BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY

OBITUARY NOTICE

 

Frank Horace Vizetelly
1864-1938

Birth: April 2, 1864 in England
Death: December 20, 1938
Occupation: Editor, Etymologist, Lexicographer
Source: Dictionary of American Biography, Supplements 1-2: To 1940. American Council of Learned Societies, 1944-1958.

Vizetelly, Frank Horace (Apr. 2, 1864 - Dec. 20, 1938), lexicographer, etymologist, and editor, was born in Kensington, London, the older of two children and only son of Henry Richard Vizetelly by his second wife, Elizabeth Anne Ansell. In addition to his sister he had four older half-brothers, the sons of his father's first marriage. He was originally named Francis, which he later shortened to Frank. […] His early schooling was received in France, where his father went in 1865 as correspondent of the Illustrated London News. Returning to England after his mother's death in 1874, he continued his studies at Lansdowne School, Brighton, and Arnold College, Eastbourne, where he took a commercial course (1876-80). In 1882 he joined the publishing firm of Vizetelly & Company, which his father had recently started in London. In 1888, however, the elder Vizetelly was convicted and fined on charges of obscenity for publishing in translation a novel by Émile Zola. His subsequent publication of other Zola novels, even in somewhat expurgated form, brought imprisonment and further financial losses and forced the company into liquidation.

Young Vizetelly came to New York in 1891, where he secured employment with the publishing firm of Funk & Wagnalls, a connection that was to last throughout his life. Starting at a salary of twelve dollars a week, he was one of a large editorial staff engaged in compiling A Standard Dictionary of the English Language under the direction of Dr. Isaac K. Funk [q.v.]. He was soon drafting definitions of words, training definers, and becoming an authority on typography, form, and critical reviewing. When work on the dictionary was completed in 1894, Vizetelly became revising editor, in 1903 managing editor, and, after Dr. Funk's death in 1912, editor of what became the New Standard Dictionary (1913 and later editions). Besides various concise editions of the Standard Dictionary, the energetic and erudite "Dr. Viz" took part in the editing of a number of other Funk & Wagnalls projects, among them the Columbian Cyclopedia (40 vols., 1897-99), The Jewish Encyclopedia (12 vols., 1901-06), The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge (13 vols., 1908-14), Funk & Wagnalls New Standard Encyclopedia of Universal Knowledge (25 vols., 1931), and, from 1932 to 1938, The New International Year Book.

No "closet scholar," Vizetelly was always eager to share his learning. For over thirty years he conducted "The Lexicographer's Easy Chair," a question-and-answer column in the popular Funk-owned weekly, the Literary Digest. It was an ideal forum for the hearty, good-humored scholar who could explain the complications of grammar, of usage, and of word derivations clearly and succinctly, and it led to nearly a dozen books by Vizetelly, written for a growing public aware of the social and business advantages of correct English, from A Desk Book of Errors in English (1906) to How to Speak English Effectively (1933). Through his books, magazine articles, radio talks, newspaper interviews, and countless letters to the editors of New York newspapers, he displayed his inexhaustible industry and curiosity in tracing word origins, his enthusiasm for the vitality of American English, and his belief that "the people make the language."
Vizetelly became a naturalized citizen in 1926. He died in New York City of pneumonia and pleurisy and was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery there. He was survived by his wife, Bertha M. Krehbiel, whom he had married on June 6, 1894, and by their only child, Norma Augusta.

-- Paul R. Cuddihy

FURTHER READINGS
[Henry Vizetelly, Glances Back Through Seventy Years (2 vols., 1893); Dict. Nat. Biog., vol. XX (on Henry Vizetelly); E. A. Vizetelly, Émile Zola: Novelist and Reformer (1904); letters by Vizetelly in various issues of N. Y. Times (see Index), esp. Dec. 19, 1925; obit. article, editorials, etc., ibid., Dec. 22-25, 1938; Editor & Publisher, Dec. 3, 1932; Publishers' Weekly, Dec. 31, 1938; Nat. Cyc. Am. Biog., XXX, 368-69; Who Was Who in America, vol. I (1942); information from Henry E. Vizetelly, a nephew, and from Charles E. Funk; personal recollections.]

SOURCE CITATION
"Frank Horace Vizetelly."Dictionary of American Biography, Supplements 1-2: To 1940. American Council of Learned Societies, 1944-1958.
Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: The Gale Group. 2003. http://www.galenet.com/servlet/BioRC

Top

OBITURAY NOTICE

The New York's Times, Thursday, December 22, 1938

Dr. F. H. Vizetelly, Etymologist, Dies

Standard Dictionary' s Editor Since 1914, With Funk & Wagnall Since 1891

Writer on Many Topics

Known as Historian of Words, He Sought to Increase the Vitality of Language

Dr. Frank H. Vizetelly, whose exploration in the world of words made him a unique international figure, died at 11:05 Tuesday night in the Fifth Avenue Hospital, where he had been a patient since Dec. 2. In his seventy-fifth year, he was a victim of pneumonia and pleurisy.
With the publishing house of Funk & Wagnalls since 1891, Dr. Vizetelly played an increasingly important part in the production of the Standard Dictionary for more than forty years. As its editor since 1914 he filled a post to which he brought a rich fund of knowledge and a genius of research.
He was often asked if he loved words. And summing up all he might have said in a few lines, he replied seven years ago: "Who that has worked with them would not? They never argue, never quarrel and are life's most cheerful companions, for there are words that cheer as well as words that weep, even as there is laughter for happiness and tears for sorrow."
His childhood brought him a good deal of sorrow. Born in London, April 2, 1864, youngest of the seven sons of Henry Richard Vizetelly and the former Elizabeth Ann Ansell, he was a delicate child threatened with blindness in his right eye. His sight was so bad it necessitated the wearing of cumbrous glasses which subjected him to ridicule in school. When he was 11 an operation improved the appearance of the eye, as well as its vision, although that remained imperfect.

Family orginated in Ravena

The Vizetelly family traced back to the Vizzetellis of Ravena, who flourished during the fourteenth century. The first English records concern a Henry Vizetelly, born in 1641 in the parish of of St. Botolph. He was apparently the one who anglicized the name. The future lexicographer was named Francis Horace, and sent to study at the Lycée Baudard, Nogent-sur-Marne, France, and at Arnold College, Eastbourne, Sussex.
A stay at Surry farm - with experience at milking cows, herding geese and hoeing vegetables-did wonders for his health, and finally he was ready to join the publishing house that had been run by the family fo several generations. He started as a sort of office boy, but an unappeasable hunger for learning led to his transfer to the editorial department , where he began his career as a historian of words.
All went well for six years. Then the firm was indicted for bringing out ''obscene'' works-translations of Tolstoy, Zola and Flaubert - and crashed. The upshot was the emigration to America of the fledgling etymologist. He arrived at the age of 27, was so often rebuffed in attempts to land a job with a publishing house that he considered going to sea - and finally landed with Funk & Wagnalls at $12 a week.
For twelve years he was an associate in the ever-growing task of editing the dictionary. He became its managing editor in 1903, holding that rank another decade. In 1914 he became editor, and he held that job until his death.

Edited 250 Publications

Besides that he was associate editor of the various abridgements of the ''Standard''. And he edited more than 250 publications on English, public speaking, mental efficiency, psychoanalysis, medicine, history and travel. He was instrumental in putting before the public reference sets on chemicals and drugs, dates, religious knowledge and general information. He edited the ''Lexicographer's Easy Chair''- long a feature of the Literary Digest - and, in 1901, became the only civilian permitted to visit the Boer detention camps in Bermuda.
Gradually, his repute grew as a unique etymological Sherlock Holmes, to whom no pains were too great if they led to the exposure of a long-hidden origin. As a geneologist and and lister of words, he personified The Social Register neither more nor less that ''Who's Who in Hockey?'' or the Rogues Gallery. Unquestionably, ''nothing pertaining to mankind was uninteresting to him.''
The advent of radio found him eager to take advantage of a new medium of expression, and he had been on the air since 1924. Meanwhile, entirely apart from his manifold editing duties, he was a prolific author. It was his multitudinous precise letters and articles for newspapers in particular which helped make his name a household word.
No better key to the range of Dr. Vizetelly's interests could be found than the stories mentioning his name which have appeared in The New York Times. In 1915 he told Joyce Kilmer, soon to be a victim of the war, what the war was doing to language by stimulation the change of expression. In 1923 he declared the ''plain people, as Lincoln liked to call them, read and understand 8, 000 to 10, 000 words.'' He went to say that in seventy-five speeches between 1913 and 1918 Woodrow Wilson used only 6, 221. He was careful to add that this in no way defined the President's total vocabulary.

Traced Puzzel's Origin

With the cross-word puzzle invasion in 1924 Dr. Vizetelly was prompt to suggest they went back to Asia, that Hindus and Chinese had racked their brains over the unfilled squares about 1,000 B.C. That Summer, he said radio had brought 5, 000 new words to the language, and quarreled with an educator at Johns Hopkins who took the ''average business man'' to task for restricting his correspondence to about 400 words in all.
In 1925, he was running down stories of man-eating trees, delving into the dialects of various professions, growing discursive on the drinking of tea and inspiring a headline-writer to assert: ''Cootie and Cutie Not Even Cousins.'' He went on to reveal that the ''first cootie of which I had any knowledge was one of those wooden kitchen bowls in which housewives chop up parsley, patatoes, onions and meat for hash or otherwise.'' Other subjects of his curiosity that year were English Yule customs, long-forgotten perfumes and a new sixty-two-letter alphabet, in which the form of the familiar letters would be varied to conform with shades of pronunciation. And he predicted that a quarter of the world's population would speak English by A.D. 2000.
By 1926 he was offering philological evidence that ''Hazel Eyes Imply the Best of Wives.'' He traced ''No Man's Land'' back to 1320. He deplored the overworking of ''elegant'', ''fine'', ''terrible'' and ''awful.'' A query from someone upset by ''promiscous osculation'' brought forth a prose poem on kissing; and in a lively controversy over ''is'' and ''are'' in ''There are vast areas in which (is or are) produced two-thirds of the oats,'' etc., he championed ''are.'' A bad speller, he held, was a vulgarian, and his motto became, ''Look up a word daily.''
Nineteen twenty-seven saw Dr. Vizetelly – who for a while, years before, had written fashions for a Chicago newspaper under the name ''Norma'' – probing the ancestry of hats, handkerchiefs and high heels. And since no year was complete without a dispute over a word in which he was a much-in-demand authority, he upheld the Republican majority of the New Jersey Legislature when it used ''biannually'' for every second year rather than twice a year. The Republicans wrote Dr. Vizetelly's heartening opinion into the record, although somewhat nervously, emphasizing in a concurrent resolution that the moot word was being used as a synonym for ''biennially.''

Language's Debt to the Flea

In the year of the Hoover-Smith campaign Dr. Vizetelly philosophised on diaper cloth, reminded that men wore petticoats before women and asserted the language owed a debt to the flea, whose astonishing story he proceeded to tell. He listed fifty synonyms for ''money,'' and found Jane Austen and George Moore among those guilty of Malapropisms.
Meanwhile, down the years, his regular work was keeping up, and the number of words in his dictionary – and his personal vocabulary – was steadily increasing. Most of the odd topics he discussed in The Times had been suggested by letter-writers; to that extent he was like Havelock Ellis, whose work has often appeared in the form of a reply to a perplexed correspondent.
Always willing to extend the list of acceptable words, Dr. Vizetelly wrote in 1931: ''if virility of language is to be preserved, we must continue to embrace the best that there is in speech. The caldron of usage is the refining pot into which all words must go for purification. There they may bob up and down, as the mass seethes or simmers, or even boil over and out of the pot, to become outcasts of the linguistic family.''
The next year he was a member of the jury of 300 authors and educators which approved these expressions, long frowned upon by grammarians: ''It is me'', ''Go slow'', ''All right'', ''Pretty good'', ''Had rather'', ''The reason why'', ''Loan me a pencil'', ''Can I go now.'' Of course there was no way of telling just which of these Dr. Vizetelly individually accepted. Not long after, he said there were 700,000 to 800,000 reputable words in the language. This was on the occasion of an announcement of an 850-word ''basic English'' suggested as a world tongue.

The Moron's ''Yes''

Alfred E. Smith's ''baloney dollar'' could not swerve Dr. Vizetelly from ''bologna.'' But he was quick to favor President Roosvelt's ''chiseler'', which he said actually had attained dictionary rating in England in 1808. He found ''whoopee'' went back to A.D. 450, discovered grammatical imperfections in Noah Webster and dismissed 1935's ''Oakie-doke'' as a moron's ''Yes.''
He edited a twenty-five volume ecyclopedia in 1931 and its new edition four years later.
On his seventy-third birthday he said he'd like to work with words ''to the end, and I hope when the good Lord calls me I'll be at my desk.'' Literally, he didn't get his wish, but those who knew him felt that, figuratively, he did.
Dr. Vizetelly married Bertha M. Krehbiel of New York on June 6, 1894. She survives, as do a daughter, Mrs. Norma Cochrane, and a grandaughter, Miss Jeanne Cochrane. He held an L.L.D. form St. John's University, Annapolis; was naturalized in 1926, was a Knight of the Order of Francis-Joseph of Austria-Hungary, a fellow of the American Geographical Society, a member of the American Red Cross and of the St. George's Society. His home was at 175 West 188th Street, the Bronx. A funeral service will be held at 8:45 P.M. tomorrow at Cooke's Funeral Chapel, 1 West 190th Street.

Top

                                     Home