The Liar's Dictionary

That morning, both patients locked eyes as they passed on the threshold of Dr Rochfort-Smith’s door. Presumably Mr Grumps was in the corridor even as the girl and her mother were ushered into the doctor’s rooms. Winceworth pictured Mr Grumps regarding the songbird in the doctor’s study with invisible, ravenous zeal. Winceworth shot the girl a small conspiratorial smile.

The child regarded him with puzzled politeness. Then her face darkened and she released a clear, snarling growl.

Pons pons pons

Peter Winceworth collected his hat and made his way rather quickly down the stairs and into the street.

C is for

crypsis

(n.)

My task for the day was to look over David Swansby’s efforts at digitising the text of Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary. It was his dream to honour the family name and the scope and vision of his forefather editors by updating the unfinished dictionary and putting it all online for free. He spoke of this as a noble project, for the betterment of humanity, and as a way of securing the Swansby legacy as something accomplished and celebrated rather than a noble damp squib.

Privately, I looked up the entry for hubris (n.).

In order that he might achieve his vision, much of Swansby’s meagre finances were being ploughed into the digitisation of the dictionary and updating its definitions. The first, last and only physical edition of the incomplete Swansby’s had come out in the 1930s using the huge archive of abandoned notes and proofs made in the previous decades, so this was no small task. In our discussions, David made it very clear that he would not be adding new words to this archive, as this did not seem in keeping with the Swansby spirit: rather, he wanted to make sure that the words that had been defined were updated for a current audience.

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.