The Liar's Dictionary

That a perfect dictionary should be right is obvious. It should contain neither spelling nor printing errors, for example, and should not make groundless claims. It should not display any bias in its definitions except those made as the result of meticulous and rigorous research. But already this is far too theoretical – we can be more basic than that: it is crucial that the book covers open, at least, and that the ink is legible upon its pages. Whether a dictionary should register or fix the language is often toted as a qualifier. Register, as if words are like so many delinquent children herded together and counted in a room; fixed, as if only a certain number of children are allowed access to the room, and then the room is filled with cement.

The perfect preface should not require so many mixed metaphors.

The preface of a dictionary, often overlooked as one pushes one’s thumbs into the fruit filled with silkworms and slaughtered cows, sets out the aims of the dictionary and its scope. It is often overlooked because by the time a dictionary is in use its need is obvious.

A dictionary’s preface can act like an introduction to someone you have no interest in meeting. The preface is an introduction to the work, not the people. You do not need to know the gender of the lexicographers who worked away at it. Certainly not their appearance, their favourite sports team nor favoured newspaper, for example. On the day they defined crinkling (n.) as a dialect word for a small type of apple, the fact that their shoes were too tight should be of absolutely no matter to you. That they were hungover and had the beginnings of a cold when they defined this word will not matter, nor that unbeknownst to them an infected hair follicle under their chin caused by ungainly and too-hasty shaving is poised to cause severe medical repercussions for them two months down the line, at one point causing them to fear that they are going to lose their whole lower jaw. You do not need to know that they dreamed of giving it all up and going to live in a remote cottage on the Cornish coast. The only useful thing a preface can say about its lexicographers is that they are qualified to wax unlyrically about what a certain type of silly small apple is called, for example.

The perfect dictionary reader is perhaps a more interesting subject for a dictionary’s preface. One generally consults a dictionary, as opposed to resting it upon lecterned knees and reading it cover to cover. This is not always the case, and there are those who make it their business to read full, huge works of reference purely in order that they can say that the feat has been achieved. If one rummages through the bletted fruit of history or an encyclopaedic biographic dictionary of dictionary readers, one might discover such a person, Fath-Ali Shah Qajar, and a short biography dedicated to the same. Upon becoming the [SEE ALSO:—] Shah of Persia in 1797, Fath-Ali Shah Qajar was gifted a third edition of one very famous encyclopaedia. After reading all of its eighteen volumes, the Shah extended his royal title to include ‘Most Formidable Lord and Master of the Encyclopædia Britannica’. What a preface! A small picture of the Shah accompanying an article about his life might be a steel-plate engraving and show him seated, wearing silk robes with fruit piled high next to him. There is a war-elephant in the background of the portrait. So much fruit, so many silkworms, so much implied offstage trumpeting.

If you put your eyes far too close to an engraving all is little dots and dashes, like a fingerprint unspooled.

Perhaps you have encountered someone who browses a dictionary not as a reader but as a grazing animal, and spends hours nose-deep in the grass and forbs of its pages, buried in its meadow while losing sight of the sun. I recommend it. Browsing is good for you. You can grow giddy with the words’ shapes and sounds, their corymbs, their umbels and their panicles. These readers are unearthers, thrilled with their gleaning. The high of surprise at discovering a new word’s delicacy or the strength of its roots is a pretty potent one. Let’s find some now. (Prefaces to dictionaries as faintly patronising in tone.) For example, maybe you know these ones already: psithurism means the rustling of leaves; part of a bee’s thigh is called a corbicula, from the Latin word for basket.