The Liar's Dictionary by Eley Williams

Author:Eley Williams [Williams, Eley]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781473562806
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2020-07-15T16:00:00+00:00

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.

Oh, my God! shut up! you are too! interesting! and! too! much! was precisely how I fell for Pip because I was intimidated and I loved her.

Where did that thought come from?

I held up two of the index cards. I squinted.

All of the cards that contained made-up words were written in a quite different type of fountain pen. All the rest were in different handwriting, sure: the work of hundreds of hands filling in thousands of index cards. But they all had the same uniform scratchiness, the same kind of line and flourish. On these false entries, however, it was as if the person writing them had used a completely different type of nib.

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