Lord Orsam's Dictionary Corner

What is it with the obsession the Chief Diary Defender has with the dictionary?

Only recently, on 4 April 2024, she posted on Casebook:

"I still wonder why a dictionary was not used if the Barretts did the deed."

Here, incidentally, is the best dictionary in existence but there may be other good ones:

The Chief Diary Defender's dictionary obsession first revealed itself on 11 January 2017, only a few months after the Orsam Theory of the diary's origins was formulated.

At this time, she was desperate for arguments as to why the Barretts could not have created the Maybrick diary.

One of her desperate arguments, made on 5 January 2017, was that Mike was too stupid to have authored the diary because he was known to have confused the word "orgasm" with "organism" and thought that the 9/11 terrorist attack occurred on 9th November 2001.

I responded on the same day by pointing out to her that Mike's account of the forgery was that he had his "sensible wife" (to use the Chief Diary Defender's own description of her) write out everything for him which would have ensured that any such silly muddles of the sort she mentioned would have been corrected before pen went to paper.

Six days later, deliberately misunderstanding what I had said, and pretending the issue was one about spelling, she posted the below in response:

"She made an unholy mess of spelling the word rendezvous then, for a sensible woman. No dictionaries available in March/April 1992?"

So began the dictionary obsession.

I responded on the same day, by asking:

"How does the word "sensible" translate to "incapable of making a spelling mistake?".

This question was never answered.

Then I said:

"The thing about dictionaries is you only use them if you think you can't spell a certain word. If you think you know how to spell that word then having all the dictionaries in the world isn't going to help you".

Her response came five days later on 16 November 2017:

We can see that she avoided my question about why being sensible translates to being a good speller, with a silly non-response:

"Via the dictionary Anne could have consulted?"

No dictionary will define "sensible" as meaning the ability to spell words correctly, so her non-answer was not only evasive but also wrong as a factual matter.

Then, surprise surprise, rather than focusing on what Anne would have done in 1992, we were given a lecture on what she, the Chief Diary Defender herself, would have done when forging the diary, despite admitting that she is a highly unusual creature in that she tends to be "completely anal about checking" (no shit, Sherlock: not about checking facts, of course, just spelling and grammar) and thus proving that she is a very bad example for this situation because most people are not completely anal about checking their spelling.

In fact, it's very clear that her dictionary obsession follows entirely from her own anal personality. If she had been forging a diary, you see, she would have checked all the spellings by using a dictionary (but of which particular words isn't clear, does she mean all of them just in case she got one wrong?) and she can't seem to understand how someone else, like Anne Barrett, might have decided not to do this, even if they owned a dictionary, about which more later.

So we can see that the full reply in her main paragraph to my point that one doesn't use a dictionary if one thinks one is able to spell, was:

"If I only think I know how to spell a word I tend to be completely anal about checking - even in emails which are not for public consumption. I suspect our diarist included the odd misspelling and shaky grammar (in a style similar to those humorous pieces in Punch) to help portray "Sir Jim" as a jumped up, self-important nobody, who fancied he was a lot smarter and better with words than he actually was. But if correct spelling had been considered at all important by Mike and Anne, I would have expected a dictionary to have been consulted at hand rather than leave things by chance."

The fact of the matter is that her own personal preference as to what she would have done is irrelevant. Her own speculative belief, unsupported by any evidence, as to what Mike and Anne would have done is, equally, of no consequence whatsoever. Did the Barretts even own a dictionary? I'll come back to that.

She then added a ludicrous question to me, being:

"So who do you have down as the one who was so sure rendezvous was spelled rondaveau that they didn't bother to check? Mike? Anne? Both?"

We can see that she converts my talking about someone who thinks they can spell a certain word into someone being "so sure" they can do so, which wasn't what I said at all. She assumes, without evidence, that if that person had been uncertain, they would have checked the spelling in a dictionary. Well she, herself, might have done so, being, as she admits, "completely anal", but I suspect that most people wouldn't bother. And that's if they actually owned a dictionary in the first place, about which we have no knowledge with respect to the Barretts.

As to that, why don't we know? Did Keith Skinner ever even ask them if they owned a dictionary? If not, and the point is so important, why not? Did Caroline Morris-Brown herself, when she interviewed both Mike and Anne for her 2003 book, ask them if they had owned a dictionary in 1992? If not, why not? Is it because these Ace Detectives weren't interested in pursuing a line of enquiry that the Barretts were the forgers?

We can see from her post that Ms Morris-Brown then tried to throw doubt on the accuracy of the diary transcripts created by Shirley Harrison and Robert Smith by suggesting that the word in the diary that she was focusing on might not be "rondaveau" (per Harrison) or "rondavous" (per Smith) but might instead be "rendavous" or "rendevous". I'm pretty sure she did this because she knows that a dictionary is useless if you don't know what the first two letters (at least) of a word are. For had Anne looked for the word "rondaveau" or "rondavous", thinking it began "ro..." she wouldn't have been able to find it in the dictionary to know how to spell it properly. She's cunning as a fox is the Chief Diary Defender so she was trying to suggest that the word might be spelt "re..." in the diary thus enabling it to have been found in the dictionary.

But, by saying that it's not clear what the spelling is, she actually throws into sharp relief that the forger appears to have deliberately written the word "rendezvous" illegibly to ensure that no one could ever be sure it was wrong. It's just that their big mistake, which is understandable, was to fail to appreciate there is a "z" in the word. Even Caroline Morris-Brown admits that the word in the diary might be "rendevous" so that the omission of the "z" might have been the forger's only mistake in spelling the word. Funnily enough, when asked to spell "rendezvous" in January 1995 Anne Barrett revealed that she too was unaware that there is a "z" in it.

The oddest thing qbout the Chief Diary Defender's argument, though, is her statement that: "I suspect our diarist included the odd misspelling and shaky grammar (in a style similar to those humorous pieces in Punch) to help portray "Sir Jim" as a jumped up, self-important nobody, who fancied he was a lot smarter and better with words than he actually was." If that really was in the forger's mind - which seems very strange and unlikely to me - that could have been in Anne's mind too, as much as in anybody else's mind. In which case, why bother discussing it? It gets us nowhere as to who wrote the diary.

But what she always fails to consider is the possibility of the forger simply not caring about making spelling mistakes, on the basis that any mistakes could be passed off as Maybrick having made those mistakes which is, of course, exactly what did happen in respect of the True Believers and The Gullible who parrot that exact line to explain away the spelling and grammatical mistakes in the diary.

Anyway, my response to her was posted on the same day as follows:

"And if you are anal then everyone in the world must be too?"

This was never answered.

I went on:

"Well there we are then. A deliberate spelling mistake and no dictionary needed to be consulted."

Despite having solved the problem, she continues, as we will see, to rabbit on about dictionaries to this day.

My post continued:

"Well then, if you really think my unanswerable point that someone who thinks they know how to spell a word doesn't look it up is answered by your own "anal" behaviour, the answer must be that they either didn't consider correct spelling as important and/or as you suggest - included deliberate mis-spellings which Maybrick could have made."

There was never any response to this.

I asked her:

"Why are you wasting time with these non-points?"

This question was never answered. Indeed, there was never any reply to this post (which was a regular occurrence on her part). She ran away from the discussion but continued to mutter about dictionaries at regular intervals to this day.

In April 2018, in a discussion with Sam Flynn she couldn't help herself but raise it again.

"Did she not posses - POSSESS - a dictionary, for example? Did she not think to consult one?"

I'm not sure why she needed to give Sam Flynn an example of a spelling mistake here. Did she think he wasn't aware what one looked like?

As for the question of whether Anne possessed a dictionary, that is something we don't know because she and Keith Skinner never seem to have bothered to find out or even ask the question. In the mind of Anne Barrett, a legal secretary, who was a reasonable speller, she might well have thought she didn't need to own or use one when writing the diary. Why would she even have cared? It wasn't a spelling competition, was it? There was no requirement that every single word needed to be spelt correctly, was there?

But the Chief Diary Defender could not be stopped and, three days later, she asked RJ Palmer the same question:

"so again, I have to ask why she would not at the very least have consulted a dictionary, if she thought good spelling was important to making the project a success. That would have been the case regardless of her basic literary skills as a secretary at work."

But why would Anne have thought that good spelling was important to making the project a success? Who has ever said she would have thought such a thing?

If you simply invent out of thin air the notion that spelling was important for the forger then, of course, you create your own mystery as to why the forger didn't spell every single word correctly in the diary.

Even then, it does rely on the forger knowing what words they were unable to spell because otherwise they would have had to look up every single word. No one looks up every single word because most people of reasonable competence believe they can spell most words and, to the extent that some people might look up words that they're not sure about (or did before the advent of the internet), that assumes: (a) that they own a dictionary (b) that they know where it is in their home and (c) that they can be arsed to interrupt the very writing they are engaged in, rise out of their chair and get it.

But are we even sure that Anne didn't use a dictionary?

Let's just pause here to consider what words the forger spelt wrongly:

1. rendezvous (possibly written as "rondaveau" or "rondavous")

2. Capital (apparently written as "Capitol")

3. unfaithful (written as "unfaithfull")

4. pursuers (apparently written as "porsuers" or "persuers")

5. commit (written as "comit" once but correctly spelt on two other occasions in the diary)

6. committed (written as "commited")

7. gouge (written as "gorge")

8. Hammersmith (written as "Hamersmith" but not a word that would have been found in the dictionary)

9. Thrill (written as "thill" but presumably just a slip of the pen)

10. lucky (written as "luckey" but spelt correctly on three other occasions in the diary)

11. controlling (written as "controling")

12. bonnet (written as "bonnett")

13. panic (written as "panick")

14. shining (written as "shinning" but spelt correctly on five other occasions in the diary)

15. where (written as "were" but spelt correctly two other occasions)

Not very many. Just fifteen wrongly spelt words, of which four are spelt correctly elsewhere in the diary indicating an obvious slip of the pen for those four, while a number of others such as "thill" must also just be slips of the pen. One can easily see why the Chief Diary Defender lasered in on "rendezvous" because, for all the other words that aren't correctly spelt - and I mean every single one of them - we can easily imagine that the forger thought they were able to spell those words, especially when one considers the volume of correctly spelled words in the diary (as below) which demonstrates that the forger was either a perfectly competent speller or did, in fact, consult a dictionary.

I haven't, incidentally, included "ridling" in the above list, which was presumably an attempt to write the word "writhing", because it's not exactly a spelling mistake (and a dictionary wouldn't likely have assisted) nor the of/off confusion because that's a grammar issue (and probably also just a slip of the pen).

Here is just a very small selection of correctly spelled words in the diary:

1. received

2. decision

3. sincerely

4. believe

5. frequently

6. wares

7. increasingly

8. weary

9. enquire

10. contrary

11. buffoon

12. flourishing

13. inclination

14. endeavour

15. courage

16. campaign

17. opportunity

18. beginning

19. pleasure

20. whoring

21. medicine

22. encountered

23. aches

24. squeezed

25. original

26. screaming

27. torment

28. weather

29. peace

30. astonishment

31. rosier

32. obliged

33. destroyed

34. frequented

35. fried

36. momentum

37. severely

38. repel

39. substantial

40. bastard

41. question

42. pleasant

43. revitalizes

44. anticipation

45. estimation

46. drenched

47. prone

48. Middlesex

49. location

50. disappointment

51. vanished

52. doubts

53. knife

54. business

55. vexed

56. peach

57. triumph

58. disappointed

59. particularly

60. sour

61. folk

62. thimble

63. various

64. appetite

65. pleasurable

66. rhyme

67. patience

68. farthings

69. wrench

70. wearing

71. gentle

72. honour

73. proud

74. slaughterman

75. chickens

76. gracious

77. accompany

78. fright

79. bounding

80. desperation

81. carriage

82. scented

83. kidney

84. redeem

85. apologised

86. handkerchief

87. vomited

88. intolerable

89. addresses

90. overwhelming

91. puzzle

92. yearn

93. nightmares

94. dangling

95. revenge

96. tongues

97. boil

98. banish

99. journey

100. fiendish

101. double

102. vengeance

103. fiendish

104. respectability

105. increasingly

106. laughing

107. lair

108. lesson

109. freshly

110. carrots

111. knowledge

112. cleverest

113. whims

114. thrilled

115. honour

116. scandal

117. meddling

118. debt

119. numbness

120. participate

121. visions

122. aches

123. tormented

124. spurned

125. dreaded

126. courage

127. unbearable

128. favourite

129. curse

130. redressed
     

Some of those can be rather tricky to spell; "disappointment" for example is often spelt wrong. Many of them cannot be guessed phonetically. Clearly the diarist didn't mess up on "ie" or "ei" words. So, if a dictionary was not, in fact, used when writing the diary, our forger would have been perfectly justified in thinking of themself as a competent speller who just didn't need to constantly use a dictionary when writing English. They could spell English words pretty well. Sure the forger wasn't quite as clever as she thought herself to be (if we assume the forger was a female) but she only slipped up on a few occasions and a number of these spelling mistakes seem to be mere temporary lapses of the kind anyone can make if a bit tired or not concentrating properly. One can make a slip of the pen when writing just as much as one can make a typo when typing.

In short, for this forger, no dictionary was necessary, although that does, of course, assume that the correctly spelled words weren't checked in the dictionary, something about which we have no knowledge or information whatsoever.

But that is not going to stop Ms Morris from yapping on about dictionaries for ever.

This one was on 10 November 2021:

"I do find it slightly comical that where Dr. Flint's 'feel' let her down, the Barretts of Goldie Street just went for it and crossed their inky fingers, with not even a dictionary - old or new - as their guide".

The fact is that we have no idea if the Barretts, as forgers of the dictionary, used a dictionary or not. It's just an assumption that they didn't, on the basis of a very small number of spelling mistakes, or rather, in truth, just one mistake, being "rendezvous" Perhaps Anne couldn't find "rendezvous" in her dictionary because she couldn't spell it and, thinking that it wasn't in there because it was a French word guessed at it but did so illegibly to hide that fact. All the other spelling mistakes can be put down either to small slips or to a belief that the forger knew how the word was spelled but didn't bother to check. Perhaps the fact that so many words were spelled correctly - I've selected 130 but there were hundreds of them - indicates that a dictionary was used.

This one was also on 10 November 2021:

"Why didn't the diary author use a dictionary, at least to get their spellings right".

In fact, most spellings were right. We have no idea if a dictionary was used or not, or if the forger even possessed a dictionary.

This one is from 24 May 2022:

"Any ideas why she didn't think to consult a dictionary while drafting and transferring it into the photo album".

She hasn't even established that Anne didn't consult a dictionary. One single spelling mistake, for in truth, that's the only one that even hints at the forger not using a dictionary, does not demonstrate that one wasn't used.

This one is from 2023:

"When faking someone's private diary in the early 1990s, however, if you decide for some reason that their spelling must be perfect, your best bet would be to invest in a basic dictionary - if you can't borrow or steal one from your local library".

Erm, who decided that their spelling "must be perfect"? Is she assuming that this is what the Barretts would have decided before setting out to forge the diary? On what possible basis can she say this?

Her post indicates that she has no idea whether the Barretts did or not known own a dictionary. She sets out an imaginary rule that if they didn't have one they should bloody well have spent some of their own money to buy one (or even borrowed one) but that's only because she's set her own ground rules that the spelling in the diary needed to be perfect. If those were not the ground rules, the point is worthless.

And is she here, when she says "steal one from your local library", condoning or even advocating the theft of dictionaries from public libraries? That is what it sounds like. Orsam Books & Music would like to disassociate itself from such a shocking suggestion.

There is then the nonsense false point:

"If Anne's father helped out with the case, was it his budget that didn't run to a basic dictionary."

We just don't know if Anne did or not use a dictionary. We don't know if she considered using a dictionary. We don't know if she cared about getting all the spellings right. We don't know if she thought herself to be a competent speller who needed a dictionary. We don't know if Anne's father helped out with the case. But the Chief Diary Defender does love these nonsensical puzzles by which she creates, in her own mind at least, a "mystery" out of nothing.

This final one is a classic:

"Again we see this failure to consult a basic dictionary to check whether things like 'alude' is even word, which would have given them allude but not the meaning they were hoping for."

It's funny that Morris-Brown is criticising Anne for not using a dictionary when preparing the transcript while saying, at the same time, that the forger didn't use a dictionary when writing the diary, thus, to any rational person, actually indicating that Anne and the forgery may be the same individual!

(I didn't, incidentally, include "alludes" in the my list of spelling mistakes because that word is actually spelt correctly in the diary. It's just that the forger muddled up "elude" with "allude" which isn't, at heart, a spelling issue (and a dictionary probably isn't going to help if you were simply using it to check spelling rather than meaning).)

But the reason I describe this post as a classic is because we can see that the Chief Diary Defender tells us how anal she was with spelling even when writing in her own personal diary, as she said:

"I have done this kind of thing all my life and have an example in my own diary from 1965, where at the age of eleven I cross out something I've just written because I'm not sure of a particular spelling, rewrite it using easier words and then explain why it looks a mess.".

One might ask: if spelling was so important to her at the age of eleven, why didn't she use a dictionary?

LORD ORSAM

3 May 2024