No rest for the wicked, said the dog’s face, and she tugged at her leash, pleased by her efforts to communicate efficiently and without formality.
‘Nice meeting you,’ said Pip. I’m not sure to whom she addressed this. She took the choc-ice wrapper from my hand and left the scene without looking back.
F is for fabrication (n.)
Winceworth opened his regulation Swansby House leather attaché case, making sure no one was looking over his work. For some years now, just to pass the time and for his own amusement, he had been making up some words and definitions. He sketched these idle thoughts on borrowed notepaper whenever the mood took him: sometimes inspired by interactions with his colleagues in the Scrivenery – bielefoldian (n.), an annoying fellow; titpalcat (n.), a welcome distraction. Sometimes he just improvised little fictions in the style of an encylopaedic entry. To this end, he made up some fourteenth-century dignitaries from Constantinople and a small religious sect living in the volcanic Japanese Alps. More often than not, however, these false entries allowed him to plug a lexical gap, create a word for a sensation or a reality where no other word in current circulation seemed to fit the bill. This ranged from waxing poetical about a disappointing meal – susposset (n.), the suspicion that chalk has been added to ice cream to bulk out the serving – to ruminations concerning everyday events – coofugual (v.), the waking of pigeons; relectoblivious (adj.), accidentally rereading a phrase or line due to lack of focus or desire to finish; larch (v.), to allot time to daydreaming.
Winceworth flexed his hands. He meant no harm by this, he told himself, and he was allowed these small private amusements. He considered the much-discussed, absent Frasham and gnawed the end of his rediscovered Swansby pen. It was cheap and hollow, and infrequently he was worried he would chew right through it. Winceworth selected a new blank index card and wrote
frashopric (n.), the office or position of a dullard, acquired by money
Terence Clovis Frasham was one of the few people for whom Winceworth’s lisp presented an opportunity for cruelty. He was quite the darling of Swansby’s, not because he was a particularly talented lexicographer nor a very hard worker. He was, however, both exceedingly rich through some family jam-making business. Just as usefully, he also had a real flair for attracting and massaging the egos of exceedingly rich friends. Every so often, whenever Prof. Gerolf’s coffers ran low, Frasham was able to amass some glinting and bulging soirée and press his associates and acquaintances for donations, and magically money appeared. This genius for accruing funds for the dictionary meant that whenever Frasham did make an appearance at Swansby House, he was fêted as a princeling and benefactor.
Occasionally Winceworth saw invitations to these fundraising events – dances or regattas depending on the season – but never felt moved to attend. He had nothing to offer, after all, and was sure that some fault would be found with his attire or that he would make some embarrassing slip of etiquette. Terenth Clovith Fthrathm. According to the invitation slipped onto his desk the previous month, Frasham had been accepted to the 1,500 Mile Society on the occasion of his twenty-seventh birthday and would Peter Winceworth like to join him in celebrating this achievement?
There were many reasons to drink heavily in the presence of Terence Clovis Frasham. He was handsome, popular and had the posture of a professional tennis player. Tennis was a sport, along with fencing and long-distance swimming, for which Frasham had received Blues whilst at university. Winceworth, by contrast, if one was in the business of contrasts, had the posture of a middle-ranking chess player. Frasham also possessed that particularly resentful quality of being a complete braggart while also seeming simply charming. He had entered the employ of Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary at the same time as Winceworth and both were of similar ages.
According to the party invitation, Frasham qualified for entry to the 1,500 Mile Society having successfully returned from Siberia. This jaunt had been funded by Swansby House in order that the etymology of the words shaman and struse and (obtusely or abstrusely) the correct spelling of tsar might be researched for the S volume. Winceworth was still not quite sure how Frasham had talked Prof. Gerolf Swansby into this since Frasham did not speak, nor was qualified to translate, a word of Russian as far as anyone knew. Spurious (adj.), from the Latin spurius, ‘illegitimate’, from spurius (n.), meaning ‘illegitimate child’, from the Etruscan spural meaning ‘public’. According to one of the letters Frasham sent back to the offices, pursuing the etymology of starlet (n.) necessitated a funded audience with various members of Russian aristocracy.
Given the parallels between their lives thus far, the fact Frasham was sent to the steppes of Asia whilst Peter Winceworth was funded to undergo Dr Rochfort-Smith’s attentions in Chelsea seemed fair. Then Frasham’s photographs started arriving back at Swansby House. As London passed through smog-fumey summer and autumn, with horses slaughtered in the street to make way for automobiles and the city filleted for the Underground railways, the photographs sent by Frasham caused grown men and women at the Dictionary to coo with envy and excitement. Here was one featuring Frasham on camelback, another with him wreathed in silks looking over Lake Baikal and taking tea with a diplomat. A particularly dramatic shot of Frasham mock-wrestling a walrus was greeted with something bordering hysteria by members of Swansby House’s staff and was immediately pinned above his empty desk, shrine-like.
In the corner of the photograph one could just make out Glossop, the other Swansby House employee sent on the trip. While his companion was tall and strapping, Ronald Glossop was unprepossessing. Perhaps it was testament to Frasham being quite so particularly good-looking but standing next to him – and Glossop was invariably somewhere close to Frasham whether in the Westminster offices or on the coast of the Bering Sea, forever scampering at the latter’s elbow with pen and paper – it was difficult to remember any real defining features for the man. Winceworth could not even recollect what his voice was like or even if he had ever heard him speak. One thing he could recall of Glossop was the lime-green handkerchief carried in his waistcoat’s jetted pocket – it was a bright enough colour that everyone grew used to catching sight of it flashing like St Elmo’s fire across the wide central hall of the Scrivenery. Glossop was very much treated as Frasham’s assistant, although they actually held the same role at Swansby House and Glossop’s faculty for languages and philology was far more advanced. Winceworth suspected Glossop did most of the actual lexicographical work during their year-long Siberian trip together as well as any heavy lifting (other than for theatrical effect, cf. walruses).
In the walrus photograph Glossop stood almost out of frame. He was in the background, blurred and obscure, using a hatchet to saw a flipper from one of the put-upon walrus’s floe-mates.
Frasham’s photographs were accompanied by letters, often elaborate with metaphor and regularly ill-spelt. The progress of Frasham’s etymological investigations was never really emphasised.
At their desks in Swansby House, Bielefeld once noticed Winceworth glancing with particular dolefulness at the walrus photograph and said in passing, cheerfully, ‘The valour of the field versus the elbow grease of the desk!’
Winceworth smiled in answer and gripped his Swansby House pen too hard. He looked down to find his notes on solecism (n.) spattered with ink.
G is for ghost (v.)
Once the police let us back into the building, guaranteeing that the call was just a hoax or prank, David and I returned to our second floor. David twiddled with something in a box of electrics under the stairs, assuring me that the fire alarm would work in the future. I left him to it. After about an hour David rang the internal phone line – making me jump circa 400 feet in the air – and requested that I come into his office.
I knew it couldn’t be because he had met Pip. That was a mad idea. Wrong wrong wrong, and yet there the idea lay, flat and flattening, at the base of my throat.
David rose from his seat as I knocked and entered, starting
a little as if shocked. Unfortunately, David’s sudden movement set off a chain of reactions that caused a flurry to intensify into a chaos. While some seventy-year-olds grow stooped with every passing year, David Swansby had unfurled: he was the tallest man I had ever met. This quick unwinding of his body from sitting to standing knocked a cup of coffee skidding and rolling across his desk. This startled the office cat, who ran headlong into the printer which spontaneously powered up and began shrieking something like the word ‘Paroxysm!’ over and over and over and over and over again. The spilt coffee scribbled a fresh, hot, organic ‘WELL, WHOOPS!’ flourish across the length of the editorial desk; I could tell the coffee was fresh because it steamed even as it spread across the paperwork and filing.
A few minutes later, when calm was restored, the cat Sphinxed on the armrest of a chair with its eyes closed. I gave its spine a nudge with my knuckles. Its body rumbled something about solidarity against my hand.
‘Sit sit sit,’ David said.
‘Thank you.’ I noticed the game of online chess open on David’s computer screen.
‘Tits Tits Tits,’ said David Swansby.
I had first met Tits during the interview for my current role. He was a rangy, yellow-eyed duffer-moggy with a coat the colour of old toast. His presence as co-interviewer (‘Ignore the cat at your feet! Please, do sit down!’) was not unwelcome: this explained the shallow ceramic bowl on the desk in front of me, placed next to the Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary-branded mug and the block of Post-It notes. At first I had thought that the bowl might be an ashtray, and if not an ashtray then a horrible version of a hotel reception’s Mint Imperials, half-filled with little dusty brown pellets. Not quite powder, nowhere near meat: kibble is the name, isn’t it, for that kind of catfood. I’ve only ever heard that word thanks to American sitcoms. Satisfyingly apt combination of sounds and letters, and carries the overtones of kitten + nibble + rubble, as well as the vague sense of onomatopoeia as it is shaken out of the bag.
Halfway through the interview for the internship I noticed this shallow ceramic bowl had TITS written on it. David – then just Mr Swansby for the interview’s sake – followed my line of sight.
‘Short for Titivillus,’ he said. He came around the desk and began talking to the cat. ‘Isn’t it, Tits? Tits Tits Tits.’ He reached for Tits’s ears and gave them a scratch. My job-hungry brain kicked in and I recognised the cat had been transformed into a conduit for diplomacy so I put my hand onto a tuft above its cat-shoulder. As Mr Swansby worked his thumb around to Tits’s jaw, finding the sweet spots there that make cats smile, I focused on its withers. If that’s the right word. Maybe this was all unconnected, but Tits purred at our teamwork and I got the job.
As David mopped up the coffee with what appeared to be a spare pair of socks, I felt I needed to say something mild, to dissipate the mood. God knows why I always feel driven to do this.
‘You know, you never fully explained the cat’s name,’ I said.
‘Strictly speaking,’ David said, not looking up, ‘all the cats at Swansby’s have been called that, ever since the very first mouser kept down in the printing press. Rats make nests out of the discarded galley papers, you know. Dynasty stuff. Eighteen Tits. Would you like some tea? Coffee? Water?’
‘No, thank you.’ I rubbed a thumb down Tits’s nose.
‘I thought Titivillus was a bit too long for collars so I shortened it to the inevitable,’ David said. ‘That was funny for the first year but then – well, I always forget how it must look. Bowls all around the building with TITS written on them, me shouting “Tits!” out of windows. I’m so used to the name by now that I hardly notice.’ David busied himself with a kettle and a small cafetière.
‘Titivillus,’ I said again, to check the pronunciation. ‘Is that an emperor? Empress?’
‘A demon – I think Milton mentions him, possibly not.’ David waved at the lower half of his wall-to-ceiling bookshelves, presumably indicating an M section. I was not prepared for the editor of an encyclopaedic dictionary to admit ignorance so candidly while also asserting how well-read he was. ‘Certainly crops up in mystery plays: used to be blamed for introducing errors into written works. Slip-ups, typos, that kind of thing. There’s also something in The Pickwick Papers about “tits” being a word for calling cats. “Puss, puss, puss – tit, tit, tit.” Along those lines.’
Tits’s purring intensified against my hand. David hit the cafetière plunger with the stance of someone detonating a mountainside.
‘He’s a boy, by the way,’ David said.
‘Got it,’ I said. ‘Hello,’ I added, to the cat.
‘But all that’s something completely by the by,’ said David. ‘I want to ask you about whether you are any good at keeping secrets.’
I blinked.
‘This will all be rather quick and informal. In fact,’ David said, checking his tone, ‘I’d rather that what I’m about to say doesn’t go beyond these walls.’
It occurred to me that I might be fired. From a cannon, in a kiln, from a job, fretted, fretting, flaming. I began to make calculations about rent and overdrafts as David cleared his throat. I realised I had been making these calculations in the back of my mind every day since I started this job. There should be a specific word for that: the sluice of adrenaline that comes when you are able to pinpoint the reason for exhaustion. Precarity and teetering and grocery lists with question marks and budgeting apps and crying in the shower and adding water to pasta sauce and—
‘First of all, I want to emphasise that I am deeply aggrieved by today’s events,’ David said. ‘Thank you for taking time out of your day, and I am so incredibly sorry for any upset caused.’
I waited.
‘I need to talk to you about mountweazels.’
‘Mountweazels,’ I repeated.
‘There are mistakes. In the dictionary,’ David said. There seemed to be a sob edging the softness of his voice. I stared at him. He assumed a defensive tone. ‘Well. Not mistakes. Not-quite mistakes. They’re words that are meant to be there but not meant to be there.’
‘Mountweazels,’ I repeated again.
‘Other dictionaries have them! Most!’ David Swansby said. ‘They’re made-up words.’
‘All words are made up,’ I said.
‘That is true,’ David Swansby replied, ‘and also not a useful contribution.’
‘Fake words?’ I said.
‘That might be one way to put it.’
David rearranged the pencils and notepads on his desk as he went on. The speech felt rehearsed, thesis-like. He explained that factually incorrect words can crop up in any work of reference. While they do undermine any overall sense of a dictionary’s objective authority, these entries will not necessarily be considered ‘fiction’, however. It was crucial to consider, he said, whether there was any intention to disseminate untruths. The cause for non-facts appearing in dictionaries could be split most simply between those mistakes that occurred as a result of extra-lexical concerns and those that occurred through editorial misunderstandings. David was at pains to point out how other, rival dictionaries botched this: for example, early in the history of the Oxford English Dictionary, all of the drafted definitions that began with the letters Pa written up on slips, ready to be edited, were accidentally used for kindling. This error was blamed on an inattentive housemaid. Moreover, only after the first edition of the OED appeared in print was it discovered that a fugitive bondmaid (n.) entry had been completely left out from the proofs due to misfiling. This kind of unfortunate occurrence was not limited to dictionaries and encyclopaedias, of course. In an interview, the creator of the popular London A–Z Street Atlas described how she momentarily lost possession of 23,000 index cards out of a window thanks to a sudden gust of wind. Many of those hand-completed cards flew onto the top of a bus as it sped down Holborn High Street. This explains the absence of the entry for Trafalgar Square in the first edition. I had no idea whether this anecdote was true or not.
I never checked, but David made a very compelling narrator for forgivable editors’ oversights. He could write a dictionary of failures, I thought.
David continued: unfortunate coincidences and misjudgements of this kind could cause an incomplete dictionary but certainly not a deliberately incorrect one – there is no evidence of malicious intent in these instances that contributed to a wrong dictionary designed to mislead the user. Reader. Chance-upon-er. Plain errors of definition as well as mistakes could just sneak into a dictionary or encyclopaedia, and such blunders were contributing factors to the unwitting summoning of so-called ghost words. David spoke about ghost words for some time, grabbing a text from his shelves and quoting directly from it: ‘Yes, ghost words – “words which have no real existence” dum de dum, blah de blah –’ he thumbed through the paragraph – ‘“being mere coinages due to the blunders of printers or scribes, or to the perfervid imaginations of ignorant or blundering editors.”’
I had no idea what he was quoting.
Such fruits of ‘perfervid imagination’ were represented by the ghost word dord that ‘famously’ appeared in five consecutive editions of Webster’s New International Dictionary. In 1931, Webster’s chemistry editor submitted a slip that read ‘D or d, cont./density’, intending to indicate that the letter D in upper-or lowercase could stand as an abbreviation for the value of a density in scientific equations. Miscommunication between different editorial bodies within the publishing process meant that Webster’s typesetters received the editor’s slip and assumed that Dord was a headword, defined as ‘density’, rather than an illustration of upper-or lowercase – it was only when dord’s lack of etymology was noted in 1939 that the entry was questioned and eventually expunged.
Dense dense dense. God knows how many people must have used dord in that time. I know I used it at least four times every week, dorddawdledoodling my way through the day.
The Liar's Dictionary Page 7
