The Liar's Dictionary

Winceworth had an unqueer desire to delay the inevitability of his working day for as long as possible. Usually there was a gaggle of lexicographers outside Swansby House in a similar frame of mind, procrastinattering about the weather or the state of nearby St James’s Park lawns while counting their cigarettes and fiddling with glove fastenings. A game of etiquette usually developed amongst this fluctuating group with each member desperate to prolong their time beyond the confines of the office. The rules of the game were unspoken and certainly the sport was never explicitly acknowledged as a way of dawdling on company time. It involved tilting the brim of one’s hat up on the forehead and voicing admiration for the streaky-bacon brickwork of Swansby House. The more architectural terms you were able to use in order to express your admiration, the more points you gained. The game was over when you ran out of things to say or the silence became too awkward. At that point, the working day began.

Winceworth’s working day was starting at a later-than-conventional hour and there were no fellow idlers to join on the front step. He tipped his chin above the lapel of his coat to look up at the building and list terms over the chaos of his headache. Streaky-bacon brickwork probably wouldn’t sit right with an expert in the field, so that was already a duff start. Was it Queen Anne, the building style? Is that what he had been told on one such milling, loafing morning or had he misheard and queenan was an architectural term for Swansby House’s shape, design, material? He had just nodded along at the time, accepting it as writ. Language is something you accept or trust rather than necessarily want to test out. Queenan wouldn’t be the most unlikely-seeming architectural term he had come across, certainly – current work on the S volume of the New Encyclopaedic Dictionary recently necessitated research into scutcheon, squinch, systyle, each one rolling around his mouth with unfamiliar textures and sloshes. Every word seems a nonsense until you need it or know more about it. Winceworth’s eyes drifted from the queenan steps and rashered walls up to the windows of the first floor, the quoins of the second floor, the oriel windows in the storeys beyond that and thence to the pediments and chimneys, the stupid blank January sky, the blotch of a starling or a pigeon on the wrought-iron weathervane, &c., &c., &c.

Time to help attempt a pointless census of language. Winceworth could not put it off any longer. He straightened his tie and braced his shoulders against the broad wooden door.

Ingrained behaviours are asserted unconsciously. Some are entirely automatic and shared from person to person, such as the impulse to pull a hand away from the steam of a breakfast kettle or a forehead perspiring in order to keep a body cool. Sometimes these responses are cultivated rather than spontaneous. They begin as autonomous performances then grow ritualised through habit until they are embedded in the culture of day-to-day action. For example, Winceworth could not imagine crossing the stone step threshold of Swansby House without his false lisp falling like a portcullis down across his tongue. He didn’t even have to think about it.

He had worked at Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary long enough to acquire a kind of muscle memory. He steered his body from the front door to the coat rack then up to his desk in the central Scrivenery hall on the first floor, knowing the precise momentum at which to swing an arm to most efficiently catch and release the stair-rail. Winceworth’s were not the only feet on the stairs and the pons pons pons of soft paws on stone steps joined his pace – one of the many cats that Prof. Gerolf Swansby allowed to roam the press and keep mice away from paper documents accompanied him up to the Scrivenery hall. This mouser was big and yellow and Winceworth reached down to scratch behind its ear. It turned its face away with a chirp. Maybe it too had a headache. Cat headaches were probably sleeker affairs.