This is a transcription (by Peter Gilliver, taken from
Brewer 2007b: 47) of the spoof slip for
radium produced by one of Craigie's team of editors, H. J. Bayliss,
radium being a word notoriously omitted from the first edition of the
OED. See the original on p. 61 of
Peter Gilliver's article, '"That Brownest of Brown Studies"', reproduced in our Library
here (expand the image using the Adobe PDF reader browser tools).
The omission came about in the following way. In August 1902, while reading through the proofs for the fascicle covering the alphabet-range
R-Reactive which had been prepared by his co-editor Craigie, Murray discovered that Craigie had inserted an entry for this new term (the name given to a recent chemical discovery)
. Murray's letter to Craigie advising him to take the word out still survives in the
OED archives, and you can read a facsimile of it on p. 60 of Gilliver's article. Murray recognized that Craigie had 'probably got the opinion of a responsible chemist', but said that he himself had meanwhile consulted 'a chemical student who has just taken his degree', who thought that the identification of this new chemical element 'is quite premature and may turn out to be a regrettable blunder'. Murray's advice prevailed and the word was excised from the proofs.
The editor-in-chief's misjudgement here may well have been a source of mirth among the staff: as Gilliver recounts, H. J. Bayliss produced a sample entry for the word which admirably satirized the forms and conventions their chief editor had so expertly established as the
norm. (Bayliss is included in the photo of
- the figure standing at the far right.) Meanwhile, Craigie eventually rectified the omission of
fell in Craigie's half of the alphabet.
