Of course, this dictionary reader also celebrates the beauty of a word, its lustre and power, but for him the value of its sillage is turned to silage.
He would use crinkling as a noun correctly, with a flourish. (Preface as over explanation, as metabombast.)
There is no perfect reader of a dictionary.
* * *
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The perfect dictionary would know the difference between, say, a “prologue” and a “preface.” Dictionary as: so, what happens?
Dictionary as about clarity but also honesty.
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If one is wont to index these things, another category of reader submits to the digressiveness of a dictionary, whereby an eyeline is cast from word to word in sweeping jags within from page to page. No regard for the formalities of left-to-right reading, theirs is a reading style that loops and chicanes across columns and pages, and reading is something led by curiosity, or snagged by serendipity.
Should a preface pose more questions than it answers? Should a preface just pose?
* * *
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A dictionary as an unreliable narrator.
* * *
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But haven’t we all had private moments of pleasure when reading a dictionary? Just dipping, come on in, the water’s lovely type of pleasure, submerging only if something takes hold of your toe and will not unbite. Private pleasures not to be displayed in public by café windows.
* * *
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A sense of pleasure or satisfaction with a dictionary is possible. It might arise when finding confirmation of a word’s guessed spelling (i.e., i before e), or upon retrieving from it a word that had momentarily come loose from the tip of your tongue. The pleasure of reading rather than using a dictionary might come when amongst its pages you find a word that is new to you and neatly sums up a sensation, quality or experience that had hitherto gone nameless: a moment of solidarity and recognition—someone else must have had the same sensation as me—I am not alone! Pleasure may come with the sheer glee at the textures of an unfamiliar word, its new taste between your teeth. Glume. Forb. The anatomy of a word strimmed clean or porched in your teeth.
In some even quite modern dictionaries, if you look up the word giraffe it ends its entry with [see: cameleopard]. If you look up cameleopard it says [see: giraffe]. This is the dictionary’s ecosystem.
* * *
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From childhood we’re taught that a dictionary begins, roughly, with an aardvark and ends, roughly, with a zebra and the rest is a rough game of lexical tug-of-war between the two, cameleopards and giraffes playing umpire.
* * *
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I think the perfect dictionary would not be written in the first person because it should make objective claims. It probably should not refer to a second-person “you” because this might feel like bullying. A preface should be sure of itself. Dictionaries as tied to longing, tied to trust, tied to jouissance and surrender—but all this seems a little too fruity and affected. Better, surely, that both lexicographer and user should be unseen or unregarded. More overlookable than a well-known word that does not need defining.
The perfect preface would know when to shut—
* * *
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Dictionaries as unsafe, heady things. It is safer in many ways to treat your memory as an encyclopaedia, and keep your dictionary mobile in your mouth. Words passing from mouth to mouth, as baby birds take food from the mother.
How many similes can you fit in a preface? How garbled can a preface be? The perfect book should grab the reader and the perfect dictionary should be easily grasped.
The green leather of a perfect dictionary might have lines that look just like the back of your hand. If you were to dig your nails into its surface the crescent shapes would remain. Don’t tell me why anyone might ever be gripping a dictionary quite so hard.
This book is queasy with knowledge. To name a thing is to know a thing. There’s power there. Can you Adam and Eve it? Words are snappable and constantly distending and roiling, silkworms trapped somewhere between the molars. Dictionaries as the Ur-mixed metaphor.
A preface as all talk and no trousers.
The perfect dictionary is the fruit of the labour of silkworms and cattle spinning yarns. Words as cud. Each definition as eulogy, each account an informed hunch.
* * *
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The perfect dictionary has the right words and the worst words in the right order. In the perfect dictionary, it is all correct and true. Incorrect definitions are as pointless as an unclear simile, as useless as a garbled preface or an imprecise narrator.
There is no such thing as the perfect dictionary.
Not every word is beautiful or remarkable, and neither is its every user or creator.
Finding the right word can be a private joy.
A preface can be shorthand for take my word for it.
A preface can be shorthand for look it up.
“Look it up.”
“Look up from it.”
* * *
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look up
A is for artful (adj.)
David spoke at me for three minutes without realising I had a whole egg in my mouth.
I had adopted my usual stance to eat my lunch—hunched over in the stationa/ery cupboard between the printer cartridges and stacked columns of parcel tape. Noon. It can be a fine thing to snuffle your lunch and often the highlight of a working day. Many’s the time I’ve stood in Swansby House’s cupboard beneath its skylight lapping soup straight from the carton or chase-licking individual grains of leftover rice from a stained piece of Tupperware. This kind of lunch will taste all the better when eaten unobserved.
I popped a hard-boiled egg into my mouth and chewed, reading a dozen words for envelope printed in different languages down the side of some supply boxes. To pass the time I tried memorising each term. Boríték remains the only Hungarian I know apart from Biró and Rubik, named after their inventors—the penman and the human puzzle. I chose a second hard-boiled egg and put it in my mouth.
There was the usual degree of snaffling, face-in-trough rootling when the door opened and editor-in-chief David Swansby sidestepped into the cupboard.
It was only etiquette that gave David this title, really. He came from a great line of Swansby editors-in-chief. I was his only employee.