conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a description for a story titled The Professor and the Madman about Minor, Oxford, English with the genre: Biographies & Memoirs, Historical.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: When the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary put out a call during the late 19th century pleading for "men of letters" to provide help with their mammoth undertaking, hundreds of responses came forth. Some helpers, like Dr. W.C. But Minor, an American expatriate in England and a Civil War veteran, was actually a certified lunatic who turned in his dictionary entries from the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. the author has produced a mesmerizing coda to the deeply troubled Minor's life, a life that in one sense began with the senseless murder of an innocent British brewery worker that the deluded Minor believed was an assassin sent by one of his numerous "enemies."
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Add another sentence about Minor, provided.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: When the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary put out a call during the late 19th century pleading for "men of letters" to provide help with their mammoth undertaking, hundreds of responses came forth. Some helpers, like Dr. W. C. Minor, provided literally thousands of entries to the editors. But Minor, an American expatriate in England and a Civil War veteran, was actually a certified lunatic who turned in his dictionary entries from the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. the author has produced a mesmerizing coda to the deeply troubled Minor's life, a life that in one sense began with the senseless murder of an innocent British brewery worker that the deluded Minor believed was an assassin sent by one of his numerous "enemies. "
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a plot for a story titled The Professor and the Madman about Minor, Oxford, English with the genre: Biographies & Memoirs, Historical.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Professor and the Madman (film): The film is about a professor who in 1857 began compiling the OED and led the overseeing committee and a doctor who submitted over 10,000 entries when he was a convict at an asylum for the criminally insane.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first four paragraphs for this story.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Professor and the Madman
  The mission library at Manepay was well stocked, and though the accommodation for the family was "very poor," according to Judith's diaries, the mission school itself was excellent—allowing young William to win a markedly better education than he might have received back in New England. His father's printing tasks gave him access to literature and newspapers; and his parents traveled by horse and buggy often, taking him along and encouraging him to learn as many of the local languages as possible. By the time he was twelve he spoke good Singhalese and is supposed to have had a fair grounding in Burmese, as well as some Hindi and Tamil, and a smattering of various Chinese dialects. He also knew his way around Singapore, Bangkok, and Rangoon, as well as the island of Penang, off the coast of what was then British Malaya.
  William was just thirteen, he later told his doctors, when he first started to enjoy "lascivious thoughts" about the young Ceylonese girls on the sands around him: they must have seemed a rare constant in a shifting, inconstant life. But by the time he was fourteen, his parents (who were perhaps aware of his pubescent longings) decided to send him back to the United States, well away from the temptations of the tropics. He was to live with his uncle Alfred, who then ran a large crockery shop in the center of New Haven. So William was seen off from the port of Colombo on one of the regular P & O liners that made the unendurably lengthy passage between Bombay and London—via (this being in 1848, long before the completion of the Suez Canal) the long seas around the Cape of Good Hope.
  He later admitted to vividly erotic recollections from the voyage. In particular he remembered being "fiercely attracted" to a young English girl he met aboard ship. He seems not to have been warned that long tropical days and nights at sea—combined with the slow, rocking motion of the swell and the tendency for women to wear short, light cotton dresses and for bartenders to offer exotic drinks—could very well, in those days as well as these, lead to romance, particularly when one or even both sets of parents were absent.
  Much appears to have happened during the four weeks at sea—though not, perhaps, the ultimate. The friendship appears to have gone unconsummated, no matter how much time the pair spent alone. Many years later Minor was to point out to his doctors that, as with his fantasies over the young Indian girls, he never "gratified himself in an unnatural way" or ever let his sexual feelings for his fellow passenger get the better of him. Matters might have turned out very differently if they had.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me five more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Once this was done, Murray would take the collections of slips for each of the subgroups for any distinct and defined target word and arrange or rearrange or further subdivide them as he saw fit. He would write and insert the word's etymology (which Oxford, despite the existence of its own etymological dictionary, did in the end see fit to allow Murray to include) and its pronunciation—a tricky decision, and one likely to provoke, as it has, ceaseless controversy—and then make a final selection of the very best quotations. Ideally there should be at least one sentence from the literature for each century in which the word was used—unless it was a very fast-changing word that needed more quotations to suggest the speed of its new shadings.
  Finally, with that all squared away, Murray would write the concise, scholarly, accurate, and lovingly elegant definition for which the Dictionary is well known—and send the finished columns over to the press. It would be set in a Clarendon or an Old Style typeface (or in Greek or other foreign or Old English or Anglo-Saxon face when needed), and returned to the Scriptorium, printed in galley. It was ready to be set onto a page, and the page made into a form for placing on the great letterpress engines in the stone printing works down in the back of Walton Street.
  Murray was no whiner, but his letters tell a great deal about the difficulty of the task he had set himself—and that the publishers, who wanted to see a return on their investment, in turn had set him. The expressed hope was that two parts—six hundred pages of finished dictionary—might be published each year. Murray himself tried gallantly to complete work on thirty-three words every day—and yet "often a single word, like Approve...takes 3/4 of a day itself."
  Murray spoke of the trials of the work in his presidential address to the Philological Society, and a subsequent Athenaeum article in March 1884—an article that led to his first real contact with William Minor. He referred to the difficulty "of pushing our way experimentally through an untrodden forest where no white man's ax has been before us."
  Only those who have made the experiment know the bewilderment with which editor or sub-editor, after he has apportioned the quotations for such a word as above...among 20, 30 or 40 groups, and furnished each of these with a provisional definition, spreads them out on a table or on the floor where he can obtain a general survey of the whole, and spends hour after hour in shifting them about like pieces on a chess-board, striving to find in the fragmentary evidence of an incomplete historical record, such a sequence of meanings as may form a logical chain of development. Sometimes the quest seems hopeless; recently, for example, the word art utterly baffled me for several days: something had to be done with it: something was done and put in type; but the renewed consideration of it in print, with the greater facility of reading and comparison which this afforded, led to the entire pulling to pieces and reconstruction of the edifice, extending to several columns of type.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Reverse the sentences.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Sometimes the quest seems hopeless; recently, for example, the word art utterly baffled me for several days: something had to be done with it: something was done and put in type; but the renewed consideration of it in print, with the greater facility of reading and comparison which this afforded, led to the entire pulling to pieces and reconstruction of the edifice, extending to several columns of type..among 20, 30 or 40 groups, and furnished each of these with a provisional definition, spreads them out on a table or on the floor where he can obtain a general survey of the whole, and spends hour after hour in shifting them about like pieces on a chess-board, striving to find in the fragmentary evidence of an incomplete historical record, such a sequence of meanings as may form a logical chain of development..."
  Only those who have made the experiment know the bewilderment with which editor or sub-editor, after he has apportioned the quotations for such a word as above. He referred to the difficulty "of pushing our way experimentally through an untrodden forest where no white man's ax has been before us."
  Murray spoke of the trials of the work in his presidential address to the Philological Society, and a subsequent Athenaeum article in March 1884—an article that led to his first real contact with William Minor.takes 3/4 of a day itself... Murray himself tried gallantly to complete work on thirty-three words every day—and yet "often a single word, like Approve. The expressed hope was that two parts—six hundred pages of finished dictionary—might be published each year.
  Murray was no whiner, but his letters tell a great deal about the difficulty of the task he had set himself—and that the publishers, who wanted to see a return on their investment, in turn had set him. It was ready to be set onto a page, and the page made into a form for placing on the great letterpress engines in the stone printing works down in the back of Walton Street. It would be set in a Clarendon or an Old Style typeface (or in Greek or other foreign or Old English or Anglo-Saxon face when needed), and returned to the Scriptorium, printed in galley.
  Finally, with that all squared away, Murray would write the concise, scholarly, accurate, and lovingly elegant definition for which the Dictionary is well known—and send the finished columns over to the press. Ideally there should be at least one sentence from the literature for each century in which the word was used—unless it was a very fast-changing word that needed more quotations to suggest the speed of its new shadings. He would write and insert the word's etymology (which Oxford, despite the existence of its own etymological dictionary, did in the end see fit to allow Murray to include) and its pronunciation—a tricky decision, and one likely to provoke, as it has, ceaseless controversy—and then make a final selection of the very best quotations.Once this was done, Murray would take the collections of slips for each of the subgroups for any distinct and defined target word and arrange or rearrange or further subdivide them as he saw fit
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: There was a brief pause, a momentary air of mutual embarrassment. A clock ticked loudly. There were muffled footsteps in the hall. A distant clank of keys. And then the man behind the desk cleared his throat, and he spoke:
  Although the official government files relating to this case are secret, and have been locked away for more than a century, I have recently been allowed to see them. What follows is the strange, tragic, yet spiritually uplifting story they reveal.
  Copies of Doctor Johnson's Dictionary can usually still be found quite easily—reproductions of the large-format two-volume editions have been produced on presses in such unlikely settings as the city of Beirut, from where I recently purchased a copy for $250. It is difficult to find a good first edition for under $15,000. But there is a witty and useful distillation, with words selected by E. L. McAdam and George Milne (Pantheon, New York, 1963; paperback reprint, Cassell, London, 1995).
  The Oxford University Press deserves a history of its own, and indeed has several: I recommend Peter Sutcliffe's The Oxford University Press: An Informal History (Oxford University Press, 1978), which covers the saga of the making of the OED very well, and with reasonable impartiality.
  The nature of the possible mental ailments that plagued Doctor Minor, which may have been triggered by his experiences during the war, are comprehensively explained by Gordon Claridge in Origins of Mental Illness (ISHK Malor Books, Cambridge, Mass., 1995). Andrew Scull's splendid Masters of Bedlam (Princeton University Press, 1996) offers a fascinating history of the mad-doctoring trade before the times of psychiatric enlightenment.