“I will see how many more Zenos can join our final encounter next week.”
Dr. Rochfort-Smith’s next client was already waiting in the corridor, a young girl of about seven years whose mother wittered hello!s and good morning!s. The girl shrank from Dr. Rochfort-Smith’s attempted swipe at a headpat. Winceworth recognised her from previous weeks when, curious, he had queried the child’s reason for visiting the practice. Apparently the girl suffered some kind of idioglossia and entirely refused to speak in anyone’s presence. She could read and write to an exceptional standard but was entirely mute when in company. Dr. Rochfort-Smith explained that her parents overheard her speaking a language of her own devising when she was alone. When asked whether there had been any progress during his tutelage, the doctor would not be explicit but said they had established through the use of paper, pen and orange crayons that the girl believed she was speaking to an imaginary tiger. This tiger accompanied the girl everywhere and was called Mr. Grumps.
That morning, both patients locked eyes as they passed on the threshold of Dr. Rochfort-Smith’s door. Presumably Mr. Grumps was in the corridor even as the girl and her mother were ushered into the doctor’s rooms. Winceworth pictured Mr. Grumps regarding the songbird in the doctor’s study with invisible, ravenous zeal. Winceworth shot the girl a small conspiratorial smile.
The child regarded him with puzzled politeness. Then her face darkened and she released a clear, snarling growl.
Pons pons pons
Peter Winceworth collected his hat and made his way rather quickly down the stairs and into the street.
C is for crypsis (n.)
My task for the day was to look over David Swansby’s efforts at digitising the text of Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary. It was his dream to honour the family name and the scope and vision of his forefather editors by updating the unfinished dictionary and putting it all online for free. He spoke of this as a noble project, for the betterment of humanity, and as a way of securing the Swansby legacy as something accomplished and celebrated rather than a noble damp squib.
Privately, I looked up the entry for hubris (n.).
In order that he might achieve his vision, much of Swansby’s meagre finances were being ploughed into the digitisation of the dictionary and updating its definitions. The first, last and only physical edition of the incomplete Swansby’s had come out in the 1930s using the huge archive of abandoned notes and proofs made in the previous decades, so this was no small task. In our discussions, David made it very clear that he would not be adding new words to this archive, as this did not seem in keeping with the Swansby spirit: rather, he wanted to make sure that the words that had been defined were updated for a current audience.
When I learned this, I couldn’t help but point out that there were online dictionaries already, online encyclopaedias updated every second by experts and hobbyists. I showed him on my phone. There was no competition. David looked bored and a little hurt that I did not share his vision.
“But to have Swansby join that list,” he said as I reeled off the names of various sites. “To finally put Swansby’s Encyclopaedic Dictionary to rest!”
I did not understand the logic of this, but not understanding the logic of it paid the bills. Each time I passed the portrait of Prof. Gerolf Swansby on the downstairs floor, I looked up an article on my phone about whether eccentricity is genetic.
Each day David Swansby disappeared into his office to spend hours typing up every individual entry from his family dictionary, updating each definition as best he could. If I’m candid, I think one of the main reasons for the delay in digitising the dictionary and the reason my “internship” had lasted over three years stemmed from David’s discovery of online chess. Not only that, he had found a site where you could “play” as if you are taking part in famous, historical chess matches: some program had mined archival data and provided the original moves made during specific games by a player, so you could pitch your wits against the ghost of that player and see whether you would have fared any better in opposition. David had spent over eight months locked in a game first played in 1926. In the online game, he was playing Harold James Ruthven Murray (1868–1955), a prominent chess historian of the early twentieth century. You may know him as a chess historian. You may also know him as one of the eleven children of the first editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. Every time I passed David’s office and heard him slamming his hands on his laptop and swearing at the screen, I could not help but think that there was something of an old rivalry between Swansby’s and the Oxford English that he was trying to put to bed. I don’t know whether he ever won. I’m sure he would have told me.
I tried to explain the digitising of the dictionary to Pip one evening back in our flat. Most of the notes for the dictionary are from the last years of the nineteenth century, and the words that appear or do not appear amongst its pages reflect the times. I looked around our kitchen for an example. Say, for instance, teabag. In 1899, no one was yet using the word, so it wouldn’t appear in the body of the dictionary.
“Verb or noun?” Pip asked. Rude. I made a face.
Teabag had yet to bob up amongst the draft pages or sketched-out columns in 1899. A teabag had yet to be invented. If you trust other dictionaries published during that time, as of 1899 one could not cartwheel as a verb either because that meaning was not yet established, nor could one travel up an escalator. In 1899, you’re still a year away from blokeish, come-hither and dorm making an appearance in any English dictionary’s pages. The modern use of hangover and morning-after as having anything to do with alcohol only cropped up in 1919, so they never made Swansby’s war-decimated pages. Language went on regardless, of course. God knows what happened at the office party to require that update.
The more I thought about it at work, the more I liked the close-but-unreachable sound of 1900 and its neologisms, the words that entered mouths and ears and inkwells that year. Teabag, come-hither, razzmatazz. 1900 sounds like a lot more fun than 1899 and its note-taking lexicographers.
In 1899, elephants were being slaughtered in huge numbers to keep up with the demand for high-quality billiard balls, with no more than four balls being made from a single tusk. I found these facts listed under Ivory, trade of in Vol. V when I skipped forward a little out of sheer boredom on my first day reading the dictionary. Then the phone rang, and it was with thoughts of slaughtered elephants that I perched the receiver between my chin and ear and answered the call.
Updating the meanings of entries in an encyclopaedia or dictionary or encyclopaedic dictionary is of course no new concept. I spent most of my time reading about it, between panic attacks on the phone and eating my lunch in the cupboard. Biographies need updating, countries are renamed or disappear completely. Swansby’s was in good company in this regard, and part of a long lineage of reference books attempting to keep up with the times: Abraham Rees’s Proposals were published in an attempt to revise Chambers’ Cyclopædia (1728), and Rees emphasised in his sermons prior to publication that it was his intention to “exclude obsolete science, to retrench superfluous matter.” As new progress is made in science, new coinages and advances in understanding constantly render previous column inches of articles superfluous, if not meaningless. For example, copies of the nineteenth-century National Encyclopaedia include entries for the word malaria where the disease is still described in terms of transmission by some strange noumenal ether that lurks over swamps, mala aria, bad air: the facts are broadly true, and etymologically valid, but ignorant of mosquitoes’ role in malaria’s vector control. David was always quick to point out that the OED left appendicitis (n.) out of its earliest editions, an omission that was roundly criticised in 1902 when Edward VII’s coronation was delayed thanks to this particular affliction and the word’s use became widespread in the media.