the work of Kaihsu Tai] outside 78 Banbury Road, Oxford where James Murray and 3000 others built the OED. We only know about the 3000 [!] because, in her last week as an Oxford lexicographer, Ogilvie opened a random box in the archive to reveal James Murray's address book. "It was one of those moments when things go into slow motion": as well it might for an archivist to discover The Archive.

She set out on an academic research project to track down and bring to life some of the ace, biased, crazy, dogged, eccentric contributors to the cause of describing the English language as it is used. OED has always been, thus, descriptivist rather than proscriptive = telling people to speak proper. It was an early example of crowd-sourcing. Biased? The English speaking world from America to Zanzibar was asked to read what they liked and thence choose illustrative usage quotes attached to words each reader thought needed that treatment. Thus, a District Officer in India might write 'slips' on khan, pagoda, puggaree, turban; while an ardent suffragette submitted emancipatress, womanist and hungerstruck. Or a doctor might abstract a lot of long words from an anatomy textbook and Editor Murray would feel obliged to include them even as they slipped from  normal usage. And if no wannabee amateur lexicographer turned up from Britain's African colonies? Then loan-words from Hausa and Swahili are invisible to the OED. The slips for Interesting contributors and editors have been shuffled and dealt by Ogilvie into 26 chapters from 'A for Archaeologist' to 'Z for Zealot'. 

Three of the top four contributors were banged up in Lunatic Asylums, while the 4th was an official in such an institution. One of them, William Douglas, submitted 150,000 slips over 22 years which works out at 2 slips an hour for two decades assuming a 60hr working week. Then again, he didn't have a day job. There were also 3 murderers 'on the books' only one of whom was convicted and in Broadmoor. 

Despite his protestations that all of English, [genital] warts and all, should be recorded in his OED, Murray baulked at including several common taboo words. Apart from the Obscene Publications Act of 1857, it was the 1890s: Victorian respectability was a powerful determinative force. In 1877, a bibliography of obscene literature was published by "Pisanus Fraxi" a clever-clogs pseudonym for compiler Henry Ashbee [it's an anagram of Fraxinus ash & Apis bee] who had accumulated the world's largest library of naughty books. He also submitted A Lot of slips from these works pour épater le bourgeois Murray and make him blush.

Ogilvie herself is recording a change in English usage: p.9 Where they lived, what they did with their lives, who they loved, the books they read. Bob: Surely that who should be whom? Scribens agrees: all the other grammar checkers, which are legion, don’t give a damn. I guess whom is on the way out. 
And "Harmless drudge"? That would be a lexicographer.