Why did the tosser citation from Finnegans Wake have the OED scratching their heads?
"Suck it yourself, sugarstick! Misha, Yid think whose was asking to luckat your sore toe or to taste your gaspy, hot and sour! Icthyan! Hegvat tosser! Gags be plebsed!"
Wordhunters located the word tosser in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, which led to a tricky decision for the OED. Peter Gilliver explains why this was not a straightforward citation:
Peter Gilliver, OED Associate Editor: James Joyce plays such games with language that it's very often impossible to be sure exactly what he means by a particular word. Sometimes he even deliberately uses more than one meaning of a word simultaneously. In this case he could be using tosser to mean "a person who tosses" in any of various senses; there's nothing in the context which definitely indicates one meaning rather than another. He might have been using it in the modern slang sense - but he might not. And for us to include the quotation as our first example of the abusive sense of tosser we have to be sure.
What did the Sir Richard Burton handwritten letter actually say?
Another seemingly exciting find was the discovery of a 1877 letter from explorer Sir Richard Burton which seemed to refer to the inhabitants of a certain Indian town as pratts. But on closer inspection of the original handwritten letter (see picture above), all was not as it seemed…
John Simpson, OED Chief Editor: The OED proudly relies principally on printed evidence, but we have to remember all the time that even this can be faulty. Typesetters key the wrong spellings, editors misread their text, proof-readers blink and pass over a mistake. Whenever a piece of evidence looks shaky, we have to prod a little deeper to check that it stands up to scrutiny.
And this was precisely what happened with the supposed predating (by a hundred years) of prat, in a modern text transcribing documents from the mid nineteenth century. We knew prat from the second half of the twentieth century, but to see pratt in what was clearly the right sense in a text from one hundred years earlier was something of a surprise.
Immediately our lexicographical antennae were out. The old meaning of prat was ‘backside’ (as in a pratfall). That meaning goes way back. And it’s not unusual for words meaning ‘backside’ to develop a later meaning ‘fool, idiot’. So semantically (or in terms of meaning) there was nothing stopping prat developing this sense as early as the nineteenth century, even though it might have been a one-off instance unrelated to the modern use.
So in theory it was feasible. In practice we were still suspicious, and felt that it was necessary to look at the original manuscript to see whether the editor had misread the word. I’m glad to say that during the first series of Balderdash & Piffle we must have trained Victoria Coren so well that before filming she’d arranged for a photocopy of the original document to be made, which she presented to us with a flourish on set. As soon as we saw the original we knew it wasn’t prat. The handwriting was difficult, but after peering at the text for several minutes one of my colleagues felt that it might represent mull (some way from pratt), and confirmed from the OED that a mull was a European official serving in the former Madras Presidency in southern India – which was just the location of the action described in the source. Problem solved, except for anyone reading the modern edition in future!
Prompted by this discovery of mull, which was a later example than the OED had previously found, we’re updating that entry too with further documentation – though the term is of course nowadays only found in a historical context.