The Liar's Dictionary

One of the Tits cats approached his desk. He couldn’t be sure if it was the same one that had soiled his shirt earlier in the day. He pulled his elbow around his work automatically, protecting it from even the cat’s prying eyes.

He would be consulted. His words might be someone’s first words, or last words. And if he was clever about it, there’d be no way to trace it back to him. Some value in his anonymity, at last: even if some poor clerk or printer’s devil was tasked with winnowing out these entries, Winceworth would be long gone. He thought about this figure discovering his private words and definitions in – what, he hazarded – five years? Ten years? A hundred? Would they resent him, or cheer him on?

Winceworth tapped his pen from Sophia against the glass of his inkwell.

winceworthliness

(n.), the value of idle pursuit

unbedoggerel (v.), to elucidate from nonsense, to free from darkness or obscurity

Winceworth slipped the blue index cards into the existing, completed deck on his desk. His mouth was dry. A private rebellion, a lie without a victim – what claims for truth did anyone really have, anyway? What right to define a world? Some trace of his thoughts surviving him was not so bad a thing. He would live for ever.

Where did that thought come from?

His face bowed in the glassy reflection of his unnecessary inkwell once more. It was puffy with sleeplessness.

He thought of Sophia and the words he would never say to her. He thought of Frasham, and words he had for the feeling of these thoughts. He thought about the indescribable colour of the explosion and how he had felt it in his bones.

Winceworth reached for the silver pen once more.

The words spooled out of him. Etymologies suggested themselves in constellations of thought and conjecture.

abantina

(n.), fickleness

paracmasticon (n.), one who seeks out truth through guile in a time of crisis

These felt like spellwords: Latinate, finickity and florid. There was a coltish joy to not feeling limited to using the letter S, which for so long had been the start of everything for him at this Swansby desk. He remembered his past couple of days: the shames of them, the leadenness of boredoms and required etiquettes, the spritz of energy and shocks. He felt them form as puns or logical morphing of semantic units. He felt that impulse fall away. He felt the new words bloom, sag, scratch.

agrupt (adj.), irritation caused by having a dénouement ruined

zchumpen

(adj.), the gait of a moth

Winceworth imagined once more the person who might discover his false entries, his surreptitious fictions. Perhaps readers would no longer need dictionaries or any reference books in the future: print and writing might be impossible in the future’s steam and smog, spoken language inaudible over the sound of engines. Maybe in the future people would communicate through touch and smell and taste alone. Maybe there would be dictionaries for that. All this learning of vocabulary for a world he would never see and sensations he would never know, Winceworth thought, patting the index cards on his desk so their edges aligned.

He veered from imagining the mischief he would cause with this non-thing, this practical joke, this overlookable nonsensing, to accepting that his hoax entries were the one act that he would ever be (not) known for and his only chance of leaving a trace on the world. He regretted he could not share a wink or something more permanent with the person who might find them.

He turned back to his work and added a final full stop to the entry he had been writing. He let the ink dry. It flashed a lively blue sheen for a moment in the light, and then the words set into the fibres of the card. The ink bled only a little; if one raised the index card to one’s eye, it was possible to see the microscopic wisps and flicks seep out from the intended lines and curves out into the paper’s grain.

New words came to him easier than breath. He had only to set them neatly down in the official way and then jimmy them into the appropriate pigeonhole in the hall. It was that simple.