Guilty by Definition

by Susie Dent

That language defines us and is the framework of our thought, an endless, shifting, complex dance through time and human nature. It is about patterns of life and the need to communicate them; it is about dying, renewal, and everything in between, about chaos and the order we make from chaos, the blood and bones of every history. Above all, it is about the slow, insistent pull into the secret lives of the ordinary.

Safi had a passion for regional words, which she would throw into conversation whenever possible—a one-woman popularization society. That day had begun with her gleefully announcing that the politician on the front page of The Times was positively “crambazzled,” explaining (glancing rather too directly at Simon, Martha had thought) that it was an old Yorkshire word for looking prematurely aged from excess drinking. Then again, Safi had added, she was a little too familiar with “crapulence”—the hungover companion to crambazzlement—herself.

“Ah, here’s one!” Alex said, unfolding one of her allocated queries. “Is there a word for the fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth?” “Well, is there?” Martha asked, assuming Alex wanted to tell them. “There is. Arachibutyrophobia. Someone made it up in the eighties if I remember rightly. It may even have been one of our lot. It’s a clumsy Greek joke of a word really.” Alex turned to her computer and pursed her lips. “Scattered across the internet on various medical sites. Not in the dictionary, though. Obviously.”

“I’m not going mad. There are loads of Shakespeare quotes in there, aren’t there?” “Don’t think Shakespeare had much to say about evidence or detectives,” Alex replied, wrinkling her nose, “but I recognize the ‘I will find where truth is hid.’ That’s Polonius playing detective in Hamlet.” “‘No legacy is so rich as honesty’ is from All ’s Well That Ends Well, I think,” Simon added, tugging unconsciously on his beard. “I don’t get it.” Safi’s voice sounded high and tight. “Is it meant to be a joke?”

“Well, it suggests that somebody is lying about something. But it’s not very specific. I’m pretty sure that in Much Ado, Claudio says Hero’s blushes are born of guilt, not innocence. Is she the maiden here?”

‘You will be my secretaries,’” she said quietly, returning to her chair. It was a nice metaphor: of lexicographers attending upon a language—serving it, assisting it, and organizing it into something ruly. What’s more, she also knew that some words wear their hearts on their sleeves. The very first secretaries were keepers of secrets.

“Chorus: they’re a key part of ancient Greek theater, aren’t they?” Simon asked rhetorically. “They express what the main characters can’t say.” “And they wear a mask,” Alex replied. “Shakespeare uses one in Henry V.”

perceivance, noun (seventeenth century): the capacity or action of perceiving

Alex had what the Italians called sprezzatura—the kind of studied nonchalance that implies no time has been taken at all to look a certain way, even if it has been achieved through considerable effort.

“Ipsedixitism,” Safi remembered: the assertion that something is fact just because a single person says so.

FALSEDICT: AN UNTRUE DELIVERANCE OR UTTERANCE

grob, verb (eighteenth century): to search by the sense of feeling, as with the hand in a dark place

“They’re just words. Not even threatening ones.” She tried to sound lighthearted. “No self-respecting lexicographer should be afraid of words.” “Maybe, but then I shouldn’t have to warn a lexicographer that they can also be extremely powerful.”

“Morning, everyone! What is it? New meaning of ‘set’?” “Set” was the longest entry in the dictionary, one that would need to be recast almost as soon as its editors completed it. It was already twice as long as Orwell’s Animal Farm, although the entry for “run” was following closely on its heels. Every dictionary maker knew that language would always outpace them, that—as Samuel Johnson had put it—they would be forever chasing the sun. Jonathan was greeted with weak smiles. “Or have you finally got to the bottom of ‘dog’?” he continued. “That would be a coup.” Another lexicographical cliché. “Dog” was one of the biggest etymological mysteries in the language, arriving unannounced in Middle English with no trace of past or ancestry.

William Shakespeare had certainly long been regarded as the bedrock of all historical dictionaries, the author credited with over thirty thousand first records of words and expressions, from the well-known “it’s all Greek to me” to less obvious coinages like “under-peep” and “crafty-sick.” It was undeniable that the playwright had been an exuberant experimenter with language, verbing furiously, dovetailing one word with another, and flipping the appearance and meaning of existing words to create something headily new. But it was also now acknowledged that some of his apparent inventions were almost certainly in use already, carried through the air in spoken English, where they were exchanged without ceremony or record. Shakespeare’s time had been one of lexical effusiveness, when language was springy and daring, producing words as modern sounding as “banana” and as steeped in time as “overmorrow.” The dictionary’s reliance on his work was largely due to his unparalleled literary status at the time when compilation began in earnest, leading to a bias among editors, many of whom were Shakespeare scholars. Each first record attributed to the playwright had become another brick in the Shakespeare edifice. Even his hapax legomena—words that lasted barely a day—were routinely given full legitimacy. The result of all this was that any discovery of an earlier record of a word currently credited to Shakespeare was held aloft as a triumph of word detection.

ert, verb (fifteenth century): to irritate, disturb, or poke

“Anyone remember ‘The Pardoner’s Tale’?” Alex said, pulling smoothly out into the traffic and raising her hand to an SUV that had slowed to let her out onto the main road. “It’s one of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, but that’s the sum total of my knowledge. Chorus must have mentioned it for a reason.” Martha had a Pavlovian response to mention of Chaucer. She could see the opening page on her desk at university under the glow of her reading light, hear the laughter of other students passing in the corridor outside. Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote, And bathed every veyne in swich licour Of which vertu engendred is the flour. “It’s one of my favorites,” Safi said. “Radix malorum est cupiditas. Greed is the root of all evil. It’s the one where three young men go in search of Death to kill him because he’s taking so many of their friends. They’re told they’ll find him under a tree, but when they get there, there’s a big pile of treasure instead, and they end up killing each other over it.”

philobiblist, noun (twentieth century): a lover of books

“What’s a busman?” Sabine had asked. Her English, always excellent, would occasionally stumble when met with yet another of the language’s eccentricities. Martha would explain the idiom and then invariably follow up by asking for the equivalent in German. Unsurprisingly, there often wasn’t one. Not that German didn’t have its own idiosyncrasies of course. Martha knew that whenever any lexicographer was asked why English failed to have a word for X, Y, or Z, the questioner’s very next comment would be “I bet German does.” And they’d be right. German usually did. Famed for its Lego-like constructions, it generously bent over backward (sometimes literally) to fill a linguistic gap. Martha’s favorite, without doubt, was Verschlimmbesserung: an attempted improvement that ends up making things worse. She knew all about those.

Vellichor: the musty, musky, and utterly beguiling smell of old books.

“I’ve just found a dictionary in the fiction aisle!” Alex said, slightly offended. “Dictionaries are storybooks in their own way,” Safi countered.

sardonian, noun (seventeenth century): one who flatters with deadly intent

induratize, verb (sixteenth century): to harden the heart

The word “slip” has a specific meaning in lexicography, another tribal code that Martha had quickly mastered. According to her predecessor, Mike, crowdsourcing began with dictionaries. Martha remembered him talking about it as he gave her the tour, shortly before she started work at the CED. Part of the handover. Any scholarly or historical lexicon, he had continued, relies on evidence in the wild of a word’s personality: how it behaves, the friends it keeps, the environment in which it thrives and, if you’re lucky, the one that created it in the first place. Lexicographers gather this information in different ways. Some rely on the data behind existing dictionaries, where the legwork has already been done, but others start the hunt anew. The Clarendon English Dictionary certainly belonged in this last category, the ongoing result of a mammoth logistical operation involving evidence submitted by thousands of volunteer readers. Astronomers, novelists, vicars, suffragists and housewives, philosophers and paleontologists, and even a few convicted criminals had collectively built the backbone of what had come to be regarded as the highest lexicographical authority in the world. The clues amassed by this curious and eager army of readers were submitted on strips of paper—slips—comprising four-by-six-inch biographical records of language. They amounted to thousands, submitted in such numbers after a public appeal by the dictionary’s editors that the lexicographers had trouble fi...

inquilinate, verb (seventeenth century): to dwell in a strange place

“Of course I do. Hitchhiker’s Guide. The most advanced beings in the galaxy create a supercomputer with one task, to solve the answer to life, the universe, and everything, and after a million years or something, it announces the answer as forty-two. Still makes more sense than most established religions in my book.”

A word nudged its way into focus. Remorse, from the Latin remordere: to bite back. Boy, could she feel its teeth now.

a “coverslut,” she remembered Simon telling her: a garment worn over the top of another to hide an unsightly stain.

A superfluity of nuns. As collective nouns go, it’s a strange one, isn’t it? But I suppose it was all about family disgrace in the end. All those ‘extra’ women, unmarried, tidied away by their families.”

Ah, the glorious exclamation mark. The boing, pling, bang, gasper, startler, slammer, and Christer, as it had been variously known across the centuries.

witterhed, noun (fourteenth century): knowledge and wisdom

rememble, verb (twentieth century): to have a false memory of something