The Liar's Dictionary

I read there was a mollusc called the Icelandic cyprine (Arctica islandica), also known as an ocean quahog. Quahog. A bubble of a word, snug and ugly and great. Quahog is a word for saying underwater or with a mouthful. Some words are made for speculative onomatopoeia. Have I ever spelled onomatopoeia correctly on first time of typing? Have I fuck. Onomatoepia is onomatopoeia for mashing your hands unthinkingly but hopefully onto a keyboard.

Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary claims that the Icelandic cyprine is a species of edible clam, which in terms of Wittig’s cyprine word was an excellent suggestion: you can right or wrong the punchlines as you like. I migrated to Wikipedia and found that an individual specimen of Icelandic cyprine was recorded as living for 507 years, which made it ‘the longest-lived non-colonial metazoan whose age was accurately known’. Cyprine and accuracy, mud in your eye: 507 years ago Thomas Wolsey drew up plans for an invasion of France. The article about ancient edible clams specified that ‘it is unknown how long [the specimen] could have lived had it not been collected alive by an expedition in 2006’. I imagined a dredging naval vessel, its bad radio full of that year’s worst hits as they dug up the noble, ancient clam: Fergie’s ‘London Bridge’, JT’s ‘Sexy-Back’, P!nk’s ‘U + Ur Hand’. You should not rake for these things, I thought at the time. I then thought: this job is killing my attention span.

I wondered how you date an edible clam, and other sentences.

There are certain words that have such a pleasing consistency, texture, taste, colour, odour, network, milieu, stance, poise, arch, crane, comfort, peak, trough; limpid, tepid, torpid, torqued, liquid, lacquered, honeyed, latched, thatched, throstle-sungèd, spangled words. The normal pH of these words is between 3.8 and 4.5, so there is some bite to them.

I supposed there was a man with the surname Skene. I supposed there was a man called Bartholin. Glands and ducts named after them, in the same way men name mountains and creatures after themselves. I hoped these men were kind.

I preferred secrete as a hiding verb rather than anything concerned with outwardliness. It is secreted about my person.

Have you ever heard the word Spinnbarkeit? I hadn’t. Why didn’t we all have these words at the tips of our fingers? Who had been stockpiling them?

‘They have an entry for queer bird,’ said Pip, looking up from her dictionary page. ‘But, ah, “Obsolete”. Poor word’s extinct.’

Obsolescence itself was just another beautiful word for a nothinging. Secrete it about your person and pearlgrit your teeth with a new vocabulary.

My office phone rang and I jumped on instinct – Pip did not have the same Pavlovian response to this sound. The peal ricocheted off the surfaces in the office.

‘Don’t—’ I said, but it was pointless. Pip was already there, hand on the receiver and lifting it to her face.

‘Hello,’ she said, and with a brightness that was purely for my benefit. There was only a slight hesitation when she improvised what she should be saying. ‘Mallory’s office phone?’

I watched her expression change. She did not want me to see her concern so she angled her body away from mine as though a glancing blow had turned her shoulder.

I wanted to ask if it was the hoaxer. I wanted to tell her to put down the phone and felt a rush of defensiveness. He was my problem, not hers. He was my threat, my reason for waking up with my heart in my mouth and horror pinching my throat. She was meant to be doodling on her hands or singing in a pub garden or holding me: his cartoon voice and his malice shouldn’t touch her. His words should stop an inch from her ears and wilt in the air.

I realised that I had no words for what I’d do to protect her.

T is for

treachery

(n.)

Winceworth descended to the basement of the Scrivenery in a creaking, cage-like lift. He had only glimpsed down to the cellar once before – as far as he knew it was an untouched, unbothered part of the building, sequestered and sectioned away until the first edition of the dictionary was ready to print. It was full of damp and shadows, the scuttle of strange unseen unnameables alongside the ready-for-use printing presses. He struck a match as he descended and in the flash of light saw the pristine presses sitting waiting in the dark. He could not have told you what the parts of machinery were called nor their intended function – they looked hulking and sleek in the dark and somehow open-jawed. They made the air stink like metal: a foretaste of the steam and inksweat of printing to come whenever Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary was ready to roll out volume by volume, word by word.