aeroplane or airplane?

[Fantome]

If this is our biggest problem in life, then life must be pretty good.

Perhaps a trifle callow. Respect for words, their correct use and an interest in their derivation can be a welcome respite from weightier concerns.

'The Surgeon of Crowthorne' is a brilliant tale of a genius whose legacy today is a large slice of The Oxford English Dictionary. That he took a slice from himself is . . .. well read the book.

The Surgeon of Crowthorne

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Surgeon of Crowthorne: A Tale of Murder, Madness and the Love of Words is a book by Simon Winchester first published in 1998. The American edition is called The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, and was published the same year.
It tells the story of the making of the Oxford English Dictionary and one of its most useful early contributors, Dr. W.C. Minor, a retired United States Army surgeon. Minor was, at the time, imprisoned in the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, near the small town of Crowthorne in Berkshire, England. The 'professor' of the American title is presumably the chief editor of the OED during most of the project, James Murray, who had previously been a bank clerk and a schoolteacher, but never a professor.
This was Winchester's first major success as an author, after which he went on to write The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary about the broader history of the OED.