The Liar's Dictionary

‘Just look at that.’ He switched his gaze from the skylight to his shoes in their weak pool of sunlight.

For my part, appreciative noises.

‘Apricide,’ David said. He pronounced it with fervour. People who work with words like to do this: enunciate with admiring flourishes as if a connoisseur and to show that here was someone who knew the value of a good word, the terroir of its etymology and the rarity of its vintage. Then he frowned, paused. He did not correct himself, but unfortunately I remembered this word from Vol. I of Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary. David meant apricity (n.), the warmness of the sun in winter. Apricide (n.) means the ceremonial slaughter of pigs.

You might spot a volume of Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary mouldering somewhere as a prop book on a gastropub mantelpiece or occasionally see one being passed from church fete bookstall to charity shop to hamster-bedding manufacturer in your local area. Not the first nor the best and certainly not the most famous dictionary of the English language, Swansby’s has always been a poor shadow of its competitors as a work of reference – from the first printed edition in 1930 to today it has nowhere near the success nor rigorousness of Britannica and the Oxford English Dictionary. Those sleek dark blue hearses. Swansby’s is also far less successful than Collins or Chambers, Merriam-Webster’s or Macmillan. It only really has a place in the public imagination because Swansby’s is incomplete.

I don’t know whether people are endeared to an almost-complete dictionary because everyone enjoys a folly, or because of the Schadenfreude that accompanies any failed great endeavour. With Swansby’s, decades’ worth of work was completely undermined and rendered inconsequential by an ultimate inability to deliver a too-optimistic promise.

If you asked David Swansby about the nature of Swansby’s as an incomplete project and therefore a failure, he would draw up to his full height of circa two hundred foot and tell you he would defer to Auden’s quotation: that a piece of art is never finished, it is just abandoned. David would then check himself, escape to a bookshelf and come back ten minutes later and say of course that particular quotation belonged to Jean Cocteau. Another ten minutes would pass and David Swansby would seek you out and would clarify that that line was actually first and best said by Paul Valéry.

David Swansby was a man who liked to quote and did so often. He was at pains to show he cared about quoting correctly. He would also not think twice about gently upbraiding people who misuse the verb quote in place of the noun quotation to which I would say, pick your battles, but I was only an intern.

I nodded once more. The egg in my mouth was Jupiter, the egg was my whole head.

Maybe the nation is fond of Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary because it holds artistic or philosophical allure as an unfinished project. Not in the way David wanted to style it – Swansby’s is not the textual equivalent of Schubert’s Symphony No. 8, Leonardo da Vinci’s Adoration of the Magi or Gaudí’s Sagrada Família. You could certainly admire the work that went into it. Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary spans nine volumes and contains a total of 222,471,313 letters and numbers. For anybody who has the time or patience for mathematics, that is approximately 161 miles of type between the dictionary’s thick green leather-bound covers. I did not have the patience for mathematics, but on this internship I certainly had the time. When I was starting my role at Swansby House, my grandfather told me that the most important quality of a dictionary is that it could fit in your pocket: that would probably cover all the important words anyway, he said, and would be slim enough to go with you wherever you went without distorting good tailoring. I wasn’t sure that he understood what was involved in an internship (‘Did you say internment?’ he hollered down the phone, to no real response. He tried again: ‘Interment?’) but he seemed pleased for me. Never mind a bullet – the nine volumes of Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary (1930) first edition could probably stop a tank in its tracks.