The Liar's Dictionary

I always disliked the expression sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me. It is one of the least useful ways of understanding one another, or how words work.

A freakish weed is just a flower that has not asked permission.

Too precise a meaning erases the mystery of your literature.

Conversation as meaningful and entirely wonderful precisely because it means nothing, except to the two people involved.

All words are made up," I said. "That is true," David Swansby replied, "and also not a useful contribution.

The thought became clear and clean: it would take just some small strokes of pen to transfer these doodled drafts onto the official blue index cards and he could pepper the dictionary with false entries. Thousands of them—cuckoos-in-the-nest, changeling words, easily overlooked mistakes. He could define parts of the world that only he could see or for which he felt responsible.

The best benchside exoticisms January could offer were all on show—the starling, the dandelion, the blown seeds and the birds skeining against the grey clouds, hazing it and mazing it, a featherlight kaleidoscope noon-damp and knowing the sky was never truly grey, just filled with a thousand years of birds’ paths, and wishful seeds, a bird-seed sky as something meddled and ripe and wish-hot, the breeze bird-breath soft like a—what—heart stopped in a lobby above one’s lungs as well it might, as might it will—seeds take a shape too soft to be called a burr, like falling asleep on a bench with the sun on your face, seeds in a shape too soft to be called a globe, too breakable to be a constellation, too tough to not be worth wishing upon, the crowd of birds, an unheard murmuration (pl. n.) not led by one bird but a cloud-folly of seeds, blasted by one of countless breaths escaping from blasted wished-upon clock as a breath, providing a clockwork with no regard to time nor hands, flocking with no purpose other than the clotting and thrilling and thrumming, a flock as gathered ellipses rather than lines of wing and bone and beak, falling asleep grey-headed rather than young and dazzling—more puff than flower—collecting the ellipses of empty speech bubbles, the words never said or sayable, former pauses in speech as busy as leaderless birds, twisting, blown apart softly, to warm and colour even the widest of skies.

I demand, in the words of Hippocrates, to be fed eclairs and served hot tea, before the day proves all too much.

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 from Webster’s Twentieth Century Dictionary of the English Language (1943)

Pip let the old maybe-dandelion maybe-nothing remnant fall from her hand to the floor and returned to her index cards. "I see queer gets a look-in," she said after a while. "That's one of the first words I looked up when I got the job." "That's the gay agenda for you. Find your people," Pip said.

Onomatopoeia is onomatopoeia for mashing your hands unthinkingly but hopefully onto a keyboard.

I told myself it was curiosity spurring me on. I didn't realize that a dictionary might be like reading a map or looking in a mirror. butch (v. transitive), to slaughter (an animal), to kill for market. Also: to cut up, to hack dyke (n.), senses relating to a ditch or hollowed-out section gay (v. intransitive), to be merry, cheerful, or light-hearted. Obsolete lesbian rule (n.), a flexible (usually lead) ruler which can be bent to fit what is being measured... queer (adj.), strange, odd, peculiar, eccentric. Also: of questionable character, suspicious, dubious... Even at school I remember wondering about closets, whether there was a subtle difference between someone being in a closet and a skeleton being in a closet.

He was a sweet man who loved words, and played chess with ghosts.

Every other author may aspire to praise... the lexicographer can only hope to escape reproach, and even this negative recompense has been yet granted to very few.

Conversation as meaningful and entirely wonderful, precisely because it means nothing, except to the two people involved.

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.

Should a preface pose more questions than it answers? Should a preface just pose?

The dictionary's title would be stamped in gold across the spine. Its paper would have a pleasing creaminess and weight, with a typeface implying elegance, an undeniably suave firmness or firm suaveness. A typeface that would be played by Jeremy Brett or Romaine Brooks - a typeface with cheekbones.

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.

In an interview, the creator of the popular London A–Z Street Atlas described how she momentarily lost possession of 23,000 index cards out of a window thanks to a sudden gust of wind. Many of those hand-completed cards flew onto the top of a bus as it sped down Holborn High Street. This explains the absence of the entry for Trafalgar Square in the first edition. I had no idea whether this anecdote was true or not. I never checked, but David made a very compelling narrator for forgivable editors’ oversights.