‘Pesky thing to hunt down. Noun. Seems to be in a translation of the Æneid, and I’m assuming it has something to do with scallywag – say, I don’t suppose,’ and here Bielefeld coughed lightly and looked up at the rumpled Winceworth through his lashes, ‘I don’t suppose you have any ideas about it? For scurryvaig, I mean – with an i after the—’
‘None whatsoever.’
‘Only ask because I’ve got a backlog on swingeouris, and swanis too and it looks like I will have a rather rum couple of weeks ahead of me.’ Bielefeld caught Winceworth’s eye. ‘But, I say, what on earth has happened to you? You look like you’ve been settling punches with a volcano. And is that ink down your shirt?’ He flapped at Winceworth’s chest. It puffed back a reply with brick dust. ‘Should I – should I get you to a doctor or somesuch?’
‘I’m fine,’ Winceworth said. ‘There was an accident – it doesn’t matter, I don’t think. I just left some work that needs finishing up here and then I will be right off to bed.’
Bielefeld regarded him. ‘You have bags under your eyes that I could carry pens in. You’ll look dreadful for the staff photograph tomorrow.’
‘Oh, dear God.’
‘But are you quite certain you should be here? I would stay with you but—’ Bielefeld pointed over at his desk, all its papers neatened up for departure and his Swansby attaché case waiting. He attempted an apologetic smile. ‘Was all set to go, you know. And I’ve bought tickets for the ballet.’
Winceworth flicked dust from an ear. ‘I’m only here because I’ve been absent most of the afternoon. Tying up some loose threads.’ He smiled ghastily. Bielefeld did not seem to notice.
‘Frasham mentioned that he ran into you dining on tea and cakes,’ Bielefeld said, and he angled his face towards Winceworth to see if an account would be forthcoming. Winceworth kept his eyes fixed. He wondered whether Bielefeld could smell the Barking reviving alcohol on him. ‘And his fiancée!’ cried Bielefeld, and he laughed and clapped a friendly hand again to Winceworth’s shoulder. ‘Well,’ Bielefeld continued, going over to his desk and picking up his things, ‘if you’re sure. Just as long as you’re not – I mean to say, you look like you’ve been hit by an omnibus. Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh, Mr Gibbon and all that. Make sure that you do not overdo it.’
‘I shall endeavour to not do so.’ Winceworth watched Bielefeld slowly take his leave. He stopped to pet one of the Swansby cats on the way out and hummed some bars of Tchaikovsky. The cat avoided his hand. Winceworth wondered what anecdote Bielefeld might be composing for his colleagues about the whole matter.
Winceworth was left alone in the echoing hall of the Scrivenery.
He moved to his own desk, and out of habit he reached for his pen in its usual place in his jacket. He drew out the new fountain pen Sophia had bought for him.
He spun the pen across his fingers. Two sleepy Swansby kittens were draped over the neighbouring bureau and both moved their heads slowly in synchrony, watching the pen twirl back and forth through his hand. He waved it around for their benefit until they appeared to lose interest. Tiredness yawped and tangled across his vision as he reached into his case and placed his idly doodled, fictitious entries on the desk. His little diversions, sketched-out underminings and skits. He rubbed his eyes and saw again the strange, blasting, indefinable colour snarl around the edges of his vision.
A daydream, tinged by anger, became a surreptitious hope. His imagination stumbled and flew a little as he looked around at the pigeonholes filled with entries ready to be filed. The pen felt a devious weight in his hand. He flicked through his notes for dawdle-scrawled false definitions. His handwriting there looked so much more relaxed than when pressed into official duty. He looked again from these secret, silly words to the Swansby House pigeonholes. There was grit in the thumbnails and traces of blood. The thought became clear and clean: it would take just some small strokes of pen to transfer these doodled drafts onto the official blue index cards and he could pepper the dictionary with false entries. Thousands of them – cuckoos-in-the-nest, changeling words, easily overlooked mistakes. He could define parts of the world that only he could see or for which he felt responsible. He could be in control of a whole universe of new meanings, private triumphs and soaring new truths all hidden in the printed pages whenever the dictionary was finished and (absurd notion!) others might find his words in print. He would never be known as a poet or a statesman, never be known as anything really – but if Prof. Gerolf Swansby’s vision for Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary was achieved, Winceworth imagined his personal words and thoughts on every bookshelf up and down the country.
One of the Tits cats approached his desk. He couldn’t be sure if it was the same one that had soiled his shirt earlier in the day. He pulled his elbow around his work automatically, protecting it from even the cat’s prying eyes.
He would be consulted. His words might be someone’s first words, or last words. And if he was clever about it, there’d be no way to trace it back to him. Some value in his anonymity, at last: even if some poor clerk or printer’s devil was tasked with winnowing out these entries, Winceworth would be long gone. He thought about this figure discovering his private words and definitions in – what, he hazarded – five years? Ten years? A hundred? Would they resent him, or cheer him on?
Winceworth tapped his pen from Sophia against the glass of his inkwell.
winceworthliness (n.), the value of idle pursuit
unbedoggerel (v.), to elucidate from nonsense, to free from darkness or obscurity
Winceworth slipped the blue index cards into the existing, completed deck on his desk. His mouth was dry. A private rebellion, a lie without a victim – what claims for truth did anyone really have, anyway? What right to define a world? Some trace of his thoughts surviving him was not so bad a thing. He would live for ever.
Where did that thought come from?
His face bowed in the glassy reflection of his unnecessary inkwell once more. It was puffy with sleeplessness.
He thought of Sophia and the words he would never say to her. He thought of Frasham, and words he had for the feeling of these thoughts. He thought about the indescribable colour of the explosion and how he had felt it in his bones.
Winceworth reached for the silver pen once more.
The words spooled out of him. Etymologies suggested themselves in constellations of thought and conjecture.
abantina (n.), fickleness
paracmasticon (n.), one who seeks out truth through guile in a time of crisis
These felt like spellwords: Latinate, finickity and florid. There was a coltish joy to not feeling limited to using the letter S, which for so long had been the start of everything for him at this Swansby desk. He remembered his past couple of days: the shames of them, the leadenness of boredoms and required etiquettes, the spritz of energy and shocks. He felt them form as puns or logical morphing of semantic units. He felt that impulse fall away. He felt the new words bloom, sag, scratch.
agrupt (adj.), irritation caused by having a dénouement ruined
zchumpen (adj.), the gait of a moth
Winceworth imagined once more the person who might discover his false entries, his surreptitious fictions. Perhaps readers would no longer need dictionaries or any reference books in the future: print and writing might be impossible in the future’s steam and smog, spoken language inaudible over the sound of engines. Maybe in the future people would communicate through touch and smell and taste alone. Maybe there would be dictionaries for that. All this learning of vocabulary for a world he would never see and sensations he would never know, Winceworth thought, patting the index cards on his desk so their edges aligned.
He veered from imagining the mischief he would cause with this non-thing, this practical joke, this overlookable nonsensing, to accepting that his hoax entries were the one act that he would ever be (not) known for and his only chance of leaving a trace on the world. He regretted he could not share a wink or
something more permanent with the person who might find them.
He turned back to his work and added a final full stop to the entry he had been writing. He let the ink dry. It flashed a lively blue sheen for a moment in the light, and then the words set into the fibres of the card. The ink bled only a little; if one raised the index card to one’s eye, it was possible to see the microscopic wisps and flicks seep out from the intended lines and curves out into the paper’s grain.
New words came to him easier than breath. He had only to set them neatly down in the official way and then jimmy them into the appropriate pigeonhole in the hall. It was that simple.
Winceworth closed his eyes. The colour of the explosion blazed behind his eyelids and, just for a moment, he was gasping, an instant fizz of sweat across his back. The colour pinch-stung his vision in a bolt exactly as it had through the train window earlier that afternoon. And it was not a memory of the colour’s intensity nor its sudden blast across his vision that had him passing his hand across his face and loosening his tie: it was the colour itself that terrified him. It flared with all the oranges of Dr Rochfort-Smith’s rooms and all the mottled yellows of the Swansby cats’ coats; it had the January greens of St James’s Park somehow within it too, the blush of a pelican’s blooded feathers, the blue of Café l’Amphigouri’s twist-leafed Limoges china. It was a colour that made no sense. It sneered like red, milk-mild and lemon-brash and tart and tangy on the eye, singing with white-hot curves and slick, abrasive purple licks.
There was a scraping sound, distant but also somehow close, followed by a self-censoring hushed curse. Winceworth started – he must have fallen asleep at his desk. He glanced at the Scrivenery’s clock and clutched his attaché case to his chest in one movement, expecting that its chime had woken him and that at any moment his colleagues would come filing through the door for their morning work. It was still evening.
He realised the sound that had made him stir was some kind of rhythmic thumping coming from the floor below.
‘Hello?’ he called into the silence of the Scrivenery.
The thumping ceased. And then, softly, there was a laugh from the corner. There were stairs there that led down into the cellar. The sound was floating up the lift shaft.
Winceworth looked at the thick stacks of blue index cards. There were hundreds, thousands there – each identical when shuffled together, his words amongst all words.
That is that, he thought. That that is, is. That that is not, is not. Is that it? It is.
There was another laugh and Winceworth felt no triumph whatsoever. He staggered to his feet and made his way towards the noise.
S is for sham (n. and adj.)
‘There’s something pressed on this one,’ Pip said, and she tilted a card in her hand towards the light. I wheeled my chair closer to get a better look. This action was not quite as fluid as I would have liked: the threshold was just across a small stretch of carpet but it still took about six heel-punts to get there.
‘It’s probably just dust,’ I said.
‘Victorian dust.’
‘Probably Tits’s fur,’ I said.
We had been looking for words for hours, were questioning the authenticity of every single entry. Once-familiar and expected words became uncanny and absurd, impossibly newfangled: quack and quad and quiddity all looked stupid. Why would a monarch be called a queen, a word so squeaky and keening? It was as exotic and unlikely to see quick as Quetzalcoatl.
‘I think it’s a dandelion seed,’ Pip continued, holding a remnant of something between her fingers and futzing with it. She blew.
In our second year of dating and once we had moved in together, Pip bought a book called The Language of Flowers (1857). Arranged alphabetically and with whimsical illustrations, it outlined the ‘meaning’ of certain blooms, floriography (n.), and what might be intended by their inclusion in a bouquet. Some I remember: an azalea means ‘temperance’, white clover means ‘think of me’. Less sweet, but memorably, cardamine means ‘paternal error’ and Fuller’s teasel means ‘misanthropy’. We laughed about these last two and then spent quite a lot of money at our next anniversary ordering armfuls of cardamine and Fuller’s teasel as a private awful joke. They did not arrange well together and the teasel pricked our thumbs.
The first two in the book’s list were the flowers called ‘abatina’ (meaning ‘fickleness’) and ‘abecedary’ (‘volubility’). I’ve never found a florist or nursery that stocks them or admits to knowing what they might look like.
Pip let the old maybe-dandelion maybe-nothing remnant fall from her hand to the floor and returned to her index cards.
‘I see queer gets a look-in,’ she said after a while.
‘That’s one of the first words I looked up when I got the job.’
‘That’s the gay agenda for you. Find your people,’ Pip said. Then, ‘Oh!’
‘What?’ I tensed, pen poised and ready.
‘Did you know queest is a word for wood pigeon?’
Another entry from The Language of Flowers: cedar leaves meant ‘strength’.
At home, we considered where to put this book on our shelves. We told each other that one day we would get around to arranging the shelf alphabetically or by spine height or colour but somehow we never did. It ended up next to a Greek cookery book and a translation of Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary (1979) by Monique Wittig and Sande Zeig. Pip found this book in a flea market or a thrift store or a jumble sale. She had riffled or rifled through it, laughed like a drain or a spout or a gargoyle and right there and then began texting me morsels from its pages. I had to hide my phone from David whenever he popped his head around the door in case he thought I was slacking off at my desk.
I had heard of Wittig during my degree. Zeig was Wittig’s partner and formerly – and, I hope, both throughout and latterly – her martial arts instructor. The book is a playful, speculative, excoriative almanac for a fabled island populated by lesbians. It’s a send-up, silly and amazing all at once, a manifesto and a flipglib thumb to the nose. Deep in its pages, the book features the neologism cyprine. What does it mean? A translator of the book rather tentatively explained the word as ‘the juice’. In the French, cyprine is defined as ‘le liquide sécrété à l’entrée du vagin de la femme lorsqu’elle est en état d’excitation sexuelle’.
Pip sent a photo of this page from the flea market stall. She included a ;£ in the text. She meant to type ;) but I think her thumb must have slipped.
It felt nice to suddenly have a word for that. Reading Pip’s text, it struck me that all the words I had that approximated cyprine were either associated more with men or with stuff coming out of my nose.
Cyprine in the dictionary of Wittig and Zeig was intended to have linguistic connotations with the island of Cyprus, Aphrodite’s home. It’s a spry and glistening kind of word.
At the time, I texted Pip back: It’s a spry and glistening kind of word.
Pip replied: And you know the gays love an island – cf. Lesbos, cruising, etc.
Are you flirting with me? I had texted.
Are you out at work yet? Pip replied. I had put my phone in my desk drawer and returned to whatever intern task of the day was required.
Wittig and Zeig’s book was brimming. That’s part of what I loved about Pip. We could talk about brims between ourselves, Brims and misunderstandings and their different pressures.
I had looked up cyprine in the Swansby dictionary out of sheer curiosity. It was an idle thought, an idling thought. A scurrilous voyeur kind of thought but also without much hope. I did find it there, but only because the word also describes a variety of a mineral first discovered adjacent to lavas on Mount Vesuvius. Boom clouds and bodies transfixed: yes, that Vesuvius. I will never guess the correct plural of lava right the first time. It does not come easily. What does? Sensu stricto, the breeze might call through the curtains, so I’ll follow its scent and read, yes, multiple laval shifts surge hot and impossible like hands reaching out
from rock.
Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary states the mineral cyprine is also known as idocrase. I do craze sometimes, I thought, when the fan was merely stirring the air into something silicate and nacreous, stars or suns peacock-bright outside. ‘Idocrase occurs as crystals in skarn deposits.’ Skarn referred to chemical alteration of a rock via hydrothermal means. The notion here was of hot fluids that had been subjected to contact metamorphism. Hot stuff, and changing out of hardnesses and feet-on-the-groundnesses. I read that cyprine’s crystals could be cut as gemstones. ‘Cut your teeth on this’ always sounded to me like the most violent-hot turn of phrase.
How many serious books and websites did I consult before I went to serious bed with a serious woman? There were diagrams in those books as there might be for DIY furniture construction or jewellery repair. All the books were bought and not from the library. This syllabus was undertaken and taken under with an earnest and terrified sense of revision. I certainly did not have the word cyprine to hand. There’s a pun here but I’m not sure I can make it indelicate-delicate. Pursuit of a word’s meaning or a meaning’s word making me sound a little unhinged.
I read there was a mollusc called the Icelandic cyprine (Arctica islandica), also known as an ocean quahog. Quahog. A bubble of a word, snug and ugly and great. Quahog is a word for saying underwater or with a mouthful. Some words are made for speculative onomatopoeia. Have I ever spelled onomatopoeia correctly on first time of typing? Have I fuck. Onomatoepia is onomatopoeia for mashing your hands unthinkingly but hopefully onto a keyboard.
Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary claims that the Icelandic cyprine is a species of edible clam, which in terms of Wittig’s cyprine word was an excellent suggestion: you can right or wrong the punchlines as you like. I migrated to Wikipedia and found that an individual specimen of Icelandic cyprine was recorded as living for 507 years, which made it ‘the longest-lived non-colonial metazoan whose age was accurately known’. Cyprine and accuracy, mud in your eye: 507 years ago Thomas Wolsey drew up plans for an invasion of France. The article about ancient edible clams specified that ‘it is unknown how long [the specimen] could have lived had it not been collected alive by an expedition in 2006’. I imagined a dredging naval vessel, its bad radio full of that year’s worst hits as they dug up the noble, ancient clam: Fergie’s ‘London Bridge’, JT’s ‘Sexy-Back’, P!nk’s ‘U + Ur Hand’. You should not rake for these things, I thought at the time. I then thought: this job is killing my attention span.
The Liar's Dictionary Page 16