The Liar's Dictionary

While Winceworth’s mother found his boyhood lisp endearing, his father found it ridiculous. This made child-Winceworth even more resolved to keep up the pretence. A great-uncle on the paternal side had spoken in a similar way and family legend revolved around this forebear’s sudden shyness when The Times swapped the long, medial ∫ form to s on its pages so that his gruff declarations of ‘finfulneff!’ and ‘forrowful!’ over the breakfast table could no longer be excused as simply too-quick reading. In truth, this family legend was made up by Winceworth to scatter into conversations when pauses were too awkward for him to bear. Winceworth lied easily when there was no clear harm in doing so. Once his school years were completed, with accusations and repercussions of perceived effeminacy duly weathered on the sports pitches and in detention, Winceworth considered leaving the lisp behind him with the chalkboards and the textbooks. Out of habit, however, and perhaps nervousness, he accidentally let slip a nethethary during an interview for a minor proofreading role at Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary.

The editor’s eyes had softened with an unmistakable sympathy. The lisp persisted and Winceworth gained meaningful employment.

The lisp became a more pressing issue when Winceworth’s job at Swansby’s focused on the letter S. Day in, day out he shuffled powder-blue index cards covered with S-led words across his desk, headwords and lemmas all sibilance and precise hissing. The same editor who had been so well disposed to Winceworth’s non-impediment at the time of interview summoned him from his desk and explained, gently, that rather than a Christmas bonus this year Winceworth would be enrolled in a series of classes with one of the premier elocutionists in Europe.

‘As we enter the Ryptage–Significant volume,’ Prof. Gerolf Swansby had said, placing a hand on Winceworth’s shoulder. He was close enough for Winceworth to detect his breath – a strange mix of citrus zest and Fribourg & Treyer’s finest tobacco. ‘I thought it might be a good time to address the matter – you know, as you go on working as an ambassador for our great Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary.’

‘Ambassador, sir?’

Swansby replied after a pause, trying to look kind. ‘Exactly.’ The hand on Winceworth’s shoulder tightened a degree.

The lisp was so much a part of Winceworth’s identity and presence at Swansby’s that this offer was difficult to refute or dismiss. Sessions with Dr Rochfort-Smith were duly scheduled at considerable cost to the company’s pocketbooks, and so it was that January’s Winceworth sat back in an orange armchair, battling a headache and feigning a lisp to a doctor for the fourth week in a row.

Dr Rochfort-Smith’s methods of tutelage proved curious but not wholly unenjoyable. This was due in part to the added cat-and-mouse element, Winceworth having to hide his perfectly standard diction and evade detection. Their last appointment featured pebbles inserted into his mouth while he read passages from Dr Rochfort-Smith’s Coverdale translation of the Bible. Another involved a kind of puppet show whereby the active musculature of a speaking mouth was demonstrated using a silk, larger-than-life-size model of the human tongue. Winceworth was informed that this tongue had been made by the absent Mrs Rochfort-Smith. Although surely a woman of many talents, at the time it occurred to Winceworth that tongue manufacture was perhaps not one of her greatest. Some of the silk’s stitching was too obvious and a few wisps of stuffing escaped in sad papillae at its seams. With the bundle safely clamped between the jaws of a pair of vulcanised rubber dentures, Winceworth had watched for a good half-hour as Dr Rochfort-Smith revealed the ways by which one’s enunciation might be improved.

Presumably primed and ready for its next exhibition, today the tongue was hanging unwaggingly from its nail by the door.

Dr Rochfort-Smith held a tuning fork in both of his hands. ‘Your pitch,’ the doctor said, ‘is adequate and tone assured. But, I wonder: “roseate”, once more?’