June 1, 1889

C. K. Ogden (June 1, 1889 to March 21, 1957) was a British thinker, born in Lancashire, who later
read classics at Magdalene College Oxford. He worked as an editor, of books and journals, and was a lover of the intellectual life. That means he experienced words as powerful and sufficient components of the world.The spark of excitement he felt at making an intellectual argument was for Ogden, as for the intellectual type in general, a token of the accuracy of his ideas.Understanding for the intellectual is a matter of fitting pieces into a jigsaw puzzle.Those pieces are words.These are not his views, necessarily -- he was satisifed with the word 'referent' in The Meaning of Meaning. That's the point however in my digression here on intellectual types: for them, "referent" is mainly,  a word.

Ogden was in charge of the translation of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, though he did not do the actual Englishing himself. He co-authored with I. A. Richards, the noted literary critic, The Meaning of Meaning, (1923) and was the editor at Kegan Paul responsible for Richards' later volume, Mencius on the Mind: Experiments in Multiple Definition (1932.)

Ogden's library was famous even for the Oxford elite. After Ogden died University College London purchased many of his books, for instance his Jeremy Bentham documents and books. This venerable institution did not however purchase his collection of cat books. UCLA purchased the vast number of books, including the books about cats, that University College London did not take. It was at UCLA that a librarian published comments about Ogden as a cat lover.