The Liar's Dictionary

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: