Professor And Madman: The Alliance Of Human Nature And Knowledge

Perhaps it is because the patience and perseverance required to compile a dictionary are in sharp contrast to the "efficiency" and "speed" pursued by the world today. In recent years, movies telling stories of dictionary compilation are quite popular. In 2014, Japan's "Bian Zhou Ji" won 12 awards, including best film, best director and best actor. In 2019, two stories related to dictionaries were released at the same time, one was Korean dictionary, the other was professor and madman, starring Mel Gibson and Sean pan A story about the compilation process.

The Oxford English Dictionary began with the ambition of the London language society in 1857, under the glory of the British Empire, to rewrite a dictionary that can fully show the development and changes of the English language. However, it is claimed that more than 20 years later, with the efforts of more than 80 British scholars, in the words of the characters in the film, "not only has no progress been made, but it has regressed, because the development of language is much faster than ours.". In frustration, James Murray, a self-taught and multi lingual high school teacher, was invited to undertake the task. He planned to complete the dictionary compilation in "five years, up to seven years" by "mobilizing the masses". However, in the process of struggling for the definition, evolution and citation of each word, the progress was extremely difficult, and the participants collapsed several times …… The film "Professor and madman" tells the story of a patient who committed homicide due to mental illness during the difficult compilation process. He sends more than 10000 perfect quotations to Murray's team from the psychiatric hospital to help them tide over the difficulties. Due to various disputes in the shooting process, the film was greatly weakened, and the final finished work was not satisfactory. However, this work based on real people and real events has its own attraction.

The film shows the value of compiling a dictionary and the hard work it needs to work. The background of this vast dictionary project was the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901), when the British Empire was influential all over the world. The rise of this English language with the rise of a dictionary of this great English language is presented in the context of the rise of this great English language with a reference to the evolution of the whole language. It was an ambitious plan, but the proposer did not expect the process to be so arduous. After the death of the Oxford University Press in 1915, a series of works for the language society were launched in 1875. According to the subtitles at the end of the film, the full version of the dictionary was not officially published until January 1, 1928, with 12 volumes, including 414825 words and more than 1.8 million quotations. "It has been 70 years since the first idea was written.".

However, is the process of compiling dictionaries really all sweat and no fun? This is probably a problem that varies from person to person. J.R.R. Tolkien, the author of the Lord of the rings, worked in the editorial board from 1919 to 1920, participating in the words beginning with "W". Looking back on the scene, he once said: "I learned more in those two years than I learned in any two years since."

The film also convincingly shows the Victorian society and the beauty of English language. The court painter who recorded the trial process, the wrangle and conspiracy calculation of the academic circles, the cruel and absurd means of treating mental illness such as craniofacial method and emetic method, the large family with many children and the overwhelming number of cards used in compiling dictionaries All of these show the audience a world quite different from today's, and people can't help feeling the great changes that have taken place in human society in more than 100 years. The film also shows the beauty of English diction. When Freddie, an important member of the early lexicographer's team, put down his prejudices and started Murray, his speech was impassioned and elegantly expressed his frustration in the process of compiling the dictionary: "it shows its weapons, sharpens its bayonet, and declares that it will not be tamed; we have been arguing about the scope, mode and meaning of words, Just let us kneel down in front of them and beg for mercy. " Similarly, when one of the main characters of the film, "madman" miner, expresses the beauty of writing and reading to the victim's wife and persuades her to start learning to read, his words also reflect a painful passion and poetic loneliness: "standing on the spine of a book, I can leap over the wall in front of me; by the wings of words, I can reach the top of the world. This is freedom. Only when I read, I have no pursuit; when I read, I am searching for the steps of God. " This is a rare spiritual comfort for him who suffered from hallucination and schizophrenia for a long time.

The victim's wife gradually falls in love with miner. Although it is a romantic performance of the film, with the help of this plot, the director promotes the character and the theme of the film to a new height, which is admirable. Miner secretly fell in love with Eliza, the wife of the innocent, who was killed by mistake, but he did not dare to confess. Since he began to receive money from miner due to his poor life, Eliza often visited him in the mental hospital. In the process, he fell in love with him and confessed to him. Miner felt sad that he had killed another ghost under the gun - this time, he had taken him from his wife's heart. Unable to bear this dual sense of guilt, he finally made a bloody act of self mutilation.

Although there have been constant correspondence in more than 10 years, Murray and miner actually met for the first time in 1891. Facing the worsening mental condition of miner and the cruelty of the treatment methods at that time, Murray stood up to help miner return to the United States and live with his relatives for the rest of his life. And the pursuit of knowledge together is a madman.

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