Hi, I'm Daniel Tosh, host of new podcast called Tosh Show. I'll be interviewing people that I find interesting, so not celebrities and certainly not comedians. We'll be covering topics like religion, travel, sports, gambling, but mostly it will be about being a working mother. If you're looking for a podcast that will educate and inspire or one that will really make you think this isn't the one for you, listen to Tosh Show on the iHeartRadio App Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.

The assassination of President John F. Kennedy is the greatest murder mystery in American history.

That's Rob Reiner. Rob called me, Soledad O'Brien, and asked me what I knew about this crime.

We'll ask who had the motive to assassinate a sitting president? Then we'll pull the curtain back on the COVID up. The American people need to know the truth.

Listen to who killed JFK on the iHeartRadio App Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, everybody. We want to let you know that we are doing our traditional Pacific Northwest swing for our live show next year. In fact, the end of January next year, very early next year.

And we're starting out in Seattle, Washington, on January 24 at the Paramount Theater. It's huge.

That's right.

And then on to Portland on January 25 at Revolution Hall, the place we always are. It's kind of our home away from home in Portland. And then we're going to wrap it all up at the thing that started the Pacific Northwest tour in the first place all those years back. SF sketchfest will be at the Sydney Goldstein Theater on Friday, January 26. Right, Chuck?

That's right. And remember, you can go to Stuffyushudnow.com, click on tours in order to get to the correct ticket link or go to the venue page only do not go to scalper sites.

That's right. And we'll see you guys in January. Okay.

Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. There's Chuck. Jerry's here, too. And this is stuff you should know.

I believe A is in order.

Why?

Because we're debuting a brand new writer.

Oh, yeah. Great idea, Chuck. Thank you for doing that.

Yeah, welcome aboard. Allison Miller. Allison came to us this is by way of Livia. Right. As a recommendation.

Yep. We said, Livia, you're great. You know any other great writers? She said, Actually, I got one I can recommend. And here we are. Yeah.

And Allison Miller did. How it works here is we do, like, sort of a test article, and this is that test article. So it obviously worked. And Allison is a historian and researcher and just did a fantastic job. So welcome to the FAM, Allison.

Welcome. Allison here. I'll coordinate you, too.

Yeah, you do it better than me. So I was hoping you would chime in.

I just put some enthusiasm in. I think that's the difference.

That's right.

So, yeah, we're talking about the OED today. The Oxford English Dictionary. And I have to say, Allison knocked this one out of the park. I get the impression that she may or may not have read significant portions of the OED in her lifetime.

Yeah, I think Allison is smart, so.

She kind of starts off by talking about different kinds of dictionaries, which is significant because the OED, the Oxford English Dictionary, is a specific kind of dictionary. It's not a regular average Joe work. It a dictionary like some other dictionaries. The Oxford English Dictionary is a historical dictionary, so it not only tells you the definition of the word, there may even be multiple definitions. By the way, I don't know if you've ever looked at a dictionary before, but sometimes one word can have more than one definition. It's nuts, the OED says, and by the way, here's where that word came from, and here's examples of its first use. It's probably most recent use, or one of its most recent uses. So you can see how this specific word in the English language evolved over time. Yeah.

I didn't know that.

It's pretty ambitious.

It is. And historical dictionaries, they don't say, like, well, that meaning is not something that people use it for anymore, like macaroni, whatever the heck they meant in that song.

The Yankee Doodles Andy one. Yeah, I took that as a reference to pot.

But my point is, they don't say, like, let's get rid of that old definition. The whole idea for the OED is that the English language is alive, and so the OED is alive, and we're going to leave it in there and go forward in time. But if you want to look up these old usages and these old meanings, it's all right there for you in this massive, massive dictionary, whose aim was to include every word in the English language and every usage of that word.

Up until now, starting in 1150 Ce.

Yeah, as far as the words go, they didn't start the dictionary then, but they went back to Middle English to get what we now have as a third edition, more than 600,000 entries, of which we have 850,000 definitions. See 3 million of those quotations, which is amazing. And although I think we're locked in with the beginning in the end, because the first word is A, there's no way you can get before that in line.

No.

And the last word is ziziva. And there's no way that someone could create a word that is after Z-Y-Z-Y-V-A. It would have to be ZZ, z or ZZ Top.

I'm surprised they didn't mention ZZ Top.

Yeah, don't talk to me about cartoon sleep bubbles. So I think we're locked in as actually, Allison has a great title for this, the Oed a to Zizia. I'm sorry? Zizba. I already messed it up.

Well, it's a tough word. Z-Y-Z-Z-Y-V-A It's fun to spell out loud, because you say it like that with some oomph, but it's a tough word to say. Did you define it?

No, go ahead.

It's a weevil.

Yeah.

And it always was. So one thing about the OED, you might say, well, like, wow, that's a lot of information packed into one tome. You would be right. If you don't know much about the Oxford English Dictionary, you may at least have the idea that it's enormous, that it's way bigger than your average dictionary, because those 600,000 entries with 850,000 definitions and 3 million quotations, when you put them all together, it takes up a lot of space. In fact, by my estimate, it takes up something like an 8th of the entire Internet.

Right. Should we read some of this these fast stats?

Oh, yeah, let's do that.

So I believe this is the first volume.

Yeah. The whole first edition, I think.

Yeah, the whole first edition. So this isn't even the current edition. This is the one that was finished up in 1928. At the time, it had 415,000 words, half a million definitions, 1.8 million quotations. But this is the part I wanted to get to. 178 miles of type, 50 million words, 4ft of shelf space, and ten or 20 half volumes. So that Encyclopedia Britannica set you grew up with in your hallway, that's basically what this dictionary's first edition looked like.

Yeah. And back in 1928, I guess, when it came out, you paid about today's equivalent of 3360 pounds sterling for a dictionary about four grand in US dollars today. And according to the bank of England, that was equal to 228 days wages for a skilled worker in 1930. Imagine spending most of your year's salary on a dictionary.

Yeah. I think the point has got to be that very like, you had to be a very well healed person trying to impress other people by owning a copy of this thing back then, right?

Yeah. Or a library.

Well, exactly.

So, yeah, that was the first edition. It's gotten even bigger, as we've seen over time. And so now, finally, the Internet was born, I think, to house the third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, which is where we're at now. And one thing that they do, which is pretty sharp, as the dictionary comes out, new words are being added to it all the time. They're probably finding less and less old words that they hadn't included. But like you said, the English language is living, so it's expanding and contracting and adding new words to it all the time. So by the time those things go to press and that last volume of the edition comes out, there's words that are left over that are just constantly being added. So I think on a quarterly basis, they release supplements, essentially, that have new words that came out or were coined. Since the volume that contained that letter was published in the latest edition.

That's right. And we'll get to how those supplements figured in back then and what they do with those today. But the other really unique thing about The OED is that it is and always has been from the very, very beginning, a crowdsourced work. Right from the beginning. The editors, who we're going to talk about the original editors here in a minute, they said, hey public, we need help. So if you're into this, you've got a little time. If you like to read, if you're a linguist, you're into words. If you love language, go back to Chaucer, start reading and find these words that we're looking for. Find usages of these words to send into us by hand on they call it a slip, a little four by six sheet of paper and mail it into us. And you could very well have a hand in creating the Oxford English Dictionary.

Yeah, pretty cool. And they got a really great response to it and I think still do today.

Oh, for sure. But that also explains why you have quotes from Chaucer and Shakespeare and also, as Allison points out, quotes from like a social media post as a usage example of a word.

Yeah, she also used an example that came from the most recent quarterly update from September 2023, porch pirate appears in there. And so it's a really good illustration of what the OED does. They explain that it's someone who steals packages from doorsteps. Everybody knows that. But did you know that it first came about from a news segment on KFOR from Oklahoma Cities, one of their local broadcasting stations?

Yeah, so they'll have that.

Wait, you did know that?

No, well, no, I said they would have that I got you as like the example or whatever. And then if you want to dig deeper and just say, well, what about this word porch? Then they'll take you back to the 1300s with the definition of porch and then examples of these, what they call senses. Not a tense, it's a sense. It's like how the word is used, basically.

Yeah. And it might not be used that way anymore, necessarily.

Yeah. But they will have all of them listed. And you can see sort of the evolution of not only the word porch, but when you eventually get to something like porch Pirate.

Yeah. So it's pretty neat stuff like that's what they do. And they've been doing this for 100 something years since I think the first volume of the first edition came out and I think 1884. Right, yeah.

And those supplements you were talking about, I promise to kind of explain how they do things now for many, many years. They were released just like, hey, here's this extra thing. But it created a problem if you're like, well, wait a minute. Now I have to look up a word in two different places if it has a more modern usage.

Right.

And so eventually they started combining them. I think they finally did that in, what, 1989, where the supplements were actually worked into the main edition.

Yeah. Just the first edition.

Yeah. So they finished that in 1989. A couple of years before that, they had finally put it on a CD Rom, and then, like you said, it only exists today. Well, I mean, you can get copies, but they're not releasing, I don't think, print editions any longer. It's just an online subscription type thing now.

Yeah. And usually I mean, it's right, so yeah, subscription. So usually you can log in through your library.

Pretty neat.

They're also in the midst of putting out a third edition, so look for that in the next century.

That's right.

I say we take a little break, Charles, and then we'll come back and talk about the history of the OED, how we got here.

Let's do it.

The assassination of President John F. Kennedy is the greatest murder mystery in American history.

That's rob briner. Rob called me Soledad O'Brien, and asked me what I knew about this crime. I know 60 years later, new leads are still emerging. To me, an award winning journalist, that's the making of an incredible story. And on this podcast, you're going to hear it told by one of America's greatest storytellers.

We'll ask who had the motive to assassinate a sitting president?

My dad.

Bob JFK. Screwed us at the Bay of Pigs, and then he screwed us after the Cuban Missile crisis. We'll reveal why Lee Harvey Oswald isn't who they said he was. I was under the impression that Lee was being trained for a specific operation. Then we'll pull the curtain back on the COVID up. The American people need to know the truth.

Listen to who killed JFK on the iHeartRadio App Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi.

I'm Daniel Tosh, host of new podcasts called Tosh Show, brought to you by Iheart Podcasts. Why am I getting to the podcast game now? Well, seemed like the best way to let my family know what I'm up to. Instead of visiting or being part of their incessant group text, I'll be interviewing people that I find interesting. So not celebrities and certainly not comedians. I'll be interviewing my plumber, my stylist, my wife's gynecologist. We'll be covering topics like religion, travel, sports, gambling. But mostly it will be about being a working mother. If you're looking for a podcast that will educate and inspire or one that will really make you think, this isn't the one for you, but it will be entertaining to a very select few because you don't make it to your mid 40s with IBS without having a story or two to tell. Join me as I take my place among podcast royalty like Joel Olsteen and Lance Bass. Those are words I'd hope I'd never have to say. Listen to toss show on the iHeartRadio App Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.

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If Bob wrote the Cadaver note in his own words, he had murdered Susan Berman.

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So the OED is not the first English dictionary ever. In fact, the first one ever was from 16 four. It's called a table alphabetical of hard usual English words by Robert Caudrey. And he basically just put this together to help people, I guess, explain themselves in English better. It was, I think, words that were commonly used, but not necessarily commonly understood. So that was the first one. But I guess the OED really traces its spiritual roots to a more recent phenomenon that the Brothers Grimm had started, which was essentially a dictionary of a language in order to show the history of that language, ostensibly in order to prove how great that language actually was.

Yeah, we shout out to a couple of great episodes we did many years ago. One on the brothers grim. And was there one on Just the fairy tales?

Yes, they were like two parter. It was a two that was that.

Was a good series. So go back and listen to that. But Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm did what you said. They were like, hey, we want to create a German dictionary from Martin Luther on. Eventually they died before it came out, but it was called, I believe, the First Fascicle. And the Fascicle is just the first part, basically like, hey, we finished A through J or whatever.

Right.

I think the first Fascicle came out when they were alive. But of the Deutsche Vertebr, I love it. And I believe they died in the late 1859 for Wilhelm in 1863. And it finally came out in 1961 in full, so they weren't even close. And she points out to Allison that Jacob died at the F's. He was working on the word fruit or defrucht. Yeah, I want to say that was pretty good. Oh, you want to say it?

I want to say it, too. Deutsche's Vertebr, which means, literally, German word book. Right?

Yeah, it's more like buch.

Deutsche Vertebrtebuch.

Yeah. There you go.

Yeah, I said it way better in my head. I think I tried too hard.

That's all right.

So, like I was saying, behind the whole initiative is not just like, documenting definitions for German words. They wanted to trace the history of the German language because they suspected that far in the distant past, all of these disparate groups of people who are now members of separate nations were all members of the same Germanic speaking tribe, and that this had been like a glorious, amazing civilization that was now fractured. And maybe if we understand it a little better, it can come back together and, dare I say, take over the world.

Yeah, it was like Easy Brothers Grim.

Yeah, they had a good idea.

I see where this is headed.

It got a little perverted along the way, although it may have been a bad idea from the beginning.

Yeah. This does link up very Odly with our episode that we just recorded on tectonic plates.

It does. I think the lesson here is anytime you have a social or cultural movement to go back and find how great your specific culture is, or was that's a red flag for everybody else?

Yeah, probably. So the OED was basically the same thing and they were like, well, you've got your German book, but what's greater than the English language? Let's do that for ourselves.

We're going to make an English word book.

Yeah, that's what it was called. So the Gentleman Scholars, and that's in quotes from Britain, got together to form the Philological Society in London in 1842. From the Greek Phylos love and logos word. So philology is just the love of words. It's really very plain and kind of wonderful and it's a study of the language and the written language. And a lot of Philologists will say, like, Greek and Latin are what we're concentrating in. But at this time, there were people like, oh, wait a minute, english seems to really be pretty important, too. I know it's not Latin or Greek, but maybe we should look forward and get down with this English dictionary. And they said, yes, in 1857. After that, that's when it was. That's when the Grimms put out their first fascicle, in fact, was around the same time they said they got a head start on us, but I think we can catch up and do a great job as well. And in fact, they did.

Yeah. And as a matter of fact, word got out about this and everybody was like, hey, this is a great project. The members of the Philological Society in England were kind of celebrated culturally for trying to do this thing, for documenting the English language and how great it was. So what they decided to do first was to find out all the words that weren't already in other dictionaries of English or any dictionary that contained English words. Unregistered words is what they called them. And they were going to make a dictionary of unregistered words to basically complete everything. And there was a guy, Richard Chenovik's Trench, R. C. Trench, who gave some lectures against this idea and essentially said, rather than patch an existing garment, let's make a brand new garment from whole cloth, and it's going to be the most beautiful garment anyone's ever seen.

The color dreamcoat.

Well, yeah, plus sequin, shoulder pads, the whole shebang. To me, that's the height of amazing fashion. So he actually convinced the Philological Society to veer a different way, and rather than just take the words that hadn't been defined and define them and make that take on the entire English language, going back to 1150 Forward. And again when you're doing this. So just think about going into the deep past and saying, okay, we're going to do all words from 1150 to 1850. That's daunting enough. But they were also signing up for essentially a never ending, unfinished work, because, as we've seen, every time they put in an edition, there's any number of new words that have come along or that they didn't have. Like, it's an ongoing never ending process. They'll never be done with the OED. And I suspect that probably drives some members of the OED staff completely mad.

Maybe. And you also have to keep in mind that they did this without a publisher secured, and, in fact, did work for about two decades without a publisher, even.

Yeah.

So they were just working on what was then called the New English Dictionary, was, I guess, the working title, and their first editor was a dude named Herbert Coleridge. And if you're thinking, I wonder if he was, yes, he was. He was the grandson of Samuel Taylor. And there were several predictions in here. They were all wrong as to how big this project would be and how long it would take. But Herbert was the first one to be way off base and said, it'll be about 7000 pages and we'll be done in a decade. Not how it worked out. They started working. They started building this thing from a forward, and they made a list of books, like, basically the English Language Literary Canon and said, all right, volunteers, you all wrote in, said you had some time, so start reading. Read these books and look out for these words. And when you find them, put them on a slip, word for word, send them into us again. That's a four x six inch piece of paper. It was all very sort of regimented, right? And they said, Please read these books, and we like English literature, because the whole point of this is to talk about how great we were and how great our works and language is.

Yeah, that's why they first were like, we're going to look through the great works of English language only because this is the highest use of these words. So these are the best examples. These are the quotations we want to use. They were very narrow minded in that sense. They were really until the 20th century, they were very much centered on that. That's what they were going to use to derive their quotes from, because it would just demonstrate how great the English language was. Look at how these amazing English writers used it. Right. So Herbert Colleridge died in 1861. I get the impression he was only working on it for a few years.

But he was, because he died right. Four years later. Yeah.

So it was like four years. Right. But he really threw himself into it, so much so that he apparently on his deathbed, he had definitions like slips scattered about on the quilt of his deathbed. He died working and he had contracted tuberculosis. And when the doctor was like, this is not ever going to get better. It will get better, but you're going to be dead. That's how it's going to get better. Herbert Colleridge was like, oh, I must start Sanskrit tomorrow, which is taken to mean that he had never learned Sanskrit. He was a polyglot, he studied all sorts of different languages and he had never gotten to Sanskrit. Now that he realized he was going to die, he needed to start on it tomorrow.

Yeah. Ironically, dying of what was then known as consumption and later TB. So that's a new usage and a new entry.

Yeah.

1879. We're skipping forward. And like I said, this is 20 years after they started. This is when they finally found that publisher. At the time, they were known another sense as Clarendon, later to be known as the Oxford University Press. And even though they didn't specifically call it the Oxford English Dictionary until later, I believe the very first publishing in 19 28. 28 was called a New English Dictionary on Historical Principles.

And so we should mention that after Coloridge died, the whole thing kind of like, lost momentum. He was a real driving force as the first editor, but a few, I think 20 or so years later, it started to pick up again and it was thanks to a new editor named James Murray, who I believe was the third editor of all. And he took this ball and ran with it. And he is the person that you can point to as the one who ultimately got the OED published. He was the true driving force of it.

Yeah, absolutely. Murray was Scottish, came from just sort of a regular working class, middle class background. Was the son of a tailor, apparently, his father was a very smart man and known for being a smart and sober person. And James, as a child was a prodigy. Was a language prodigy. Right. Learned his ABCs before he was 18 months. Was apparently reading and writing in Greek by seven. Left school at 14, was studying four languages and eventually came to London to be the headmaster of a school there. And that is where in London, he joined up with the Philological Society. And like you said, he was the guy. He was also the guy who had another ten year completion prediction. He said, this will take ten years from now. And after five years of that ten year prediction, they had a through ant.

No. Wow. I would just see that and be like, Well, I quit.

He's like, a lot of that was on boarding, you understand.

Jeez, man, that's crazy.

Yeah.

But it also goes to show how little they actually had gotten done, apparently under Coleridge's command.

Yeah. Everyone was just they wanted jokes about, like, come on, tell me, what was Sammy really like?

So the one thing that you said, I think, from the start was that this was a crowdsourced project.

Yeah.

And it's not like the OED makes a secret about this. They're very deferential to the volunteers that have worked for them over the years because they just could not have done this without them. It was just too big of an undertaking for just a small group of people to have done by themselves. And there were a lot of different people. There's a book out there called the Dictionary People.

What's it about?

Isn't that what it's called?

I don't know.

Where is it?

Yep.

The dictionary people. I think it's fairly new. And the author had worked at the OED, and before she left, she had gotten from the archive, she'd come across James Murray's address book. And it was pretty thick because it had the names and addresses of a lot of the volunteer correspondents that were working contributing quotations to the dictionary. And so she decided to write a book tracking down who these people were. And that's what she came up with, this book called The Dictionary People. And she found some pretty interesting stuff. For example, about one in six, by her estimate, were women, including James Murray's wife and daughters. He drafted them and got a lot of support and help from them. Apparently the editing the OED did not pay much, but he had dedicated his life essentially to it, and his family supported him in that, which was pretty great. And then there are a lot of other women contributed too, right?

Yeah. The daughter of Karl Marx, Eleanor Marks, contributed and was apparently fired by Murray for not doing the assignment properly, not sticking to the assignment. And by the way, Sarah Ogilvy is who wrote the dictionary? People.

Yeah. Nice. Thanks.

I'd like to check that out. I bet it's a good book. Another writer that Allison found from this book to highlight his name, Marganita Lasky, who was alive from 1915 to 1988. Marganita contributed 13,000 quotes to 20th century supplements. And Marganita was a critic and a journalist and a novelist and kind of made the rounds on TV shows and stuff back in the day, starting in the late fifty s and into the. When people are volunteering like this, they can sort of have their own path forward and how they want to tackle the project almost, and who they want to highlight, or words they want to highlight. And at some point, Margaret Alaski got into sort of away from the highbrow thing and said, I want to start looking at domestic manuals and all these old ancient cookbooks and modern newspapers and famous diaries and just a really unique approach to come up with some of those 13,000 entries.

Yeah. And that was a real change. Remember I said that they had really kind of had their blinders on just looking for the pinnacle of English literature for quotations under James Murray. He was like, no, we're going to not only look for new sources, we're also going to include slang. We're going to include vulgar words. If it's English word, we're going to include it because we're documenting the entire English language. So that was a huge sea change for the direction of the dictionary. And apparently he was under a tremendous amount of pressure to not go that way, to kind of stick with the original plan. And he said no. He said nine.

No, he said no. I mentioned knickers. Is that underwear? That's what knickers are. Right, okay. I thought so as soon as I said it, I was like, wait a minute, did I say the wrong word?

You were thinking of fanny and what's a Knickerbocker? A Knickerbocker is a I think it's the short pants that were, like, kind of cinched at the knee that you think of with, like, little newsboys.

So. The New York Knicks, named after the Knickerbockers.

That's what they were.

I don't know if they did or not. No, they were named after the Knickerbocker, like the story club that Washington Irving was a member of.

Oh, really? Are you making all this up?

No, I'm pretty sure that's right. I sometimes get things wrong.

Well, this is off the dome.

I think I'm right.

Look it up.

Okay.

So back to Murray. He's working with his wife and eleven kids at his house mainly, and not only at his house, but mainly in this little shed that he had built behind the house in the garden called the Scriptorium. And they worked on it here. Once they got A through ant in 1884, he was like, we need some help here. So they hired a second editor named Henry Bradley, and then not too long after that, added two more co editors. So you essentially had a team of four editors at that point that were working with teams and teams of people. So a lot of people working Murray at his scriptorium there at home. But then he moved to Oxford and built another larger scriptorium there behind his house. And things were getting so busy, the local post put a PO box right there by his little front driveway, by his sidewalk, and it's still there if you look it up, this beautiful red PO box with a little placard saying, know, Murray lived here. And this was the post to gather these slips that helped create the OED.

I saw in actually Atlas obscura that the placard doesn't say that. It just says that the guy who created the OED lived here. And they just walk right past the post office box that's literally in front of the placard. They don't even mention it.

The most amazing part of the story.

It's one of the greatest grossest government oversights in history.

So thousands of people contributing. At this point, murray is still beating the drum and writing open letters to newspapers and stuff, saying, hey, we're still doing know, trying to keep that fire going. And people it wasn't just people in England. People from all over the world were contributing. And I think when they finally they had so many slips because they're filing these as they get them alphabetically, they're slotting them in, and they have these lexicographers working around the clock as well. When they finally put out the first supplement in 1933, they still had 140,000 slips left over.

It's so nuts. Again, I would have been like, Well, I quit.

Yeah.

It's just too daunting. I can barely talk about this stuff.

Yeah, I think 33 that's the first year they officially called it the OED.

Okay.

But everyone was kind of calling it that anyway.

Were they really?

Yeah.

Okay. Crazy. So they kind of went with the change the English language changed the name of the dictionary for them.

Yeah, because whatever that long thing a New English Dictionary on Historical Principles. It was printed by the Oxford English Press. So everyone was just calling it that anyway. So, yeah, I guess it was a sense.

Plus OED sounds better than the ned.

Yeah, sure.

Do you want to take another break and come back and talk about arguably the most interesting contributor of all?

Sure.

Okay.

The assassination of President John F. Kennedy is the greatest murder mystery in American history.

That's Rob Reiner. Rob called me, Soledad O'Brien, and asked me what I knew about this crime. I know 60 years later, new leads are still emerging. To me, an award winning journalist, that's the making of an incredible story. And on this podcast, you're going to hear it told by one of America's greatest storytellers.

We'll ask, who had the motive to assassinate a sitting president?

My dad.

Bob JFK screwed us at the Bay.

Of Pigs, and then he screwed us.

After the Cuban Missile Crisis. We'll reveal why Lee Harvey Oswald isn't who they said he was. I was under the impression that Lee was being trained for a specific operation. Then we'll pull the curtain back on the COVID up. The American people need to know the truth.

Listen to who killed JFK on the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi.

I'm Daniel Tosh, host of new podcasts called Tosh Show, brought to you by Iheart Podcast. Why am I getting to the podcast game now? Well seemed like the best way to let my family know what I'm up to. Instead of visiting or being part of their incessant group text, I'll be interviewing people that I find interesting. So not celebrities and certainly not comedians. I'll be interviewing my plumber, my stylist, my wife's gynecologist. We'll be covering topics like religion, travel, sports, gambling. But mostly it will be about being a working mother. If you're looking for a podcast that will educate and inspire or one that will really make you think, this isn't the one for you, but it will be entertaining to a very select few because you don't make it to your mid 40s with IBS without having a story or two to tell. Join me as I take my place among podcast royalty like Joel Olstein and Lance Bass. Those are words I'd hope I'd never have to say. Listen, toss show on the iHeartRadio App Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.

My name is Payne Lindsay, and just like pretty much everyone else on the Internet, I make podcasts. Throughout my career, I've had the chance to travel all over the place investigating true crimes, researching the unexplained. I've been able to meet some of the most truly interesting people, and I've decided to sit down with them and pick their brains. We're going to talk about life, death, unsolved crimes.

If Bob wrote the cadaver note in his own words, he had murdered Susan Berman.

Why do you think we're so obsessed with dark people like that?

It's maybe part of human nature, the supernatural.

There's something here, truly something going on. Our biggest fears, mental health, pop culture, just adrenaline.

Being on a film set is incredible.

And honestly, just whatever the hell is on our minds. Wait a minute.

You should be very happy.

This is talking to death. New episodes of Talking to Death are available now. Listen on the iHeartRadio App Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

So Murray dies of plurisi in 1915. Did not see the first final edition put out, which is very sad. That would be, what, 13 years later? But did put out. Most of the fascicles by that point. Just wasn't compiled into one edition. Different people. J. R. Tolkien worked for a year on this in 1919. Lots of volunteers, but as you promised. Oh, and Murray was also knighted in 1908.

I didn't know.

Troubles.

Wow.

Yeah, apparently knighted, but still a bit of an outsider in the hoity toity Oxford. Literati. Always felt like an outsider and wasn't even given an honorary degree until, like, the year before he died or something.

Yeah. And when he walked across the stage, what he didn't realize is that one of the faculty had taped a kick me sign to his back. So he never understood why the audience was laughing when he grabbed his honorary degree. It was very sad.

He never got it. So you promised to talk of the most interesting, perhaps most celebrated volunteer, and that is one Dr. William Chester Minor. If you've seen the movie or read the book The Professor and the Madman, the book was by Simon Winchester and the book starred Mel Gibson as Murray and Sean Penn as the quote unquote madman. Chester Minor I have not seen it. Apparently, it's not very good. And Mel Gibson and the director tried know they didn't support the movie in the press and they tried to get their I don't know if it get their name removed, but they basically disowned it.

Really? I thought Mel Gibson was the one whose movie it was, whose idea well.

It was his production company. Yeah, but apparently he took him to court because he didn't get final cut like they said. And he didn't get to shoot for a week in Oxford like he wanted to. And he's basically like, this thing is garbage because you didn't let me do what I wanted to and so I'm not supporting it. And Sean Penn just went, what?

That stinks. Because apparently the book was just amazing. The professor and the madman.

I know, and it's such a great story, but I heard other people defend it and know it was pretty good. I had great acting and he know, got his knickers in a wad.

So the madman is Dr. William Chester Miner, you said? Right. That's who the references and the reason that they call him the Madman is because at the time he was diagnosed with either dementia preycox or paranoid schizophrenia. And today we would call either of those just plain old schizophrenia spectrum disorder. But this was the mid 19th century and Dr. Miner was suffering from this at a time when they did not understand what they were dealing with. They just knew that this guy was pretty bad off and needed care essentially for the rest of his life. He had started out as a military doctor, I believe he graduated from Yale Medical School and entered the Civil War as a military doctor pretty much right off the bat. And there's some stories about when his symptoms began. Allegedly, it was from things he was exposed to during his time in the Civil War. One is there's a story that he supposedly had to brand a deserter, an Irish deserter from the Union with a D on his face and that having to do that to that poor man just made him snap, essentially, or brought his symptoms on is a different way to say it.

Or he was involved in the battle of the wilderness outside of, um, Virginia. Either way, we don't know. We just know that, yes, this man definitely had schizophrenia. We don't know how it came on or if there was even any trigger, but we just kind of join him around the time after the Civil war when he's still in the army, but he's really starting to show symptoms.

Yeah. And also, by the way, this is how we knew that Allison really has the goods as a researcher and writer, because Allison was like, hey, be careful with this stuff know, there are a lot of stories out there, and just don't buy up everything you're reading here.

Right.

Music to our ears.

She also told us how to pronounce zizziva.

Right, that's true. The first writer to ever include pronunciation.

It's nice.

So, like you said, an army doctor, an army surgeon working at the US. General Hospital in New Haven, Connecticut. Also a flute player, apparently a very ambitious guy. And because know kind of how his schizophrenia played out were delusions of persecution, a lot of delusions of being attacked sexually, and I think that speaks for itself. They got pretty bad. And he apparently would wander red light districts of places where he lived. He said this is because of his disorder. He was sent to an asylum in Washington while he was still in the army, although he would get his discharge in 1870 while he was still there. He thought he could get better if he went to the UK and get treatment there. And so in 1872, in London, he found himself waking from a delusion that he was being attacked, I think sexually attacked by an Irish Republican and got up from bed and ran out to the street like, guns blazing. Thinking he was shooting at his tormentor and killed an innocent man, a brewery worker named George Merritt, who was on his way to work that early morning.

Yes. So that was enough for the British government. He'd already been discharged from the Army, I don't know if you said or not. By the time he made it to the UK, and in the UK, the authorities were like, okay, we're going to introduce you to one of our asylums called Broadmoor. And in Broadmoor, this is the 19th century, you did not want to be in an asylum of any sort in the 19th century. They were horrible, terrible places where humans were treated like, about as bad as humans can be treated. And yet, either he was charming or wealthy enough or a combination of both. He was able to play his flute. He was able to wear his own clothes, go on walks, and very importantly, he was able to bring his personal library of very rare books from the 17th and 18th century with him, and they actually gave him another cell to serve as his personal library, essentially. And I'll bet Sean Penn playing that flute is something to see. I mean, that, above anything else, is why I want to see that movie.

It's like in Anchorman. He pulls it from his sleeve and yeah, it's very fake.

Hey, Aqualong.

Oh, no, not again.

Yeah, it just happened.

He stayed in touch. This is kind of interesting here that he did stay in touch with the wife, the widow of the man that he killed. And she brought him books even, which is amazing and kind of a nice ending to that story. I don't know, the ins and outs maybe I don't know, maybe he did her a favor. Maybe he was a bad guy.

No, apparently he wasn't. He was a joking. Well, he apparently contacted her and apologized, made some sort of restitution. I took that to mean like gave her some money but she accepted his apology. She didn't have to do that. So I think it says a lot about both of them.

Yeah, for sure. When it came to the OED, he really poured himself into this as an avid reader and had all those rare books like you said, but didn't do the thing that they said, which was, hey, read these books and look for these words. He said, no, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to read a book at a time and I'm going to start, I guess it says with one letter. I guess he started with the letter A and just started looking through all the books for all the letter A's and then again for the letter B's and so on and so on.

Yeah. And it was a fruitful way to search for quotations using specific words. Because I think within just a couple of years he had generated and sent in between 5000 slips of quotations to James Murray. And as the years went on, no one seems to know how many he sent in, but tens and tens of thousands of slips came directly from Dr. Miner during his time in Broadmoor.

Yeah, they eventually met in person. I mean this was a relationship that spanned a couple of decades, hundreds of quotes a week. And they met in 1891 finally. Apparently the superintendent of the asylum had both men at his house and they met a few more times after that. I watched the trailer of the movie today and I'm not sure how accurate it is, but it seems like they'd met here and there over the years. And in the book it was know, Mel Gibson doing a pretty bad Scottish accent, saying like you and I are partners.

Ye complete me.

It was kind of like that. And I'm not really sure if that was the real case in real life.

Well, so apparently from what I saw, james Murray considered just as a decent human being, he needed to go support Dr. Miner. Whether Dr. Miner was contributing or not. I think it helped that Dr. Minor was contributing. But they did have some sort of friendship or relationship. It went beyond just the editor and the contributor kind of thing.

Well, maybe it was then.

And supposedly dr. Miner kept finding excuses anytime James Murray was like, well let's meet. I'm just across the city. Let's meet for lunch or something. And Dr. Minor would be, can't you know, I broke my foot or my sister's coming to visit, whatever. And then finally, I'm not sure how he finally found out. Either Dr. Miner admitted to it, or James Murray found out somehow. But he finally did find out that he was institutionalized, and then he started to go visit.

Oh, okay.

Pretty neat. And then he saw him off. After Dr. Miner was released from Broadmoor so he could go back to be institutionalized in America, it was clear that he wasn't going to be around too many more years. James Murray saw him off at the docks and gave him six unpublished volumes of the first edition that hadn't come out yet.

Yeah, he had a very sad end to a sad life. He had those delusions of being sexually violated. And in December 19, two, he tied a tourniquet around his penis and he cut it off in what he called in the interests of morality. Because what he believed is that he had delusions, that he was being taken out of the asylum for years and years at night and forced to have sex with women all around the asylum and in town. And so he cut his penis off. And after that, things really just weren't the same for him. It seems like things went pretty downhill pretty quickly. Although he died in 1920, so that was another 18 years of suffering.

Yeah. As far as his contributions, that really went downhill after that, man.

Yeah. Very sad, but super interesting story. And great job, Allison. This was really cool.

Yeah. Thanks a lot, Allison. This was great. Great start. Welcome to the team. And what, chuck, since I said welcome to the team, do you think it's time for listener mail?

I think so.

Okay.

I'm going to call this Cost of Goods. In that episode, what episode was it? Were you talking about the cost of goods?

I think the Harlem Globetrotters is where it originally came from.

Yeah. Like, why is it so expensive to go to NBA game these days or get a meal or whatever? We had a lot of people that write in, so I don't think we even settled on a final point.

Yeah, I'm still looking around.

There were a few different theories, but this one from Matt. I'm going to read. Hey, guys. I have a partial explanation for the question. Why does it cost so much more for a nice meal than it used to, even adjusting for inflation? Balmol. B-A-U-M-O-L. Ball's cost disease might help. Explain. This refers to the rising costs associated with service or labor intensive industries over time, despite no corresponding increase in productivity. So imagine a restaurant in the 1950s. You have a server take your order. Chef cooks the food. Someone else cleans up after you're done. Fast forward to today. Despite all the technological advances, you still need that server to take the order. You still need the chef. You still need the staff to clean. The humans have not been replaced by machines or software. In a lot of these cases, you can't speed up the chef the way you can double the speed of a factory machine without sacrificing quality. So if you own a restaurant, you still need roughly the same number of workers that you've had that you needed in the 50s. Roughly. Yet wages for the staff have gone up over the years.

That's a whole other rabbit hole. The restaurant has to pay its staff more over time without getting more meals per worker. So what do you do? You pass it on to the customers. By the way, this also explains why stuff like health insurance and childcare have also gotten way more expensive relative to other stuff. You still need the same number of daycare workers per kid and nurses per patient that you did in past decades. This was a good one, Matt. We got some other ideas and imagine it's kind of all these things, probably, but Baumall's cough's disease is a great explanation. And that is from Matt Farmer.

Yeah. Thanks a lot, Matt. That was a good one. The whole thing's brewing. I don't know what it's going to turn into, but that'll definitely be part of it, for sure.

Perhaps a Josh Clark solo ten part series. The cost of goods with Josh Clark.

I don't think so.

No.

I'm going to make you do it with me.

Oh, no.

So that was from Matt, right?

Yeah. Matt Farmer.

Matt Farmer. Thank you very much for that. And if you want to be like Matt Farmer and show off your braininess and try to answer a burning question, we have. We'd love that kind of thing. You can send it to us via email to stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com.

Stuff you should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, My Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio App Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Hi, I'm Daniel Tosh, host of new podcast called Tosh Show. I'll be interviewing people that I find interesting, so not celebrities and certainly not comedians. We'll be covering topics like religion, travel, sports, gambling. But mostly it will be about being a working mother. If you're looking for a podcast that will educate and inspire or one that will really make you think this isn't the one for you, listen to Toss Show on the iHeartRadio App Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.

The assassination of President John F. Kennedy is the greatest murder mystery in American history.

That's Rob Reiner. Rob called me Soledad O'Brien and asked me what I knew about this crime.

We'll ask who had the motive to assassinate a sitting president. Then we'll pull the curtain back on the COVID up. The American people need to know the truth.

Listen to who killed JFK on the iHeartRadio App Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

My name is Payne Lindsay throughout my career, I've had the chance to travel all over the place investigating true crimes, researching the unexplained. And I've been able to meet some of the most truly interesting people, and I've decided to sit down with them and pick their brains. We're going to talk about life, death, unsolved crimes, the supernatural. There's something here, truly something going on. And honestly, just whatever the hell is on our minds. Wait a minute.

You should be very happy.

This is talking to death. New episodes of Talking to Death are available now. Listen on the iHeartRadio App Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.