Eley Williams
THE LIAR’S DICTIONARY
Contents
Preface
A is for artful (adj.)
B is for bluff (v.)
C is for crypsis (n.)
D is for dissembling (adj.)
E is for esquivalience (n.)
F is for fabrication (n.)
G is for ghost (v.)
H is for humbug (n.)
I is for inventiveness (adj.)
J is for jerque (v.)
K is for kelemenopy (n.)
L is for legerdemain (n. and adj.)
M is for mendaciloquence (n.)
N is for nab (v.)
O is for ostensible (adj.)
P is for phantom (n. and adj. and v.)
Q is for queer (n. and adj. and v.)
R is for rum (adj.)
S is for sham (n. and adj.)
T is for treachery (n.)
U is for unimpeachable (adj.)
V is for vilify (v. transitive)
W is for wile (n.)
X is for x (v.)
Y is for yes (exclam.)
Z is for zugzwang (n.)
Afterword
Acknowledgements and thanks
About the Author
Eley Williams lectures at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her short story collection Attrib. and Other Stories won the James Tait Black Prize and the Republic of Consciousness Prize and was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. The Liar’s Dictionary is her debut novel.
Also by Eley Williams
Attrib. and Other Stories
for Nell, too marvellous for words
novel (n.), a small tale, generally of love from Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755) jung ftak (n.), a Persian bird, the male of which had only one wing, on the right side, and the female only one wing, on the left side; instead of the missing wings, the male had a hook of bone, and the female an eyelet of bone, and it was by uniting hook and eye that they were enabled to fly – each, when alone, had to remain on the ground from Webster’s Twentieth Century Dictionary of the English Language (1943)
Preface
Let us imagine you possess a perfect personal dictionary. A, the, whatever. Not a not-imperfect dictionary but the best dictionary that could ever exist for you.
Let’s specify: this should be printed rather than digital. Dictionaries as practical objects. You could hold a volume of it out of someone else’s reach, wave it around or use it to chivvy a wayward moth out of a kitchen. As I say, dictionaries as practical. It might have a meaningful heft in the hand with lightly scuffed corners: trustworthy enough to be consulted and not too hot to handle. It would have a silk bookmark perhaps, and page numbers, so that it’s not jealous of other fancy books on the shelf. The perfect preface would know why dictionaries have page numbers. The dictionary’s title would be stamped in gold across the spine. Its paper would have a pleasing creaminess and weight, with a typeface implying elegance, an undeniably suave firmness or firm suaveness. A typeface that would be played by Jeremy Brett or Romaine Brooks – a typeface with cheekbones. Leather covers come to mind if one imagines a perfect dictionary, and if you were to flick your perfect dictionary’s cover with a thumbnail it would make a satisfying fnuck-fnuck sound.
I admit that I have a less-than-great attention span so my perfect personal dictionary would be concise and only contain words that either I don’t yet know or ones that I frequently forget. My concise, infinite-as-ignorance dictionary would be something of a paradox and possibly printed on a Möbius strip. My impossible perfect dictionary.
Let us dip into a preface and push it open with our thumbs as if we are splitting some kind of ripe fruit. (Opening a book is never anything like that though really, is it, and this simile is a bad one.) My perfect dictionary would open at a particular page because of the silk bookmark already lodged there.
Two thousand five hundred silkworms are required to produce a pound of raw silk.
What is the first word one reads at random on this page?
[I have been sidetracked. Some words have a talent for will-o’-the-wispishly leading you from a path that you had set for yourself, deeper and deeper into the parentheses and footnotes, the beckoning SEE ALSO suggestions.]
Exactly how many dictionary covers could one make by peeling a single cow?
Who reads the prefaces to dictionaries, anyway?
fnuck-fnuck-fnuck
To consider a dictionary to be ‘perfect’ requires a reflection upon the aims of such a book. Book is a shorthand here.
The perfect dictionary should not be playful for its own sake, for fear of alienating the reader and undermining its usefulness.
That a perfect dictionary should be right is obvious. It should contain neither spelling nor printing errors, for example, and should not make groundless claims. It should not display any bias in its definitions except those made as the result of meticulous and rigorous research. But already this is far too theoretical – we can be more basic than that: it is crucial that the book covers open, at least, and that the ink is legible upon its pages. Whether a dictionary should register or fix the language is often toted as a qualifier. Register, as if words are like so many delinquent children herded together and counted in a room; fixed, as if only a certain number of children are allowed access to the room, and then the room is filled with cement.
The perfect preface should not require so many mixed metaphors.
The preface of a dictionary, often overlooked as one pushes one’s thumbs into the fruit filled with silkworms and slaughtered cows, sets out the aims of the dictionary and its scope. It is often overlooked because by the time a dictionary is in use its need is obvious.
A dictionary’s preface can act like an introduction to someone you have no interest in meeting. The preface is an introduction to the work, not the people. You do not need to know the gender of the lexicographers who worked away at it. Certainly not their appearance, their favourite sports team nor favoured newspaper, for example. On the day they defined crinkling (n.) as a dialect word for a small type of apple, the fact that their shoes were too tight should be of absolutely no matter to you. That they were hungover and had the beginnings of a cold when they defined this word will not matter, nor that unbeknownst to them an infected hair follicle under their chin caused by ungainly and too-hasty shaving is poised to cause severe medical repercussions for them two months down the line, at one point causing them to fear that they are going to lose their whole lower jaw. You do not need to know that they dreamed of giving it all up and going to live in a remote cottage on the Cornish coast. The only useful thing a preface can say about its lexicographers is that they are qualified to wax unlyrically about what a certain type of silly small apple is called, for example.