The Liar's Dictionary

At home, we considered where to put this book on our shelves. We told each other that one day we would get around to arranging the shelf alphabetically or by spine height or colour but somehow we never did. It ended up next to a Greek cookery book and a translation of Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary (1979) by Monique Wittig and Sande Zeig. Pip found this book in a flea market or a thrift store or a jumble sale. She had riffled or rifled through it, laughed like a drain or a spout or a gargoyle and right there and then began texting me morsels from its pages. I had to hide my phone from David whenever he popped his head around the door in case he thought I was slacking off at my desk.

I had heard of Wittig during my degree. Zeig was Wittig’s partner and formerly – and, I hope, both throughout and latterly – her martial arts instructor. The book is a playful, speculative, excoriative almanac for a fabled island populated by lesbians. It’s a send-up, silly and amazing all at once, a manifesto and a flipglib thumb to the nose. Deep in its pages, the book features the neologism cyprine. What does it mean? A translator of the book rather tentatively explained the word as ‘the juice’. In the French, cyprine is defined as ‘le liquide sécrété à l’entrée du vagin de la femme lorsqu’elle est en état d’excitation sexuelle’.

Pip sent a photo of this page from the flea market stall. She included a ;£ in the text. She meant to type ;) but I think her thumb must have slipped.

It felt nice to suddenly have a word for that. Reading Pip’s text, it struck me that all the words I had that approximated cyprine were either associated more with men or with stuff coming out of my nose.

Cyprine in the dictionary of Wittig and Zeig was intended to have linguistic connotations with the island of Cyprus, Aphrodite’s home. It’s a spry and glistening kind of word.

At the time, I texted Pip back: It’s a spry and glistening kind of word.

Pip replied: And you know the gays love an island – cf. Lesbos, cruising, etc.

Are you flirting with me? I had texted.

Are you out at work yet? Pip replied. I had put my phone in my desk drawer and returned to whatever intern task of the day was required.

Wittig and Zeig’s book was brimming. That’s part of what I loved about Pip. We could talk about brims between ourselves, Brims and misunderstandings and their different pressures.

I had looked up cyprine in the Swansby dictionary out of sheer curiosity. It was an idle thought, an idling thought. A scurrilous voyeur kind of thought but also without much hope. I did find it there, but only because the word also describes a variety of a mineral first discovered adjacent to lavas on Mount Vesuvius. Boom clouds and bodies transfixed: yes, that Vesuvius. I will never guess the correct plural of

lava right the first time. It does not come easily. What does? Sensu stricto, the breeze might call through the curtains, so I’ll follow its scent and read, yes, multiple laval shifts surge hot and impossible like hands reaching out from rock.

Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary states the mineral cyprine is also known as idocrase

. I do craze sometimes, I thought, when the fan was merely stirring the air into something silicate and nacreous, stars or suns peacock-bright outside. ‘Idocrase occurs as crystals in skarn deposits.’ Skarn referred to chemical alteration of a rock via hydrothermal means. The notion here was of hot fluids that had been subjected to contact metamorphism. Hot stuff, and changing out of hardnesses and feet-on-the-groundnesses. I read that cyprine’s crystals could be cut as gemstones. ‘Cut your teeth on this’ always sounded to me like the most violent-hot turn of phrase.

How many serious books and websites did I consult before I went to serious bed with a serious woman? There were diagrams in those books as there might be for DIY furniture construction or jewellery repair. All the books were bought and not from the library. This syllabus was undertaken and taken under with an earnest and terrified sense of revision. I certainly did not have the word cyprine to hand. There’s a pun here but I’m not sure I can make it indelicate-delicate. Pursuit of a word’s meaning or a meaning’s word making me sound a little unhinged.