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A Verb for Our Frantic Times

Sam Potts

ANSWERS:1. Run aground. 2. A run in her stocking. 3. Take the money and run. 4.Run it up the flagpole. 5. Also-ran. 6. Run a fever. 7. Running on empty. 8. Runs in the

family. 9. Home run. BONUS: "Along the riverrun" from "Finnegans Wake" by James

Joyce.

By SIMON WINCHESTER

Published: May 28, 2011

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Sandisfield, Mass.

HER birthday: must set plans in motion. Run a bath, put on cologne, set the table. High

anxiety. Run down list: set watch again, put water in glasses, set flowers. Run to thewindow phew! Watch her put a finger to the doorbell. Such joy! What timing! And

just as the sun sets, too!

Thus does an evening beckon, full of pleasantry and promise. But as described here itnotes events in a manner of considerable interest for the lexicographer. For scattered

within the vocabulary of this 54-word drama are 11 uses of the three most complex verbs

in the English language: set, put and run.

Each of the trio is possessed of so many meanings, senses and shadings of interpretationas to have occupied for months, even years, the exceptionally agile minds working on the

next edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (expected in 2037). Recently an amiablecontest has been fought to determine which verb has the most meanings of all. Which is

the most lustrously complex word among the three quarters of a million or so words andsenses that make up this vast mongrel tongue we know as the English language?

Well, according to the O.E.D.s chief editor, John Simpson, we now have a winner

and a winner that may well say something about the current state of English-speakinghumankind. For while in the first edition of the O.E.D., in 1928, that richest-of-all-words

was set (75 columns of type, some 200 senses), the victor in todays rather more frantic

and uncongenial world is, without a doubt, the three-letter word run.

You might think this word simply means to go with quick steps on alternate feet, neverhaving both or (in the case of many animals) all feet on the ground at the same time. But

no such luck: that is merely sense I.1a, and there are miles to go before the reader of this

particular entry may sleep.

It took Peter Gilliver, the O.E.D. lexicographer working on the letter R, more than ninemonths harnessed to the duties of what Samuel Johnson once called a harmless drudge

(plus many more months of preparatory research) to work out what he believes are all the

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meanings of run. And though some of the senses and their derivations try him Why

does a dressmaker run up a frock? Why run through a varlet with a sword? How come

you run a fence around a field? Why, indeed, run this essay? Mr. Gilliver has finallycalculated that there are for the verb-form alone of run no fewer than 645 meanings. A

record.

In terms of sheer size, the entry for run is half as big again as that for put, a word on

which Mr. Gilliver also worked some years ago. But more significantly still, run is alsofar bigger than the old chestnut set, a word that, says Mr. Gilliver, simply hasnt

undergone as much development in the 20th and 21st centuries as has run.

But why? The decline of set is the more readily explicable. Basically I think put

killed set, another lexicographer mused to Mr. Gilliver in an only-in-Oxford pub chatrecently, noting that you now put a vase on the mantel, rather than set it there, and put

words on paper, not set them.

Explaining why run has so greatly expanded its semantic territory is more difficult. Theword has exploded with the increase in the number of machines and computers: a train

runs on tracks, a car runs on gas, an iPad runs apps. But simultaneously, there have also

been countless revivals of antique non-mechanical senses: you now run out on someone,

you run something past someone. Old runs are, in other words, generating newmeanings, a demonstration of the living nature of the language.

Between set and run (and their cousins) there are trans-Atlantic cultural differences,

as you would expect. In the United States, for example, a political candidate will run for

office, while in England he is content still to merely stand. And though stand and setare only marginally similar in meaning, their joint difference from run is suggestive of

another, deeper reason behind the acceleration of run and the enervating stodginess ofset. It reminds us of the difference between static and mobile, between energy andsolidity why dear old clubbable, sedentary and generally contented set has at long

last been outstripped by sweaty, muscular, fitness-obsessed and six-pack-muscled run.

For while set stood for stability and sturdy conservatism, so the newfangled, richest-of-

all-todays-words run is all about ambition and optimism and the possibilities of thefuture. Set is England, old and fusty. Run is America, new and cool. Set is

yesterday, run is tomorrow. In short: to set is human, but to run divine.