An old but favorite BSI annual dinner talk (1989) that I published in Baker Street Miscellanea 62, Summer 1990, and try to update (below, in offset text in blue) as new information comes to me. AND NOW, A WORD 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 remarkable vigor in both our tongue and the world’s English-speaking community. Compare our situation with that of France, for example, where the venerable Academie Française works hard to keep new words out of the French language, especially ones with unseemly Anglo-Saxon origins. For over seventy years, the Oxford English Dictionary has been the definitive authority on English vocabulary, illustrating historical and contemporary usages with some two million literary and journalistic quotations. The Dictionary’s first section of the letter A appeared in 1884, and the final section was eventually published in 1928: twelve massive volumes, a marvel of lexicography thousands of pages long, recording, defining, and documenting the English language. Subsequent to that, five equally massive supplements were also published, recording the continuing growth and development of the language. The OED’s first Supplement and Bibliography was published in 1933, later to be superseded by a modern four-volume Supplement appearing between 1972 and 1986.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.” I Arthur Conan Doyle, be it noted, did his part to enrich the English language. Researching this was an intriguing challenge. The 15,385 pages of entries in the OED proper are enough to daunt Jabez Wilson, the dupe in the Sherlock Holmes story “The Red-Headed League” who was set to copying out the Encyclopedia Britannica by hand. But releasing it on CD-ROM made running down all the entry-words from Conan Doyle’s works possible. And a long list it is: over 400, from 21 Conan Doyle books, six of them from the Sherlock Holmes Canon: A Study in Scarlet; The Sign of the Four; The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes; The Memoirs; The Return; and His Last Bow. The seventy-four entry-words from the Canon are 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,” and his use of thumb-mark comes from his historical novel Micah Clarke, though its line “it is impossible to get the thumb-marks of any two men to be alike” was surely perspicacious for 1887, when the novel was written, anticipating Sherlock Holmes’s exchange on fingerprints with the police in “The Norwood Builder” by sixteen years. (It was disappointing to find that the OED did not draw upon Conan Doyle to illustrate the various meanings of the word detective—not even consulting detective, though Sherlock Holmes claimed to be the world’s first. Later, however, the OED’s modern Supplement added a new definition for the word consultant: “a person qualified to give professional advice or services; also spec. a private detective,” justifying this definition with a quotation from “Silver Blaze”: “I am rather disappointed in our London consultant.” Consulting-room, as “a room in which a consultation takes place; esp. the room in which a doctor examines his patients,” goes back to 1843, but Conan Doyle got partial credit for both the canonical “Two men had come from Paddington and were waiting in the consulting room,” in “The Engineer’s Thumb,” and the noncanonical “If you will wait here in the consulting-room I have no doubt that I shall be able to send the doctor in to you,” from Round the Red Lamp, a collection of medical stories. Only the former was retained by the modern Supplement from the 1933 Supplement and Bibliography.) But some canonical entry-words are Sherlockian bell-ringers, such as tantalus and dottle. Some are British slang such as fiver and ripping, or American slang such as deader and woozy. A few are foreign words, such as Lunkah and Trichinopoly. Some betray medicine’s influence in Dr. Conan Doyle’s writing; when Dr. Watson spoke of Holmes adorning the wall of 221B “with a patriotic V.R. done in bullet-pocks,” for example, the OED says he made a fresh use of the medical term meaning “a spot or mark like a pustule.” Other examples show the equally strong influence of Conan Doyle’s love of sports, such as A Study in Scarlet’s “I told you that, whatever happened, Lestrade and Gregson would be sure to score.” Few words were actually coined by Conan Doyle, of course. Mostly he created new and original uses of existing words. The OED has a “third class carriage on the Underground” in A Study in Scarlet as that term’s earliest recorded reference to London’s Metropolitan Railway, for example (though Michael Harrison, in London by Gaslight, tells us that Londoners were already calling it that when its first line was still under construction in 1860). Another term for which Conan Doyle gets first credit is snackle, defined as “to secure, to make fast.” The vengeful fugitive Jefferson Hope uses it toward the end of 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 Conan Doyle gets sole credit, for the OED records no other use before or since his, and says that the word is “of obscure origin.” Perhaps snackled was Conan Doyle’s attempt at the sound of American slang, but it may have been simply a misprint for shackled that survived from Beeton’s Christmas Annual for 1887, where A Study in Scarlet first appeared, into all subsequent editions of the first Sherlock Holmes tale. Since the manuscript is lost, probably we shall never know for sure. A more likely example of Doylean originality is the modest word snick. The OED knows no earlier use of it to mean “a sharp noise, a click” than “The Naval Treaty”: “suddenly there came from the window a sharp metallic snick.” Often the possible borrowings are thought-provoking. In “The Stockbroker’s Clerk,” for example, the villainous Beddington brothers are seeking “a young, pushing man with plenty of snap about him.” That 1893 use is interesting, because the term, in its meaning of “alertness, energy, vigor, ‘go’,” is American in origin, the OED says. The only earlier use that the OED records is from 1872: “I like to see a man who has got snap in every part of him.” The person who wrote that was the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, and it is not too difficult to imagine that Beecher’s book once lay on Conan Doyle’s desk, even before Watson displayed Beecher’s portrait (“The Cardboard Box” tells us) at 221B Baker Street. II The name Sherlock Holmes appears in only one OED quotation from 1928, from a December 9, 1899, London Daily News item, found 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?” But 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, 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 the term Sherlock Holmes were given in that historic 1933 entry, the earliest from a long-forgotten 1899 Introduction to Science: “a coincidence that would hardly be devised in the fertile brain of a Sherlock Holmes.” Not “of Sherlock Holmes,” mind, but “of a Sherlock Holmes”—that was the OED’s point about the term Sherlock Holmes having penetrated the language. George Bernard Shaw followed in 1903, calling a feminine character in Man and Superman “a regular Sherlock Holmes”; and a 1929 novel called Roper’s Row, by G. W. Deeping, supposedly coined a pleasant turn of phrase with the passage: “Let’s do a little Sherlock Holmesing.” We don’t often see that particular expression these days. To my ear, it has a pleasant old-fashioned sound. It seems to have been fairly common usage once, and 1929, it turned out later, was not the first time that it appeared in print. When the final volume of the OED Supplement appeared in 1986, its continuing entry for Sherlock Holmes noted several more uses and permutations of “Sherlock Holmesing,” beginning in 1922 with James Joyce’s Ulysses, no less: “He had been meantime taking stock of the individual in front of him and Sherlock-holmesing him up.”* ______________________ *[Jon L., 3/29/07] In Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters, ed. by Jon Lellenberg, Daniel Stashower & Charles Foley (New York: Penguin Press, London: HarperCollins, 1907), an earlier use of this term than the OED records, by A. Conan Doyle himself, in a November 1893 letter from Newcastle-upon-Tyne to his sister Lottie: “I don’t know how you got at me here . . . . You’ve been Sherlock-Holmesing me.” ______________________ By 1896, in fact, the Master actually rated two entries in the OED Supplement, one under Sherlock Holmes, and an even longer one under Sherlock alone. No big surprise to find Sherlock used as a noun or verb by such writers as Dorothy L. Sayers, in 1928, or even Rudyard Kipling, in 1932: “We aren’t exactly first-class Sherlocks,” he wrote in Limits & Renewals. No great surprise either to find Sherlockian scholars like Howard Haycraft and William S. Baring-Gould contributing new usages of their hero’s name. Stronger evidence of the universality of the great detective was provided by 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 question twice.”) Sherlockians have occasionally wondered when and what the first use of the term Sherlockian was. I once contended that it was at the turn of the century in The Bookman, that wonderful literary journal for a more literary age, but I was bluffing. I was unsure when the term was first used, or even why I thought it had been there. But happily the OED Supplement agrees, citing a comment in The Bookman in 1903: “If you decipher this you are a real Sherlockian.” Sherlockiana made its debut much later, in 1942, says the OED, in Murder for Pleasure, Howard Haycraft’s history of the detective story, when Haycraft referred to “Vincent Starrett’s Private Life of Sherlock Holmes with its valuable appended bibliography of Sherlockiana.” Tempting as it is to accept this, Haycraft commenting on Starrett, I find it difficult to believe that there are no earlier uses of the term Sherlockiana. Perhaps the OED needs a Sherlockian among its army of volunteer readers. Or a Holmesian. Holmesian is an entry in the OED Supplement too, defined as: “A. adj. Of, pertaining to, or in the manner of Sherlock Holmes. B. sb. A devotee of Sherlock Holmes.” The earliest use of which the OED’s editors are aware occurs in the 1929 novel Man in Queue by “G. Daviot”—actually Josephine Tey’s first novel, The Man in the Queue: “Grant disclaimed any such Holmesian qualities.” Other examples in the OED introduce us to supposedly first references to Holmesian scholars, the Holmesian saga, Holmesian costume, etc., including, in 1972, the felicitous observation of the Times Literary Supplement that “the great Holmesian game trundles along with unabated vigor.” Overlooked, though, to the pain of Baker Street Irregulars, is the term’s use in 1930 by the BSI’s founder, Christopher Morley—“Holmesians and Doyleites”—in his foreword to first American Complete Sherlock Holmes, still in print today. 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—not to mention being “used allusively of one who acts similarly as a stooge or audience, esp. for a detective.” The earliest example given is from the 1927 mystery novel The Three Taps by Monsgr. Ronald A. Knox, who as an undergraduate at Oxford in 1911 wrote a paper called “Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes” which defined what the Times Literary Supplement called the great Holmesian game. “Watson-work,” wrote Knox in 1927, “meant that Angela tried to suggest new ideas to her husband under a mask of carefully assumed stupidity.” Poor Watson, libeled even by the father of our own Higher Criticism!* Other usages of Watson followed Knox’s, by Dorothy L. Sayers, P. G. Wodehouse, Agatha Christie, and some others less obviously owing homage to the creator of Sherlock Holmes. _______________________ I wrote this long ago, when I had not yet begun to research the BSI’s history. As I did, in the years that followed, I learned better, and you can too. ______________________ Watsonian is a separate entry in the OED’s Supplement (“a. Of, pertaining to, or characteristic of someone called Watson”), though our Watson has to share the entry with the American behavioral psychologist J. B. Watson. The earliest Watsonian reference to our Watson is a 1940 comment, in mystery writer E. C. Bentley’s reminiscences, Those Days, about “Watsonian chronology” being discussed at the dinners of London’s Sherlock Holmes Society in the 1930s. Among several other examples, there is a strange one from a 1966 issue of the British magazine Encounter: “Just one more case of Watsonian blackmail.” What could Encounter—a political journal for Tory intellectuals—have meant by that? III But these are mere permutations of the proper names of literary heroes, whom we and countless writers have celebrated in print for more than a century now. I must report some failures by devoted Sherlockians regarding the English language, at least as enshrined by the OED. In 1933, one OED definition of Canon was “the collection of books of the Bible accepted by the Christian Church as genuine and inspired; also, any set of sacred books.” When in 1972 the OED Supplement extended the definition to include “those writings of a secular author accepted as authentic,” the examples given could, and should, have included Sherlock Holmes as well as Plato and Shakespeare. They did not.* Baker Street Irregularity, moreover, Irregularity with a capital I, is still unrecognized by the OED. And while the abbreviation BSI is recognized by the OED, its editors know it only as indicating the “British Standards Institution”! Obviously the BSI has work ahead of itself in its self-appointed task of thoroughly confusing the archaeologists of the future.** _______________________ * [Jon L., 8/22/10] The earliest example of which I’m aware is the unsigned editorial “A Plea for a More Liberal Spirit in the Criticism of the Sherlock Holmes Canon” in the November 11, 1932, Cambridge Review, reprinted in Baker Street Miscellanea 3, September 1975. ** [Jon L., 9/8/10] No doubt to Irregular dismay, “Baker Street Irregular Behavior” is now something in organizational science to be avoided. Using the example of how Holmes’ Irregulars pop in and out of the tales, management expert Stephen Balzac in his 7/13/10 American Management Association article “Baker Street Irregular Behavior in Your Organization” explains how many managers “tend to assume that the other players in the scenario are only there to support their goals,” leading to “narrow perspectives and a decreased willingness to work with others,” “increased friction,” and “lack of coordination” resulting in “significant waste of time and energy and significant increase in failure work.” “The key to preventing your organization from turning into a collection of Baker Street Irregulars is two-fold,” says Balzac at www.amanet.org/training/articles/Baker-Street-Irregular-Behavior-in-Your-Organization.aspx. (Though maybe too late for our BSI.) _______________________ Perhaps the most egregious omission from the OED is the memorable expression known as the “Sherlockismus.” A hypothetical (and incomplete) entry for it might go as follows: SHERLOCKISMUS. n. Also Sherlockism. Any of several kinds of memorable quotations or turns of phrase attributed to, or characteristic of, Sherlock Holmes (Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective). 1. A memorable interlocutory exchange between Holmes and any second party in which Holmes retains the investigational upper hand. 1912: “There is a special kind of epigram, known as the Sherlockismus, of which the indefatigable Ratzegger has collected no less than 173 instances.” Ronald A. Knox, “Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes,” Gryphon (Oxford University). 2. An enigmatic clue, described by Holmes to Watson (his foil) in the form of an ambage. 1949: “Call this ‘Sherlockismus’; call it any other fancy name; the fact remains that it is a clue, and a thundering good one at that.” John Dickson Carr, The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. 3. Any other memorable statement (whether by Holmes or one of his imitators), in the form of a maxim, hyperbole, meiosis, or antithesis, that is typical of Sherlock Holmes. 1988: “In other words, a Sherlockism is something said by Sherlock Holmes that is unique to Holmes.” George Scheetz, “The Sherlockismus Revisited,” Baker Street Journal. Somewhere, I believe, the mystery writer and critic Anthony Boucher coined the alternative term “Sherlocution” for the memorable and uniquely Sherlockian statement,* but I have not yet located the reference.** _______________________ [Jon L., 5/29/08] In the October 1957 Baker Street Journal, Edgar W. Smith used the term “Sherlocution” to refer to clerihews Sherlockian in nature. ** Tracked down 7/14/09 by Susan Vizoskie (“Mrs. Saunders,” BSI) in ch. 11 of Boucher’s The Case of the Baker Street Irregulars (1940): “…this bit of dialogue is a famous excerpt from the adventure ‘Silver Blaze’—perhaps the most noted example of that form of verbal riposte which Father Knox has christened the Sherlockismus, though Sherlockution is an alternative form which I find even more suitable.” ___________________ IV Finally, what about words or expressions created by Conan Doyle? Are there any from the Canon? Yes, there are: several at least. However, the first, grimpen, was probably included in the OED a trifle facetiously (however unlikely it may seem that the august Oxford English Dictionary would jest with the pure scholarly aspirations of its readers). The OED defines grimpen as “? A marshy area,” with that diffident question mark compounded by a comment that the word’s etymology is uncertain. That’s putting it mildly—though there is a strong Old English sound to it; Grendel might well live in a grimpen. The OED cites Watson’s marvelous 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 I suspect grimpen would have gone unrecognized by the OED, had it not been picked up by no less a poet than that Old Possum of closet Sherlockians, T. S. Eliot, whose 1940 poem East Coker includes the lines: We are only undeceived 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 there 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: William S. Baring-Gould’s prosaically factual comment in his 1967 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” on Dartmoor. Whenever the OED brings its record of the English language up to date again, it can add some further usages of grimpen. They come this time from the February 27, 1988, issue of The Blood-Horse, a magazine for the horsey set. Its editors do not take equine matters lightly. After a garbled summary of the OED’s exposition of the word grimpen, they launch into a heated discussion of what a pedestrian like myself would call “horse-doping,” referring along the way to (a) the need to extend the definition of grimpen “to include onslaughts of emotional verbiage ‘into which one may sink’”; (b) lemmings following one another into the great Grimpen Mire (an outré sight denied us by the author of The Hound of the Baskervilles); and (c) preventing the humane treatment of racehorses from sinking out of sight “in the great Grimpen Mire of rhetoric, theory, and off-target idealism.” One wishes the OED’s editors luck.* ______________________ [Jon L., 11/18/08] A new use of Grimpen in 2008 prompted a new term in computing as well. Wrote a computer-science blogger named Bill Thompson: “A while back I wrote a column about cloud computing in which I noted that the physical location our online services still matters, and commented that: ‘In the real world national borders, commercial rivalries and political imperatives all come into play, turning the cloud into a miasma as heavy with menace as the fog over the Grimpen Mire that concealed the Hound of the Baskervilles in Arthur Conan Doyle’s story.’ Nick Carr coined the phrase ‘miasma computing’ in response (and I wish I’d thought of it first!), and at GikIII recently the excellent Miranda Mowbray presented ‘The Fog over the Grimpen Mire: Cloud Computing and the Law’ [http://www.law.ed.ac.uk/ahrc/gikii/docs3/mowbray.pdf] which organiser Andres Guadamuz called ‘a virtuoso remix of Sherlock Holmes and cloud computing’ that was ‘both endearingly performed and absolutely spot on.’” (www.thebillblog.com/billblog/index.php/2008/11/18/grimpen-mire) One continues to wish the OED’s editors luck. _____________________ 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 Supplement cites a 1974 New Yorker article, though that quotation implies that the term was already in use by then to mean “the definitive piece of evidence that the President committed a crime.” Curiously, the OED entry for smoking gun, pistol calls it a specifically American term—failing to link its origin to a canonical 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 quotation from Chaucer, and the ninth, with which we are concerned here, comes from a Sherlock Holmes story narrated by Holmes himself, “The ‘Gloria Scott’”: “The chaplain stood with a smoking pistol in his hand.” (While the OED failed to make the connection, the Watergate expression’s origin was traced back to Sherlock Holmes by William Safire in his 1979 New York Times article “Sweet Land of Euphemism,” and specifically to “The ‘Gloria Scott’,” with the help of BSI Peter E. Blau, in Safire’s book On Language the following year.) _____________________ Thaddeus Holt comments: “‘Smoking gun” was a term and concept when I took Evidence at Harvard Law School in 1955-56, and I imagine long had been in evidence courses. It was the classic example of strong circumstantial evidence. That A was found standing over B’s body holding a smoking gun was circumstantial evidence that A shot B. It was part of every lawyer’s vocabulary, I believe. That’s surely the root of its usage in connection with Watergate. And I strongly question whether GLOR is the “origin” of such an obvious phrase, pace Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoking_gun ______________________ The OED’s modern four-volume Supplement also listed, among half a dozen more Conan Doyle titles, The Valley of Fear. Browsing through it one day, I thought perhaps the term brain-wave might be an instance of Doylean originality: “One more coruscation, my dear Watson,” says Holmes: “Yet another brain-wave.” Wrong. Brain-wave was in use as early as 1869. So much for my brain-wave. I do have one last example of Doylean originality to offer, however, from The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes. That volume of the Canon was not even mentioned in the OED’s bibliographies, and yet this particular Doylean expression may be his least likely contribution of all to our language. The Oxford English Dictionary gives Arthur Conan Doyle credit for inventing the term—wait for it: wonder-woman—of all things! The term was used by Sherlock Holmes, readers will recall, to describe Miss 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 in another Sherlock Holmes story, “His Last Bow,” called suffragettes “window-breaking Furies,” and blamed them on German agitators! That’s pretty wondrous in its own right. The creator of Sherlock Holmes never loses his ability to surprise us. Return to About Me Return to Welcome page

An old but favorite BSI annual dinner talk (1989) that I published in Baker Street Miscellanea 62, Summer 1990, and try to update (below, in offset text in blue) as new information comes to me.

AND NOW, A WORD 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 remarkable vigor in both our tongue and the world’s English-speaking community. Compare our situation with that of France, for example, where the venerable Academie Française works hard to keep new words out of the French language, especially ones with unseemly Anglo-Saxon origins.

For over seventy years, the Oxford English Dictionary has been the definitive authority on English vocabulary, illustrating historical and contemporary usages with some two million literary and journalistic quotations. The Dictionary’s first section of the letter A appeared in 1884, and the final section was eventually published in 1928: twelve massive volumes, a marvel of lexicography thousands of pages long, recording, defining, and documenting the English language. Subsequent to that, five equally massive supplements were also published, recording the continuing growth and development of the language. The OED’s first Supplement and Bibliography was published in 1933, later to be superseded 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.”

Arthur Conan Doyle, be it noted, did his part to enrich the English language. Researching this was an intriguing challenge. The 15,385 pages of entries in the OED proper are enough to daunt Jabez Wilson, the dupe in the Sherlock Holmes story “The Red-Headed League” who was set to copying out the Encyclopedia Britannica by hand. But releasing it on CD-ROM made running down all the entry-words from Conan Doyle’s works possible. And a long list it is: over 400, from 21 Conan Doyle books, six of them from the Sherlock Holmes Canon: A Study in Scarlet; The Sign of the Four; The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes; The Memoirs; The Return; and His Last Bow.

The seventy-four entry-words from the Canon are 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,” and his use of thumb-mark comes from his historical novel Micah Clarke, though its line “it is impossible to get the thumb-marks of any two men to be alike” was surely perspicacious for 1887, when the novel was written, anticipating Sherlock Holmes’s exchange on fingerprints with the police in “The Norwood Builder” by sixteen years.

(It was disappointing to find that the OED did not draw upon Conan Doyle to illustrate the various meanings of the word detective—not even consulting detective, though Sherlock Holmes claimed to be the world’s first. Later, however, the OED’s modern Supplement added a new definition for the word consultant: “a person qualified to give professional advice or services; also spec. a private detective,” justifying this definition with a quotation from “Silver Blaze”: “I am rather disappointed in our London consultant.” Consulting-room, as “a room in which a consultation takes place; esp. the room in which a doctor examines his patients,” goes back to 1843, but Conan Doyle got partial credit for both the canonical “Two men had come from Paddington and were waiting in the consulting room,” in “The Engineer’s Thumb,” and the noncanonical “If you will wait here in the consulting-room I have no doubt that I shall be able to send the doctor in to you,” from Round the Red Lamp, a collection of medical stories. Only the former was retained by the modern Supplement from the 1933 Supplement and Bibliography.)

But some canonical entry-words are Sherlockian bell-ringers, such as tantalus and dottle. Some are British slang such as fiver and ripping, or American slang such as deader and woozy. A few are foreign words, such as Lunkah and Trichinopoly. Some betray medicine’s influence in Dr. Conan Doyle’s writing; when Dr. Watson spoke of Holmes adorning the wall of 221B “with a patriotic V.R. done in bullet-pocks,” for example, the OED says he made a fresh use of the medical term meaning “a spot or mark like a pustule.” Other examples show the equally strong influence of Conan Doyle’s love of sports, such as A Study in Scarlet’s “I told you that, whatever happened, Lestrade and Gregson would be sure to score.”

Few words were actually coined by Conan Doyle, of course. Mostly he created new and original uses of existing words. The OED has a “third class carriage on the Underground” in A Study in Scarlet as that term’s earliest recorded reference to London’s Metropolitan Railway, for example (though Michael Harrison, in London by Gaslight, tells us that Londoners were already calling it that when its first line was still under construction in 1860). Another term for which Conan Doyle gets first credit is snackle, defined as “to secure, to make fast.” The vengeful fugitive Jefferson Hope uses it toward the end of 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 Conan Doyle gets sole credit, for the OED records no other use before or since his, and says that the word is “of obscure origin.” Perhaps snackled was Conan Doyle’s attempt at the sound of American slang, but it may have been simply a misprint for shackled that survived from Beeton’s Christmas Annual for 1887, where A Study in Scarlet first appeared, into all subsequent editions of the first Sherlock Holmes tale. Since the manuscript is lost, probably we shall never know for sure.

A more likely example of Doylean originality is the modest word snick. The OED knows no earlier use of it to mean “a sharp noise, a click” than “The Naval Treaty”: “suddenly there came from the window a sharp metallic snick.” Often the possible borrowings are thought-provoking. In “The Stockbroker’s Clerk,” for example, the villainous Beddington brothers are seeking “a young, pushing man with plenty of snap about him.” That 1893 use is interesting, because the term, in its meaning of “alertness, energy, vigor, ‘go’,” is American in origin, the OED says. The only earlier use that the OED records is from 1872: “I like to see a man who has got snap in every part of him.” The person who wrote that was the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, and it is not too difficult to imagine that Beecher’s book once lay on Conan Doyle’s desk, even before Watson displayed Beecher’s portrait (“The Cardboard Box” tells us) at 221B Baker Street.

The name Sherlock Holmes appears in only one OED quotation from 1928, from a December 9, 1899, London Daily News item, found 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?” But 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, 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 the term Sherlock Holmes were given in that historic 1933 entry, the earliest from a long-forgotten 1899 Introduction to Science: “a coincidence that would hardly be devised in the fertile brain of a Sherlock Holmes.” Not “of Sherlock Holmes,” mind, but “of a Sherlock Holmes”—that was the OED’s point about the term Sherlock Holmes having penetrated the language. George Bernard Shaw followed in 1903, calling a feminine character in Man and Superman “a regular Sherlock Holmes”; and a 1929 novel called Roper’s Row, by G. W. Deeping, supposedly coined a pleasant turn of phrase with the passage: “Let’s do a little Sherlock Holmesing.”

We don’t often see that particular expression these days. To my ear, it has a pleasant old-fashioned sound. It seems to have been fairly common usage once, and 1929, it turned out later, was not the first time that it appeared in print. When the final volume of the OED Supplement appeared in 1986, its continuing entry for Sherlock Holmes noted several more uses and permutations of “Sherlock Holmesing,” beginning in 1922 with James Joyce’s Ulysses, no less: “He had been meantime taking stock of the individual in front of him and Sherlock-holmesing him up.”*

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*[Jon L., 3/29/07] In Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters, ed. by Jon Lellenberg, Daniel Stashower & Charles Foley (New York: Penguin Press, London: HarperCollins, 1907), an earlier use of this term than the OED records, by A. Conan Doyle himself, in a November 1893 letter from Newcastle-upon-Tyne to his sister Lottie: “I don’t know how you got at me here . . . . You’ve been Sherlock-Holmesing me.”

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By 1896, in fact, the Master actually rated two entries in the OED Supplement, one under Sherlock Holmes, and an even longer one under Sherlock alone. No big surprise to find Sherlock used as a noun or verb by such writers as Dorothy L. Sayers, in 1928, or even Rudyard Kipling, in 1932: “We aren’t exactly first-class Sherlocks,” he wrote in Limits & Renewals. No great surprise either to find Sherlockian scholars like Howard Haycraft and William S. Baring-Gould contributing new usages of their hero’s name. Stronger evidence of the universality of the great detective was provided by 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 question twice.”)

Sherlockians have occasionally wondered when and what the first use of the term Sherlockian was. I once contended that it was at the turn of the century in The Bookman, that wonderful literary journal for a more literary age, but I was bluffing. I was unsure when the term was first used, or even why I thought it had been there. But happily the OED Supplement agrees, citing a comment in The Bookman in 1903: “If you decipher this you are a real Sherlockian.” Sherlockiana made its debut much later, in 1942, says the OED, in Murder for Pleasure, Howard Haycraft’s history of the detective story, when Haycraft referred to “Vincent Starrett’s Private Life of Sherlock Holmes with its valuable appended bibliography of Sherlockiana.” Tempting as it is to accept this, Haycraft commenting on Starrett, I find it difficult to believe that there are no earlier uses of the term Sherlockiana. Perhaps the OED needs a Sherlockian among its army of volunteer readers.

Or a Holmesian. Holmesian is an entry in the OED Supplement too, defined as: “A. adj. Of, pertaining to, or in the manner of Sherlock Holmes. B. sb. A devotee of Sherlock Holmes.” The earliest use of which the OED’s editors are aware occurs in the 1929 novel Man in Queue by “G. Daviot”—actually Josephine Tey’s first novel, The Man in the Queue: “Grant disclaimed any such Holmesian qualities.” Other examples in the OED introduce us to supposedly first references to Holmesian scholars, the Holmesian saga, Holmesian costume, etc., including, in 1972, the felicitous observation of the Times Literary Supplement that “the great Holmesian game trundles along with unabated vigor.” Overlooked, though, to the pain of Baker Street Irregulars, is the term’s use in 1930 by the BSI’s founder, Christopher Morley—“Holmesians and Doyleites”—in his foreword to first American Complete Sherlock Holmes, still in print today.

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—not to mention being “used allusively of one who acts similarly as a stooge or audience, esp. for a detective.” The earliest example given is from the 1927 mystery novel The Three Taps by Monsgr. Ronald A. Knox, who as an undergraduate at Oxford in 1911 wrote a paper called “Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes” which defined what the Times Literary Supplement called the great Holmesian game. “Watson-work,” wrote Knox in 1927, “meant that Angela tried to suggest new ideas to her husband under a mask of carefully assumed stupidity.” Poor Watson, libeled even by the father of our own Higher Criticism!* Other usages of Watson followed Knox’s, by Dorothy L. Sayers, P. G. Wodehouse, Agatha Christie, and some others less obviously owing homage to the creator of Sherlock Holmes.

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*I wrote this long ago, when I had not yet begun to research the BSI’s history. As I did, in the years that followed, I learned better, and you can too.

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Watsonian is a separate entry in the OED’s Supplement (“a. Of, pertaining to, or characteristic of someone called Watson”), though our Watson has to share the entry with the American behavioral psychologist J. B. Watson. The earliest Watsonian reference to our Watson is a 1940 comment, in mystery writer E. C. Bentley’s reminiscences, Those Days, about “Watsonian chronology” being discussed at the dinners of London’s Sherlock Holmes Society in the 1930s. Among several other examples, there is a strange one from a 1966 issue of the British magazine Encounter: “Just one more case of Watsonian blackmail.” What could Encounter—a political journal for Tory intellectuals—have meant by that?

III

But these are mere permutations of the proper names of literary heroes, whom we and countless writers have celebrated in print for more than a century now. I must report some failures by devoted Sherlockians regarding the English language, at least as enshrined by the OED. In 1933, one OED definition of Canon was “the collection of books of the Bible accepted by the Christian Church as genuine and inspired; also, any set of sacred books.” When in 1972 the OED Supplement extended the definition to include “those writings of a secular author accepted as authentic,” the examples given could, and should, have included Sherlock Holmes as well as Plato and Shakespeare. They did not.* Baker Street Irregularity, moreover, Irregularity with a capital I, is still unrecognized by the OED. And while the abbreviation BSI is recognized by the OED, its editors know it only as indicating the “British Standards Institution”! Obviously the BSI has work ahead of itself in its self-appointed task of thoroughly confusing the archaeologists of the future.**

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* [Jon L., 8/22/10] The earliest example of which I’m aware is the unsigned editorial “A Plea for a More Liberal Spirit in the Criticism of the Sherlock Holmes Canon” in the November 11, 1932, Cambridge Review, reprinted in Baker Street Miscellanea 3, September 1975.

** [Jon L., 9/8/10] No doubt to Irregular dismay, “Baker Street Irregular Behavior” is now something in organizational science to be avoided. Using the example of how Holmes’ Irregulars pop in and out of the tales, management expert Stephen Balzac in his 7/13/10 American Management Association article “Baker Street Irregular Behavior in Your Organization” explains how many managers “tend to assume that the other players in the scenario are only there to support their goals,” leading to “narrow perspectives and a decreased willingness to work with others,” “increased friction,” and “lack of coordination” resulting in “significant waste of time and energy and significant increase in failure work.” “The key to preventing your organization from turning into a collection of Baker Street Irregulars is two-fold,” says Balzac at www.amanet.org/training/articles/Baker-Street-Irregular-Behavior-in-Your-Organization.aspx. (Though maybe too late for our BSI.)

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Perhaps the most egregious omission from the OED is the memorable expression known as the “Sherlockismus.” A hypothetical (and incomplete) entry for it might go as follows:

SHERLOCKISMUS. n. Also Sherlockism. Any of several kinds of memorable quotations or turns of phrase attributed to, or characteristic of, Sherlock Holmes (Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective). 1. A memorable interlocutory exchange between Holmes and any second party in which Holmes retains the investigational upper hand. 1912: “There is a special kind of epigram, known as the Sherlockismus, of which the indefatigable Ratzegger has collected no less than 173 instances.” Ronald A. Knox, “Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes,” Gryphon (Oxford University). 2. An enigmatic clue, described by Holmes to Watson (his foil) in the form of an ambage. 1949: “Call this ‘Sherlockismus’; call it any other fancy name; the fact remains that it is a clue, and a thundering good one at that.” John Dickson Carr, The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. 3. Any other memorable statement (whether by Holmes or one of his imitators), in the form of a maxim, hyperbole, meiosis, or antithesis, that is typical of Sherlock Holmes. 1988: “In other words, a Sherlockism is something said by Sherlock Holmes that is unique to Holmes.” George Scheetz, “The Sherlockismus Revisited,” Baker Street Journal.

Somewhere, I believe, the mystery writer and critic Anthony Boucher coined the alternative term “Sherlocution” for the memorable and uniquely Sherlockian statement,* but I have not yet located the reference.**

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*[Jon L., 5/29/08] In the October 1957 Baker Street Journal, Edgar W. Smith used the term “Sherlocution” to refer to clerihews Sherlockian in nature.

** Tracked down 7/14/09 by Susan Vizoskie (“Mrs. Saunders,” BSI) in ch. 11 of Boucher’s The Case of the Baker Street Irregulars (1940): “…this bit of dialogue is a famous excerpt from the adventure ‘Silver Blaze’—perhaps the most noted example of that form of verbal riposte which Father Knox has christened the Sherlockismus, though Sherlockution is an alternative form which I find even more suitable.”

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Finally, what about words or expressions created by Conan Doyle? Are there any from the Canon? Yes, there are: several at least.

However, the first, grimpen, was probably included in the OED a trifle facetiously (however unlikely it may seem that the august Oxford English Dictionary would jest with the pure scholarly aspirations of its readers). The OED defines grimpen as “? A marshy area,” with that diffident question mark compounded by a comment that the word’s etymology is uncertain. That’s putting it mildly—though there is a strong Old English sound to it; Grendel might well live in a grimpen. The OED cites Watson’s marvelous 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 I suspect grimpen would have gone unrecognized by the OED, had it not been picked up by no less a poet than that Old Possum of closet Sherlockians, T. S. Eliot, whose 1940 poem East Coker includes the lines:

We are only undeceived

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 there 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: William S. Baring-Gould’s prosaically factual comment in his 1967 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” on Dartmoor.

Whenever the OED brings its record of the English language up to date again, it can add some further usages of grimpen. They come this time from the February 27, 1988, issue of The Blood-Horse, a magazine for the horsey set. Its editors do not take equine matters lightly. After a garbled summary of the OED’s exposition of the word grimpen, they launch into a heated discussion of what a pedestrian like myself would call “horse-doping,” referring along the way to (a) the need to extend the definition of grimpen “to include onslaughts of emotional verbiage ‘into which one may sink’”; (b) lemmings following one another into the great Grimpen Mire (an outré sight denied us by the author of The Hound of the Baskervilles); and (c) preventing the humane treatment of racehorses from sinking out of sight “in the great Grimpen Mire of rhetoric, theory, and off-target idealism.”

One wishes the OED’s editors luck.*

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*[Jon L., 11/18/08] A new use of Grimpen in 2008 prompted a new term in computing as well. Wrote a computer-science blogger named Bill Thompson: “A while back I wrote a column about cloud computing in which I noted that the physical location our online services still matters, and commented that: ‘In the real world national borders, commercial rivalries and political imperatives all come into play, turning the cloud into a miasma as heavy with menace as the fog over the Grimpen Mire that concealed the Hound of the Baskervilles in Arthur Conan Doyle’s story.’ Nick Carr coined the phrase ‘miasma computing’ in response (and I wish I’d thought of it first!), and at GikIII recently the excellent Miranda Mowbray presented ‘The Fog over the Grimpen Mire: Cloud Computing and the Law’ [http://www.law.ed.ac.uk/ahrc/gikii/docs3/mowbray.pdf] which organiser Andres Guadamuz called ‘a virtuoso remix of Sherlock Holmes and cloud computing’ that was ‘both endearingly performed and absolutely spot on.’” (www.thebillblog.com/billblog/index.php/2008/11/18/grimpen-mire)

One continues to wish the OED’s editors luck.

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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 Supplement cites a 1974 New Yorker article, though that quotation implies that the term was already in use by then to mean “the definitive piece of evidence that the President committed a crime.” Curiously, the OED entry for smoking gun, pistol calls it a specifically American term—failing to link its origin to a canonical 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 quotation from Chaucer, and the ninth, with which we are concerned here, comes from a Sherlock Holmes story narrated by Holmes himself, “The ‘Gloria Scott’”: “The chaplain stood with a smoking pistol in his hand.” (While the OED failed to make the connection, the Watergate expression’s origin was traced back to Sherlock Holmes by William Safire in his 1979 New York Times article “Sweet Land of Euphemism,” and specifically to “The ‘Gloria Scott’,” with the help of BSI Peter E. Blau, in Safire’s book On Language the following year.)

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Thaddeus Holt comments: “‘Smoking gun” was a term and concept when I took Evidence at Harvard Law School in 1955-56, and I imagine long had been in evidence courses. It was the classic example of strong circumstantial evidence. That A was found standing over B’s body holding a smoking gun was circumstantial evidence that A shot B. It was part of every lawyer’s vocabulary, I believe. That’s surely the root of its usage in connection with Watergate. And I strongly question whether GLOR is the “origin” of such an obvious phrase, pace Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoking_gun

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The OED’s modern four-volume Supplement also listed, among half a dozen more Conan Doyle titles, The Valley of Fear. Browsing through it one day, I thought perhaps the term brain-wave might be an instance of Doylean originality: “One more coruscation, my dear Watson,” says Holmes: “Yet another brain-wave.” Wrong. Brain-wave was in use as early as 1869. So much for my brain-wave. I do have one last example of Doylean originality to offer, however, from The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes. That volume of the Canon was not even mentioned in the OED’s bibliographies, and yet this particular Doylean expression may be his least likely contribution of all to our language. The Oxford English Dictionary gives Arthur Conan Doyle credit for inventing the term—wait for it: wonder-woman—of all things! The term was used by Sherlock Holmes, readers will recall, to describe Miss 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 in another Sherlock Holmes story, “His Last Bow,” called suffragettes “window-breaking Furies,” and blamed them on German agitators! That’s pretty wondrous in its own right. The creator of Sherlock Holmes never loses his ability to surprise us.

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