EDITOR'S LETTER

A WELLSPRING OF WORDS

Language presents limitless possibilities

British author Eley Williams’ novel, The Liar’s Dictionary, published last year and already a qualifier for lots of lists with more honors surely to come, is for a lover of words like me, a genuine delight and funny as hell.

Its story toggles between past and present and centers on two lexicographers employed by a publishing business founded in 1850 and which survives generations — until it becomes time finally to digitize its only product, Swansby’s Encyclopaedic Dictionary.

When we meet Peter Winceworth, a character so pathetic that he brings to mind Ignatius Reilly from John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces and Quoyle from Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News, he has worked for five years on the inevitably and perennially unfinished Swansby’s. Dictionaries, as a matter of definition, must always be incomplete, rather like the hapless Winceworth, due to the constantly evolving nature of language.

The mostly powerless Winceworth makes an enduring and twisted mark on the dictionary he is helping to compile by introducing fake entries to the work. He arrives at agrupt, an adjective meaning “irritating as the result of a denouement ruined,” and the eponymous winceworthliness, a noun defined as “the value of idle pursuit.”

Decades later, with the effort to put Swansby’s online underway, it falls to Mallory, by now the publisher’s only staffer, to ferret out the contaminants introduced by Winceworth before the dictionary goes live.

By the time Mallory enters the employ of David Swansby, deliberately bogus Winceworthian entries had come to be known — for real — as Mountweazels in celebration of the fictitious Lillian Virginia Mountweazel, who according to the fourth edition of the New Columbia Encyclopedia, published — truth be told — in 1975, was an American photographer who was born in Bangs, Ohio, and died in an explosion while on assignment for Combustibles magazine.

Publishers inserted Mountweazel and other Mountweazels in books and maps as copyright traps, not because they were befallen by vindictive employees.

The 1943 edition of Webster’s New Twentieth Century Dictionary, for example, contained the following entry:

jungftak, 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.

Inspired by The Liar’s Dictionary, I have coined the word schmidtliesel, which I have decided will mean “a story about food written by someone who does not eat.” I know such a writer, Liesel Schmidt. I have never seen her ingest anything but tea. Too, I have arrived at paralironesis, “a tendency to lose track of repetitions when lifting weights.”

On a day in February that fell just short of turning mild, I thought about Eley Williams and the tendency to assign a word, each different, to groupings of various animal species — a tower of giraffes, a crash of rhinos, a murder of crows — after encountering a terrific scene. I was out on my boat, the Bullpen, and West Bay was stuffed with a stew, shall I say, of countless thousands of Spanish sardines. The small silvery fish of about 5 inches in length had attracted a chaos of cormorants, a pandemic of pelicans and a damnright of dolphins.

Speckled trout season was closed, and the trip amounted to more of a shakedown cruise than a fishing trip. But I was delighted to find that ospreys had taken to their nests, and all about were signs of the imminent expiration of winter. It occurred to me that the sardine suppers had been a reward to birds who had toughed out hard freezes brought on by the southerly tip of a polar vortex.

At day’s end, I had no complaints. The trip had been rich in winceworthliness.

Word up,

STEVE BORNHOFT EXECUTIVE EDITOR

sbornhoft@rowlandpublishing.com

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