From Andrew M. Colman
Samuel Johnson famously defined lexicographers as “harmless drudges”, and
charity demands that we at least give these unfortunates credit when it’s due.
I’m grateful to Laurie John for his kind review of the Oxford Dictionary of
Psychology (24 March, p 52), but I wish
I had not been described as its editor.
At the risk of milking the sympathy vote, I must admit that I wrote every
single word of this Bible-sized dictionary.
It’s ironic that the dictionary entry on Pepper’s ghost, to which John
referred in his review, cites another case of credit cruelly denied. Pepper’s
ghost was, in fact, invented by the retired civil engineer and patent agent
Henry Dircks, and it should have been called
Dircks’s ghost.
Leicester
