The phone kept ringing, boring into my skull.
Of course, the hourglass is not the only symbol that accompanies hapless computer users (me) and their periods of waiting. There’s Apple products’ spinning orb known affectionately as the “Spinning Beach Ball of Death” or the “Marble of Doom.” My old BlackBerry occasionally presented me with a graphic of a squared-off clock, its hands rotating uncontrollably. BlackBerry-time, Apple-time, egg-time. My laptop at home was far newer than my office computer and ran on a far more up-to-date operating system. Bereft of hourglasses, my waiting was instead accompanied by its replacement, its inheritor: a glowing ring, a tiny green ouroboros graphic forever eating its own tail. The same irritation existed, the feeling of being trapped in a state of suspension rather than progress being made, but stripped of the more esoteric timekeeping device. This glowing circle felt somehow more clinical and inhumane, its cultural implications less to do with pirates and Father Time and more HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey or the KITT vehicle’s front-scanning bar in Knight Rider. Armed with the iconography of vanitas, maybe other operating systems in the future will adopt symbols of futility such as skulls or rotting flowers. Perhaps a small pixelated Sisyphus could be forced to clamber up my scrollbar. As it stands and stood, the charm of the hourglass was gone and I missed it. Tempus won’t stop fugit, sure, but at least we once had the chance to watch it play out in style.
The word hourglass lost any meaning for me beyond frantic rage.
The phone made another petulant ring. I sighed and picked up the receiver, smiling fixedly at the stain on the wall opposite my desk.
“Hello, Swansby’s Press,” I said, “how may I help you?”
“Burn in hell, Mallory,” said the synthetically distorted voice on the other end of the line.
“Yes,” I said, and gave the stain a thumbs-up. “Yes, you’re through to the right department. How may I help you?”
There was the sound of breathing. Digitised breath shuttlecocked down the phone line.
“Twice in one day,” I said. I’m not sure why.
“There’s a bomb in the building,” the voice said. Then they rang off and the hourglass on my screen flipped one final time.
D is for dissembling (adj.)
Winceworth had an unqueer desire to delay the inevitability of his working day for as long as possible. Usually there was a gaggle of lexicographers outside Swansby House in a similar frame of mind, procrastinattering about the weather or the state of nearby St. James’s Park lawns while counting their cigarettes and fiddling with glove fastenings. A game of etiquette usually developed amongst this fluctuating group with each member desperate to prolong their time beyond the confines of the office. The rules of the game were unspoken and certainly the sport was never explicitly acknowledged as a way of dawdling on company time. It involved tilting the brim of one’s hat up on the forehead and voicing admiration for the streaky-bacon brickwork of Swansby House. The more architectural terms you were able to use in order to express your admiration, the more points you gained. The game was over when you ran out of things to say or the silence became too awkward. At that point, the working day began.
Winceworth’s working day was starting at a later-than-conventional hour and there were no fellow idlers to join on the front step. He tipped his chin above the lapel of his coat to look up at the building and list terms over the chaos of his headache. Streaky-bacon brickwork probably wouldn’t sit right with an expert in the field, so that was already a duff start. Was it Queen Anne, the building style? Is that what he had been told on one such milling, loafing morning or had he misheard and queenan was an architectural term for Swansby House’s shape, design, material? He had just nodded along at the time, accepting it as writ. Language is something you accept or trust rather than necessarily want to test out. Queenan wouldn’t be the most unlikely-seeming architectural term he had come across, certainly—current work on the S volume of the New Encyclopaedic Dictionary recently necessitated research into scutcheon, squinch, systyle, each one rolling around his mouth with unfamiliar textures and sloshes. Every word seems a nonsense until you need it or know more about it. Winceworth’s eyes drifted from the queenan steps and rashered walls up to the windows of the first floor, the quoins of the second floor, the oriel windows in the storeys beyond that and thence to the pediments and chimneys, the stupid blank January sky, the blotch of a starling or a pigeon on the wrought-iron weathervane, &c., &c., &c.
Time to help attempt a pointless census of language. Winceworth could not put it off any longer. He straightened his tie and braced his shoulders against the broad wooden door.
Ingrained behaviours are asserted unconsciously. Some are entirely automatic and shared from person to person, such as the impulse to pull a hand away from the steam of a breakfast kettle or a forehead perspiring in order to keep a body cool. Sometimes these responses are cultivated rather than spontaneous. They begin as autonomous performances then grow ritualised through habit until they are embedded in the culture of day-to-day action. For example, Winceworth could not imagine crossing the stone step threshold of Swansby House without his false lisp falling like a portcullis down across his tongue. He didn’t even have to think about it.
He had worked at Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary long enough to acquire a kind of muscle memory. He steered his body from the front door to the coat rack, then up to his desk in the central Scrivenery hall on the first floor, knowing the precise momentum at which to swing an arm to most efficiently catch and release the stair-rail. Winceworth’s were not the only feet on the stairs and the pons pons pons of soft paws on stone steps joined his pace—one of the many cats that Prof. Gerolf Swansby allowed to roam the press and keep mice away from paper documents accompanied him up to the Scrivenery hall. This mouser was big and yellow and Winceworth reached down to scratch behind its ear. It turned its face away with a chirp. Maybe it too had a headache. Cat headaches were probably sleeker affairs.
On the walk from Dr. Rochfort-Smith’s rooms to Swansby House Winceworth had returned to vexing over why no word had been coined for the specific type of headache he was suffering. The bitter meanness of its fillip, the sludgy electric sense of guilt coupled with its existence as physical retribution for time spent in one’s cups. A certain lack of memory, as if pain was crowding it out. You drink too much and this headache was the result—the world was surely in the market for such an affliction to bear a name? And if no word did exist, could it be named after him as an autoeponym? Stricken by a ghastly case of the Winceworths. I am sorry I cannot come in to work today, I’ve a Winceworth like you wouldn’t believe. This could be his legacy, the way his name might yet echo down the generations. He made a mental chit to see whether the word already existed in slang or dialect words—perhaps something bracing and earthy from Dorset with gruff fricatives and flat, thudding vowels.