It’s still a good thing

A good dictionary of quotations is part-reference book, part-anthology. It is a place where you go to check things up, and where you stay to browse. Many of the items it includes are there not so much because people are actually in the habit of quoting them, but because they are judged to be quotable.

The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, which was first published in 1941, has always been committed to this double role, with conspicuous success. But over the years there has been a shift of emphasis. The original dictionary broadly reflected the culture of club, common room and rectory. In later editions, the compilers have come to take a more democratic (or realistic) view of what most readers are likely to be familiar with. They have extended an increasing welcome to the popular and the contemporary, to mass entertainment, the media and everyday speech.

The new, seventh edition, edited by Elizabeth Knowles, takes the process a stage further. Rather too far, if one were to judge by some of the more breathless publicity it has received — most notably the excitement over the inclusion among those quoted of Paris Hilton. But publicity is publicity, and it can be misleading. Anyone worried that the dictionary’s traditional strengths have been jettisoned need take only the briefest glance at the contents for reassurance. There are still 100 quotations from Virgil, for instance, and no less than 240 from Milton.

As for the inroads of popular culture, they are as justifiable in principle — this is the world we live in — as they are entertaining in practice. They can be most easily inspected in the special sections on advertising slogans, headlines, film titles and the like, where there is much happy delving to be done, and where many memories are stirred — not least of what has been left out.