The Liar's Dictionary

Mountweazel: the noun that refers to these bogus entries cooked up and inserted into a dictionary or encyclopaedia as a means of protecting copyright. Misinformation, fake news – gotcha, pal.

This was a strategy also used by cartographers to safeguard their maps: just plop a non-existent ‘Trap Street’ in amongst the roads and byways in order to tell upon tracing replication in other publications whether other maps have copied yours.

I permitted Tits the cat to curl up in my lap as David went on. He explained that mountweazels were named after one of the most famous fictitious entries, printed amongst the pages of The New Columbia Encyclopedia (1975). Lillian Virginia Mountweazel sits unobtrusively in the company of the composer Mussorgsky in the foothills of Mount Olympus and Mount Rushmore:

Mountweazel, Lillian Virginia, 1942–1973, American photographer, b. Bangs, Ohio. Turning from fountain design to photography in 1963, Mountweazel produced her celebrated portraits of the South Sierra Miwok in 1964. She was awarded government grants to make a series of photo-essays of unusual subject matter, including New York City buses, the cemeteries of Paris and rural American mailboxes. The last group was exhibited extensively abroad and published as Flags Up! (1972). Mountweazel died at 31 in an explosion while on assignment for Combustibles magazine.

I liked the sound of Lillian Virginia. It was a shame she didn’t exist.

‘So there are some of these fake words in our dictionary?’ I said.

‘In a manner of speaking,’ David said.

‘One?’ I asked. ‘One or two? What are they?’

‘Herein lies the issue,’ David said.

He handed a printout to me. Tits was excited to see movement across the desk and perked up beneath my hand. The piece of paper was slightly coffee-damp around the edges.

It was a scan of a Swansby’s dictionary page. The scan was not a good one, with the spectre of David’s fingertips visible at its sides. A single word and its definition were circled halfway down the column.

cassiculation (n.), sensation of walking into spider silk, diaphanous unseen webs, etc.

A good word, I thought. I can see the use for that.

I brought the page close to my face as if trying to sniff out the fraud. ‘This is one of those fake words? These mountweazels?’

‘I’ve cross-checked as many dictionaries as I can bear: it’s not in any of them.’ David indicated his bookshelves, then ran his hands through his hair in such a way that seemed to imply that he was used to pulling it out.

‘I mean,’ I said, turning the word over in my mouth, ‘just one little word. Cassiculation. What’s the harm in—’

‘I went back to the archives,’ David interrupted. He was not usually an interrupting man. He held up a faded index card on his desk. ‘I went back to the original slip of paper that we had in storage. Each word has its own “slip” with its definition written on it. Have a look at it, here: no example usages given, there’s no etymology – it’s been written on the card in a completely non-standard way. God knows how it got through the editing process and was included, but this bloody word has been squirrelled away in the dictionary in every copy ever printed.’

‘If it’s one of these mountweazels,’ I said, picking up the index card, ‘and if I’ve followed you, surely there must be some record of it being inserted? Otherwise the trick doesn’t work. It wouldn’t work as a copyright trap. You need to know you’ve lain a trap to catch anyone out.’

David nodded. ‘That’s what I’m holding out for – that there’s a list somewhere in storage that we can scoop up, then tick off and winnow out all of these fake words before I digitise it.’

‘A list,’ I said. ‘So you think there might be more than one?’

David sank behind his desk. ‘I’m afraid so.’ He twirled his finger dejectedly. ‘Turn the page. I made it my project at the beginning of the week to see whether another one surfaced – I opened the archives at random and found one after about three hours of checking for the same handwriting on the index card.’

I turned my A4 sheets. Another scan, another circled word and definition. It might have been my imagination, but the circle looked slightly more frantic.

asinidorose

(n.), to emit the smell of a burning donkey

‘Jeez,’ I said. ‘Whoever came up with that must have been – a little bit – a little bit out there.’

‘I mean, it’s completely embarrassing,’ David said, gesticulating. ‘Mountweazels are common enough, but each edition only requires one of the damn things. And an editor needs to know about them, otherwise it’s just pointless. Pointless falsehoods! It’s inexplicable why they would just be sprinkled in there.’

‘Makes it look like the dictionary has a mind of its own,’ I said.

‘How embarrassing,’ David said.

‘You know what, I think this is fine.’

David looked up. ‘Fine?’