Evans, Richard --- "A key to the culture" [1997] LawIJV 12; (1997) 71(1) The Law Institute Journal 28

• A key to the culture

A key to the culture

The Melbourne barrister who goes by the pen-name Melissa Chan once wrote a short story about a women's uprising in Canberra. Young mothers, rich and poor, are inspired to break their shackles by the workers at a nappy cleaning service who slip quotations from feminist writers into deliveries of clean nappies.

These enterprising rebels would be pleased with the revised 4th edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, which has just been released. Though still heavy on the dead white males, the ODQ has recognised that "sisterhood is powerful" (Robin Morgan, 1970) and that there is much justice in Esther Lewis' complaint "Why are the needle and the pen/ Thought incompatible by men?" (1754).

A good dictionary of quotations can be strangely humbling. It shows that many of the ideas and expressions we tend to think of as new - reflecting the greater wisdom of our own time - have been kicking around for centuries. For example, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote this in 1792: "Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison."

It is the older quotations in this dictionary which are the most interesting, and also tend to be better expressed. Perhaps unwisely, this revised edition includes a new section called "Sayings of the 90s". The heading seems a tad premature, and the content is disappointing - mostly clever gibes from the House of Commons, of little interest to those who have the good fortune to be unfamiliar with British politics.

Of more value are new sections on popular misquotations ("Beam me up, Scotty" was never said in any episode of Star Trek) and slogans ("No manager was ever fired for buying IBM" was an advertising slogan before it became an ironic observation on managerial conservatism).

But these are minor additions.

The substance of the ODQ - its well-ordered and indexed collection of 17,000-odd quotations from more than 2000 sources - remains a fascinating and endlessly readable collection, a useful checking reference and a valuable key to our culture, language and history.

As Angela Partington notes in her preface: "Often when we quote, or allude to a quotation, we do so without knowing we have done so: we are perhaps vaguely aware of expressing some well-worn idiom, but we think of it perhaps more in terms of a cliche than as being or be-longing to a saying with a known source.

"`There is method in my madness,' we say, or `I'm not my brother's keeper!', drawing as we think on a common stock of language.
"It is both the distinction and the fate of some of our best known language (notably that of Shakespeare and the Bible) that over time it is absorbed into our common vocabulary, becoming intrinsic to the way in which we express ourselves, and even to the way in which we think."

It will come as no great surprise that the way people have thought and expressed themselves about the law has varied little over the centuries. Some choice samples:

The hungry judges soon the sentence sign,
And wretches hang that jury-men may dine.

Alexander Pope, 1714

The one great principle of the English law is, to make business for itself

Charles Dickens, 1853

Laws are like cob-webs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.

Jonathan Swift, 1709

People crushed by law have no hopes but from power. If laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to laws; and those, who have much to hope and nothing to lose, will always be dangerous, more or less.

Edmund Burke, 1777

Gems like these, carefully placed, can add colour and life to an article or speech. They also have the great virtue of making you seem better read than you actually are.

There is a danger in this, of course: a good one-liner does not a philosophy make. Melissa Chan is wrong - it would take more than a few lines from Gloria Steinem to inspire a housewives' uprising, even in Canberra.

The ODQ is a superb reference, but it is not a substitute for reading the books.

In fact, its greatest value is probably in inspiring modern readers to take a look at writers long dead, writers who were not nearly as stuffy, old-fashioned and conser

vative as we tend to think. 

RICHARD EVANS