The Liar's Dictionary

Winceworth didn’t know how he vaulted over the bench so quickly nor how he covered so much ground in apparently one step but all at once he was face to face with the pelican on the ground and hitting it and hitting it and hitting it, pinning it between his knees and landing punches against its large white body. It was scrambling beneath his weight while behind him the mother and the child were screaming but all he could think of was the small cut above Sophia’s eye, bleeding; a thin line of blood ran down the side of her face so that its symmetry was thrown completely off, and the bird had not been bleeding at all as he had thought but was in fact covered in her blood, and he hit it in the chest over and over and over—

K is for

kelemenopy

(n.)

When a cartoon character is represented swearing or cursing, there is a word for the series of hashtags and exclamation marks and toxicity symbols in their speech bubbles: grawlix. @#$%&! It is a growling grunting irk of a work of a word. That’s what my brain felt like on days like this one, with tasks like reading through index cards. Asterisks lodged in my thoughts, upside-down question marks grapplehooking and winching the sides of my brain. My head as grawlax, grawlixed. Plural grawlixes or grawlix or nitpicked obscene grawlices.

I could feel myself growing bored. I doodled a small drawing of me screaming on top of one of the index cards. We all have that at our fingertips, don’t we: an image or design to which we unconsciously return and use to fill stray bits of paper. I used to draw thousands of boxes and little cartoon cats over my university notes. I wondered whether they ever doodled, the errant lexicographer or lexicographers who had gone so off-piste in the index cards of Swansby House. There might have been a better way to assuage their boredom, rather than making up fake words for me to hunt down.

There is a kind of snow blindness that descends during repetitive tasks. Pip described it happening at her work too – coffee orders no longer make any damn sense and you have to trust muscle memory to get the task done.

I started picking index cards at random from the pile. I checked the definition and if I didn’t recognise the word I cross-checked it on my phone.

I held one up to my window and read the beautiful looped handwriting.

crinkling (n.), a small precocious apple. Notes: Compare with other crinkles. Compare also crumpling in widespread English regional use. Compare also with craunchling in the same sense

I double-checked this word, sure that it must be an error and I had found another false word but damn damn damn it did bear some scrutiny.

I was tired, and the page on my phone listed in my vision. I had enjoyed-endured interesting, transformative and very boring discussions since sixth form about the instability of language but this task felt different – looking at the columns of online and pretty much infinite definitions, I was no longer sure which words were real nor why anyone had ever bothered trying to contain them. This was a failure of the imagination on my part. This was giving up. But surely compiling a dictionary or an encyclopaedia, even one as ramshackle as Swansby’s

, was like conceiving of a sieve for stars. I was daydreaming about audiobooks for dictionaries. I was daydreaming about literally browsing and pulling my lips over the words and routling or rootling or etymolojostling and chewing the cud of these index cards littered across my desk just to see what stuck in my teeth and could be removed. Cud and other ruminations.

I held up the index card. Crinkling, I read, a type of small apple. A precocious apple. What did that mean? What the hell. I associated crinkling as a verb or adjective with the corners of eyes, or Mr Blobby, or the unseen recesses of a wastepaper basket. How dare crinkling apples have unseen roots. This meant that someone once held a fruit in their hands and rather than say whatchamacallit or thingy or, indeed, ‘small apple’ to describe it, they had announced crinkling. And someone else had written that down. Adam and Eve naming the beasts of the field and the birds of the sky and the tricky precocious crinklings.

Not for the first time at that desk, I looked up ‘Symptoms of adult ADHD’ on my phone and flicked through the first few results. I then tried searching ‘What is an adult?’ The first link on the search page showed up purple, so clearly I had looked that up before.

I glanced at the cards strewn across my desk. Oh, my God, shut up, you are too interesting and too much, I wanted to tell them. That’s what people say to belittle women in workplaces, isn’t it? Or women in general. I wanted to say it to the materials of a dictionary. It was because I was intimidated and I hated it.