The Liar's Dictionary

by Eley Williams

  When I learned this, I couldn’t help but point out that there were online dictionaries already, online encyclopaedias updated every second by experts and hobbyists. I showed him on my phone. There was no competition. David looked bored and a little hurt that I did not share his vision.

  ‘But to have Swansby join that list,’ he said as I reeled off the names of various sites. ‘To finally put Swansby’s Encyclopaedic Dictionary to rest!’

  I did not understand the logic of this, but not understanding the logic of it paid the bills. Each time I passed the portrait of Prof. Gerolf Swansby on the downstairs floor, I looked up an article on my phone about whether eccentricity is genetic.

  Each day David Swansby disappeared into his office to spend hours typing up every individual entry from his family dictionary, updating each definition as best he could. If I’m candid, I think one of the main reasons for the delay in digitising the dictionary and the reason my ‘internship’ had lasted over three years stemmed from David’s discovery of online chess. Not only that, he had found a site where you could ‘play’ as if you are taking part in famous, historical chess matches: some program had mined archival data and provided the original moves made during specific games by a player, so you could pitch your wits against the ghost of that player and see whether you would have fared any better in opposition. David had spent over eight months locked in a game first played in 1926. In the online game, he was playing Harold James Ruthven Murray (1868–1955), a prominent chess historian of the early twentieth century. You may know him as a chess historian. You may also know him as one of the eleven children of the first editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. Every time I passed David’s office and heard him slamming his hands on his laptop and swearing at the screen, I could not help but think that there was something of an old rivalry between Swansby’s and the Oxford English that he was trying to put to bed. I don’t know whether he ever won. I’m sure he would have told me.

  I tried to explain the digitising of the dictionary to Pip one evening back in our flat. Most of the notes for the dictionary are from the last years of the nineteenth century, and the words that appear or do not appear amongst its pages reflect the times. I looked around our kitchen for an example. Say, for instance, teabag. In 1899, no one was yet using the word, so it wouldn’t appear in the body of the dictionary.

  ‘Verb or noun?’ Pip asked. Rude. I made a face.

  Teabag had yet to bob up amongst the draft pages or sketched-out columns in 1899. A teabag had yet to be invented. If you trust other dictionaries published during that time, as of 1899 one could not cartwheel as a verb either because that meaning was not yet established, nor could one travel up an escalator. In 1899, you’re still a year away from blokeish, come-hither and dorm making an appearance in any English dictionary’s pages. The modern use of hangover and morning-after as having anything to do with alcohol only cropped up in 1919, so they never made Swansby’s war-decimated pages. Language went on regardless, of course. God knows what happened at the office party to require that update.

  The more I thought about it at work, the more I liked the close-but-unreachable sound of 1900 and its neologisms, the words that entered mouths and ears and inkwells that year. Teabag, come-hither, razzmatazz. 1900 sounds like a lot more fun than 1899 and its note-taking lexicographers.

  In 1899, elephants were being slaughtered in huge numbers to keep up with the demand for high-quality billiard balls, with no more than four balls being made from a single tusk. I found these facts listed under Ivory, trade of in Vol. V when I skipped forward a little out of sheer boredom on my first day reading the dictionary. Then the phone rang, and it was with thoughts of slaughtered elephants that I perched the receiver between my chin and ear and answered the call.

  Updating the meanings of entries in an encyclopaedia or dictionary or encyclopaedic dictionary is of course no new concept. I spent most of my time reading about it, between panic attacks on the phone and eating my lunch in the cupboard. Biographies need updating, countries are renamed or disappear completely. Swansby’s was in good company in this regard, and part of a long lineage of reference books attempting to keep up with the times: Abraham Rees’s Proposals were published in an attempt to revise Ephraim Chambers’ Cyclopædia (1728), and Rees emphasised in his sermons prior to publication that it was his intention to ‘exclude obsolete science, to retrench superfluous matter’. As new progress is made in science, new coinages and advances in understanding constantly render previous column inches of articles superfluous, if not meaningless. For example, copies of the nineteenth-century National Encyclopaedia include entries for the word malaria where the disease is still described in terms of transmission by some strange noumenal ether that lurks over swamps, mala aria, bad air: the facts are broadly true, and etymologically valid, but ignorant of mosquitoes’ role in malaria’s vector control. David was always quick to point out that the OED left appendicitis (n.) out of its earliest editions, an omission that was roundly criticised in 1902 when Edward VII’s coronation was delayed thanks to this particular affliction and the word’s use became widespread in the media.

  A conventional dictionary is often determined by lexicographers’ particular intellectual milieu and potentially their personal bias. I’m sure David Swansby comforted himself with the thought that a perfect encyclopaedic dictionary, free from all error and completely relevant in every particular, is impossible because any compiler or compilating body lacks complete objective oversight. No man is an island, no dictionary a fixed star, or something something something. Of course, the decision to remove words in order that more ‘relevant’ words in a dictionary might take their place can be controversial. Recent editorial proposals to replace, for example, the words catkin and conker with cut and paste and broadband in an edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary gained national coverage and much outraged comment. Swansby’s received far less blowback following its online updates, chiefly because hardly anyone noticed.

  Hardly anyone.

  The phone rang again.

  No further words were to be added to the Dictionary, although many of the current words required an update. The verb refresh, for example, needed some tweaking since its 1899 iteration where ‘refreshing mobile stream’ meant something quite different. Similarly, the words tag, viral and friend have changed quite a bit since the first time they popped up. Another word was marriage.

  The 1899 definition of marriage began (emphasis my own [How often do you get to truly say that?]):

  marriage (n.), referring to both the act and ceremony by which the relationship of husband and wife is constituted and the blissful physical, legal and moral union between man and woman in complete community, ready for the establishment of a family

  For the new digital edition, this had been updated by David to:

  marriage (n.), referring to both the act and ceremony by which a person’s relationship to another might be constituted, and the physical and legal union between those persons

  For whatever reason, it was this change that caused some ruckus in the press. It was also the cause of the phone calls.

  As well as answering the calls, it was my job to check the spelling and punctuation of David’s updated words. This was laborious because David hated technology that wasn’t online chess. Also, he had scrimped on buying office equipment. To use a computer in Swansby House was to hate the sight of an hourglass. The one on my computer’s loading screen was silent, monochrome and smaller than a fingernail, six black pixels in its top bulb and ten in the lower. I wondered how many months of people’s lives had been spent staring at this pinch-waisted little graphic. It made me think of the different tidemarks on the keyboard I inherited. Not quite grey, not quite black, not quite brown. Of what: skin? Grime? The transitive verb slough came to mind. The noun sebum. The record of previous hands resting on this very same piece of plastic. Some of them might have died and this little scuff mark could be the only trace of them left on this earth. The keyboard made m
e feel a little sick.

  This loading hourglass, though. A further pair of pixels was suspended in the centre of the graphic to imply that sand was falling – as one watched the screen, this hourglass would swivel on its axis as if tipped and re-tipped by an unseen moderator’s fingers. Everybody knows this. Why bother explaining hourglasses to myself? Proximity to encyclopaedic dictionaries made me a bore. Prolixity, pedantry, ploddiplodplod. I’m sure that I was not alone in my dread of the hourglass. Having worked alongside the arrow and manicule forms of the computer’s cursor, it is a shock to have it suddenly transformed into a tool dedicated to some other project, a project that is not only apparently out of one’s control but that takes priority. With the operating system too busy to accept input from the keyboard or mouse one is stuck there until the computer has come to terms with itself, the spinning hourglass your unwanted company for the duration.

  The phone on my desk gave another sharp ring.

  Perhaps the hourglass caused so much anxiety because as a graphic it offered no hint of eventual relief. Yes, it confirmed, you are rotting where you sit! This is all pointless! It was all for naught! Why did you learn all those piano scales, why did you memorise song lyrics, why did you ever care about pronouncing pronunciation correctly? The constant trickling of sand from one obconical end to the other gave no indication that any specific amount of time was being counted down. I mean, really, the hourglass was the perfect icon for frustrated flux rather than a sense of progress, an image of a fixed, inescapable ‘presentness’ rather than promising any future. A clockface devoid of hands, perhaps, would have the same uncanny effect. Why was I thinking like this? Flux and uncanny. What was in my hard-boiled eggs? Who did I think I was—?

  The phone gave another ring.

  The iconography of the hourglass hinted at a particular progression: that all natural things tend towards death. This was not good for office morale. Waiting for the computer-screen hourglass to empty and refill and empty again generated a feeling not just of futility but also of mortality. I understood why it was a favoured prop whenever ‘Father Time’ or ‘Death’ are figured as personae in Western culture, and if Disney’s Alice in Wonderland’s White Rabbit had been described as crying, ‘I’m late, I’m late, I’m late!’ while clutching an hourglass rather than a pocket watch, he would have been a far more morbid (I Googled this on my phone) leporine sigil. Shouldering for room with skulls, burned-down candles and rotten fruit, hourglasses are also one of the recurring tropes of vanitas pieces, those works of art that illustrate the world’s physical transience. Crumpled tulips, dry parchment. Trading upon this saturnine thrill of memento mori set-pieces, pirate ships of the seventeenth and eighteenth century bore hourglasses upon their flags alongside the more famous skull insignias. Hourglass iconography is also prevalent on a number of gravestones, often supplemented with mottoes such as Tempus fugit (‘Time flies’) or Ruit hora (‘The hour is flying away’).

  The work computer was old and slow: the previous week I had to face a couple of turns of the hourglass while checking the words obconical and saturnine in the dictionary by my elbow.

  My desk phone gave a fourth ring, which was usually as long as I could bear.

  Hourglass imagery is not always coincident with a sense of hopelessness, however. In fact, thinking about it, sometimes it exists as a symbol for a certain necessity to seize the hour: perhaps for this reason hourglasses feature on many heraldic crests. I’ve looked it up. Of course I have. In one of its more savoury definitions, the online UrbanDictionary.com lists the verb hourglassing in reference to ‘a state in which a computer is “thinking” and is currently unresponsive. Not exactly frozen, hourglassing gives a potentially false sense of action on the part of the computer.’ Many families unite in baying, unfestive horror during games of Charades or Pictionary as the final grains of sand fall through the necks of supplied hourglasses. Hourglasses of this size are also called egg-timers. Although this is probably a practical description of its use amongst, say, the soft-boiling breakfast community, I do think that egg-timer lacks the poetry of the other possible synonym clepsammia. The lexicographer Noah Webster listed this word in his 1828 dictionary – its etymological roots are the Greek words for sand and theft, the idea being that as each grain slips through the hourglass’s waist another moment is being taken away. Clepsammia certainly has a pleasing clicking sibilance to it, and as a word evokes a slick trickling of the contents from bulb to bulb as well as the flipping-over of its body. Unlike Webster’s, Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary overlooked the word clepsammia in its published incomplete 1930 edition. It does, however, provide the word hourglass as a hyphenated noun. With its symmetry and little dashed isthmus between the two words, ‘hourglass’ on the page is like the object itself, lying on its side or balanced mid-spin.

  The phone kept ringing, boring into my skull.

  Of course, the hourglass is not the only symbol that accompanies hapless computer users (me) and their periods of waiting. There’s Apple products’ spinning orb known affectionately as the ‘Spinning Beach Ball of Death’ or the ‘Marble of Doom’. My old BlackBerry occasionally presented me with a graphic of a squared-off clock, its hands rotating uncontrollably. BlackBerry-time, Apple-time, egg-time. My laptop at home was far newer than my office computer and ran on a far more up-to-date operating system. Bereft of hourglasses, my waiting was instead accompanied by its replacement, its inheritor: a glowing ring, a tiny green ouroboros graphic forever eating its own tail. The same irritation existed, the feeling of being trapped in a state of suspension rather than progress being made, but stripped of the more esoteric timekeeping device. This glowing circle felt somehow more clinical and inhumane, its cultural implications less to do with pirates and Father Time and more HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey or the KITT vehicle’s front-scanning bar in Knight Rider. Armed with the iconography of vanitas, maybe other operating systems in the future will adopt symbols of futility such as skulls or rotting flowers. Perhaps a small pixelated Sisyphus could be forced to clamber up my scrollbar. As it stands and stood, the charm of the hourglass was gone and I missed it. Tempus won’t stop fugit, sure, but at least we once had the chance to watch it play out in style.

  The word hourglass lost any meaning for me beyond frantic rage.

  The phone made another petulant ring. I sighed and picked up the receiver, smiling fixedly at the stain on the wall opposite my desk.

  ‘Hello, Swansby’s Press,’ I said, ‘how may I help you?’

  ‘Burn in hell, Mallory,’ said the synthetically distorted voice on the other end of the line.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, and gave the stain a thumbs-up. ‘Yes, you’re through to the right department. How may I help you?’

  There was the sound of breathing. Digitised breath shuttlecocked down the phone line.

  ‘Twice in one day,’ I said. I’m not sure why.

  ‘There’s a bomb in the building,’ the voice said. Then they rang off and the hourglass on my screen flipped one final time.

  D is for dissembling (adj.)

  Winceworth had an unqueer desire to delay the inevitability of his working day for as long as possible. Usually there was a gaggle of lexicographers outside Swansby House in a similar frame of mind, procrastinattering about the weather or the state of nearby St James’s Park lawns while counting their cigarettes and fiddling with glove fastenings. A game of etiquette usually developed amongst this fluctuating group with each member desperate to prolong their time beyond the confines of the office. The rules of the game were unspoken and certainly the sport was never explicitly acknowledged as a way of dawdling on company time. It involved tilting the brim of one’s hat up on the forehead and voicing admiration for the streaky-bacon brickwork of Swansby House. The more architectural terms you were able to use in order to express your admiration, the more points you gained. The game was over when you ran out of things to say or the silence became too awkward. At that point, the working day began.

&nb
sp; Winceworth’s working day was starting at a later-than-conventional hour and there were no fellow idlers to join on the front step. He tipped his chin above the lapel of his coat to look up at the building and list terms over the chaos of his headache. Streaky-bacon brickwork probably wouldn’t sit right with an expert in the field, so that was already a duff start. Was it Queen Anne, the building style? Is that what he had been told on one such milling, loafing morning or had he misheard and queenan was an architectural term for Swansby House’s shape, design, material? He had just nodded along at the time, accepting it as writ. Language is something you accept or trust rather than necessarily want to test out. Queenan wouldn’t be the most unlikely-seeming architectural term he had come across, certainly – current work on the S volume of the New Encyclopaedic Dictionary recently necessitated research into scutcheon, squinch, systyle, each one rolling around his mouth with unfamiliar textures and sloshes. Every word seems a nonsense until you need it or know more about it. Winceworth’s eyes drifted from the queenan steps and rashered walls up to the windows of the first floor, the quoins of the second floor, the oriel windows in the storeys beyond that and thence to the pediments and chimneys, the stupid blank January sky, the blotch of a starling or a pigeon on the wrought-iron weathervane, &c., &c., &c.

  Time to help attempt a pointless census of language. Winceworth could not put it off any longer. He straightened his tie and braced his shoulders against the broad wooden door.

  Ingrained behaviours are asserted unconsciously. Some are entirely automatic and shared from person to person, such as the impulse to pull a hand away from the steam of a breakfast kettle or a forehead perspiring in order to keep a body cool. Sometimes these responses are cultivated rather than spontaneous. They begin as autonomous performances then grow ritualised through habit until they are embedded in the culture of day-to-day action. For example, Winceworth could not imagine crossing the stone step threshold of Swansby House without his false lisp falling like a portcullis down across his tongue. He didn’t even have to think about it.