A conventional dictionary is often determined by lexicographers’ particular intellectual milieu and potentially their personal bias. I’m sure David Swansby comforted himself with the thought that a perfect encyclopaedic dictionary, free from all error and completely relevant in every particular, is impossible because any compiler or compilating body lacks complete objective oversight. No man is an island, no dictionary a fixed star, or something something something. Of course, the decision to remove words in order that more “relevant” words in a dictionary might take their place can be controversial. Recent editorial proposals to replace, for example, the words catkin and conker with cut and paste and broadband in an edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary gained national coverage and much outraged comment. Swansby’s received far less blowback following its online updates, chiefly because hardly anyone noticed.
Hardly anyone.
The phone rang again.
No further words were to be added to the Dictionary, although many of the current words required an update. The verb refresh, for example, needed some tweaking since its 1899 iteration where “refreshing mobile stream” meant something quite different. Similarly, the words tag, viral and friend have changed quite a bit since the first time they popped up. Another word was marriage.
The 1899 definition of marriage began (emphasis my own [How often do you get to truly say that?]):
marriage (n.), referring to both the act and ceremony by which the relationship of husband and wife is constituted and the blissful physical, legal and moral union between man and woman in complete community, ready for the establishment of a family
For the new digital edition, this had been updated by David to:
marriage (n.), referring to both the act and ceremony by which a person’s relationship to another might be constituted, and the physical and legal union between those persons
For whatever reason, it was this change that caused some ruckus in the press. It was also the cause of the phone calls.
As well as answering the calls, it was my job to check the spelling and punctuation of David’s updated words. This was laborious because David hated technology that wasn’t online chess. Also, he had scrimped on buying office equipment. To use a computer in Swansby House was to hate the sight of an hourglass. The one on my computer’s loading screen was silent, monochrome and smaller than a fingernail, six black pixels in its top bulb and ten in the lower. I wondered how many months of people’s lives had been spent staring at this pinch-waisted little graphic. It made me think of the different tidemarks on the keyboard I inherited. Not quite grey, not quite black, not quite brown. Of what: skin? Grime? The transitive verb slough came to mind. The noun sebum. The record of previous hands resting on this very same piece of plastic. Some of them might have died and this little scuff mark could be the only trace of them left on this earth. The keyboard made me feel a little sick.
This loading hourglass, though. A further pair of pixels was suspended in the centre of the graphic to imply that sand was falling—as one watched the screen, this hourglass would swivel on its axis as if tipped and re-tipped by an unseen moderator’s fingers. Everybody knows this. Why bother explaining hourglasses to myself? Proximity to encyclopaedic dictionaries made me a bore. Prolixity, pedantry, ploddiplodplod. I’m sure that I was not alone in my dread of the hourglass. Having worked alongside the arrow and manicule forms of the computer’s cursor, it is a shock to have it suddenly transformed into a tool dedicated to some other project, a project that is not only apparently out of one’s control but that takes priority. With the operating system too busy to accept input from the keyboard or mouse one is stuck there until the computer has come to terms with itself, the spinning hourglass your unwanted company for the duration.
The phone on my desk gave another sharp ring.
Perhaps the hourglass caused so much anxiety because as a graphic it offered no hint of eventual relief. Yes, it confirmed, you are rotting where you sit! This is all pointless! It was all for naught! Why did you learn all those piano scales, why did you memorise song lyrics, why did you ever care about pronouncing pronunciation correctly? The constant trickling of sand from one obconical end to the other gave no indication that any specific amount of time was being counted down. I mean, really, the hourglass was the perfect icon for frustrated flux rather than a sense of progress, an image of a fixed, inescapable “presentness” rather than promising any future. A clockface devoid of hands, perhaps, would have the same uncanny effect. Why was I thinking like this? Flux and uncanny. What was in my hard-boiled eggs? Who did I think I was—?
The phone gave another ring.
The iconography of the hourglass hinted at a particular progression: that all natural things tend towards death. This was not good for office morale. Waiting for the computer-screen hourglass to empty and refill and empty again generated a feeling not just of futility but also of mortality. I understood why it was a favoured prop whenever “Father Time” or “Death” are figured as personae in Western culture, and if Disney’s Alice in Wonderland’s White Rabbit had been described as crying, “I’m late, I’m late, I’m late!” while clutching an hourglass rather than a pocket watch, he would have been a far more morbid (I Googled this on my phone) leporine sigil. Shouldering for room with skulls, burned-down candles and rotten fruit, hourglasses are also one of the recurring tropes of vanitas pieces, those works of art that illustrate the world’s physical transience. Crumpled tulips, dry parchment. Trading upon this saturnine thrill of memento mori set-pieces, pirate ships of the seventeenth and eighteenth century bore hourglasses upon their flags alongside the more famous skull insignias. Hourglass iconography is also prevalent on a number of gravestones, often supplemented with mottoes such as Tempus fugit (“Time flies”) or Ruit hora (“The hour is flying away”).
The work computer was old and slow: the previous week I had to face a couple of turns of the hourglass while checking the words obconical and saturnine in the dictionary by my elbow.
My desk phone gave a fourth ring, which was usually as long as I could bear.
Hourglass imagery is not always coincident with a sense of hopelessness, however. In fact, thinking about it, sometimes it exists as a symbol for a certain necessity to seize the hour: perhaps for this reason hourglasses feature on many heraldic crests. I’ve looked it up. Of course I have. In one of its more savoury definitions, the online UrbanDictionary.com lists the verb hourglassing in reference to “a state in which a computer is ‘thinking’ and is currently unresponsive. Not exactly frozen, hourglassing gives a potentially false sense of action on the part of the computer.” Many families unite in baying, unfestive horror during games of Charades or Pictionary as the final grains of sand fall through the necks of supplied hourglasses. Hourglasses of this size are also called egg-timers. Although this is probably a practical description of its use amongst, say, the soft-boiling breakfast community, I do think that egg-timer lacks the poetry of the other possible synonym clepsammia. The lexicographer Noah Webster listed this word in his 1828 dictionary—its etymological roots are the Greek words for sand and theft, the idea being that as each grain slips through the hourglass’s waist another moment is being taken away. Clepsammia certainly has a pleasing clicking sibilance to it, and as a word evokes a slick trickling of the contents from bulb to bulb as well as the flipping-over of its body. Unlike Webster’s, Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary overlooked the word clepsammia in its published incomplete 1930 edition. It does, however, provide the word hour-glass as a hyphenated noun. With its symmetry and little dashed isthmus between the two words, “hour-glass” on the page is like the object itself, lying on its side or balanced mid-spin.