Time to help attempt a pointless census of language. Winceworth could not put it off any longer. He straightened his tie and braced his shoulders against the broad wooden door.
Ingrained behaviours are asserted unconsciously. Some are entirely automatic and shared from person to person, such as the impulse to pull a hand away from the steam of a breakfast kettle or a forehead perspiring in order to keep a body cool. Sometimes these responses are cultivated rather than spontaneous. They begin as autonomous performances then grow ritualised through habit until they are embedded in the culture of day-to-day action. For example, Winceworth could not imagine crossing the stone step threshold of Swansby House without his false lisp falling like a portcullis down across his tongue. He didn’t even have to think about it.
He had worked at Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary long enough to acquire a kind of muscle memory. He steered his body from the front door to the coat rack then up to his desk in the central Scrivenery hall on the first floor, knowing the precise momentum at which to swing an arm to most efficiently catch and release the stair-rail. Winceworth’s were not the only feet on the stairs and the pons pons pons of soft paws on stone steps joined his pace – one of the many cats that Prof. Gerolf Swansby allowed to roam the press and keep mice away from paper documents accompanied him up to the Scrivenery hall. This mouser was big and yellow and Winceworth reached down to scratch behind its ear. It turned its face away with a chirp. Maybe it too had a headache. Cat headaches were probably sleeker affairs.
On the walk from Dr Rochfort-Smith’s rooms to Swansby House Winceworth had returned to vexing over why no word had been coined for the specific type of headache he was suffering. The bitter meanness of its fillip, the sludgy electric sense of guilt coupled with its existence as physical retribution for time spent in one’s cups. A certain lack of memory, as if pain was crowding it out. You drink too much and this headache was the result – the world was surely in the market for such an affliction to bear a name? And if no word did exist, could it be named after him as an autoeponym? Stricken by a ghastly case of the Winceworths. I am sorry I cannot come into work today, I’ve a Winceworth like you wouldn’t believe. This could be his legacy, the way his name might yet echo down the generations. He made a mental chit to see whether the word already existed in slang or dialect words – perhaps something bracing and earthy from Dorset with gruff fricatives and flat, thudding vowels.
The squeak of soles on parquetry met Winceworth and cat as they reached the corridor adjacent to the Scrivenery. Decorum, in architecture, is the suitability of a building, and the several parts and ornaments thereof, to its station and occasion. Swansby House’s central, circular, shelf-lined Scrivenery was a bright, vast room with high windows and whitewashed stuccoed dome. A bookish bullring with the acoustics of a basilica. Even on a dull January day, sunshine lanced down upon the Swansby workers below, light curdling the dust in the air whenever it rose from disturbed old papers. There must have been at least fifty desks in the room, all regularly spaced and facing the entrance. Light glinted from the flat blades of paper knives in flashed blurs.
The majority of the sounds of the Scrivenery were dedicated to paper – the sibilance of documents slid across desktop, the slightly more stuttered shuffling of leaves arranged into order or the khuhhkunk-ffppp of a book removed from its purchase on the shelves lining the large airy room. It is a lexicographer’s impulse to categorise these things. All this was a welcome, cathedral-like calm compared to the orange oriole nightmare of Dr Rochfort-Smith’s office, let alone the braying scheme and flux of Birdcage Walk and London’s many other streets. The general noise was low; the peeling back of pages, the plopping of cats from desk to floor and the occasional sniff or sneeze were the highlights as lexicographers moved quietly from their desks to the ranked pigeonholes of index cards set into the walls of the domed Scrivenery hall. These pigeonholes were arranged alphabetically in huge towering labelled wooden shelves all around the perimeter of the room.
Pigeonholes – depending on whether it was a good or bad day at Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary, informally this manner of shelving was referred to by the lexicographers as either the dovecote or the cloacae. Winceworth’s desk was amongst the S-words.
He slunk into his seat with his head still a-clanging. Notions of slinking seemed to characterise even his most fluid gestures. Just as the lisp descended over his tongue as he entered the building, so too his shoulders shot unnaturally high once sat at his desk. Winceworth intuitively moved to pick up his Swansby standard-issue pen. It was not in its usual place. He looked at his hands as though trying to remember what possible use they could be.
Conversation in the Scrivenery took place in muttered tones. All was conducted at the level of murmur, grumble or croon apart from rare moments of particular inspiration or when grievous error and frustration were realised. Generally this was frowned upon but, after all, even the most slapdash of lexicographers is only human and Winceworth was certainly guilty of such eruptions. Misspellings and grammatical up-slips snagged his eyeline and produced a physical reaction. A sprightly tsk usually released some of the tension. Perhaps all readers experience this feeling – a well-crafted sentence runs through the reading mind as a rope runs through hands but when that sentence contains errors or distracting ambiguities, eccentric syntax or bleurghs of vocabulary or grammar, its progress is stalled or coarsened. Compare the textured skeins of these two examples:
The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.
The jumx quickfoot browned oevr the, dogly laze.
Surely a tsk might be excused in the latter case.
The colleague occupying the desk next to Winceworth was not a tsker. Whenever Bielefeld encountered an error or disruption on a page, a kind of whinnying, sniffing gag tore from his throat. It was quite distressing and often made Winceworth start. Bielefeld’s eyes would widen, his hands would draw up on either side of his neatly whiskered cheeks and a small, high, vocalised peal would ring through the air. The noise was animal in nature but also not unlike the sound of a finger being pulled across a wine glass. It made cats and lexicographers turn their heads. The moment would then pass and calm returned to his face as Bielefeld scored a line through the error or retraced his steps on the page, carrying on as if nothing had happened.
The peace in Swansby’s Press was rent by these squawks quite regularly and nobody other than Winceworth seemed to mind.
Shoutsnorting colleague Bielefeld was already scribbling away at the desk on Winceworth’s left. Bielefeld was shaped like a carafe. On Winceworth’s right sat Appleton, shaped like a cafetière. All three exchanged the normal noises of pleasantry.
Winceworth’s desk was littered with yesterday’s blue index cards and scrunched pieces of paper, ready for work even if he was not. He wished he had thought to clear his desk. Clear desk, clear mind. There must be a word for that, too – when your environment is arranged so as to inspire calm and rational industry. It would be indulgent to come up with such a word. But – if he did – perhaps a sprinkling of classical Latin, the cool of its marble statuary in its vowels and cadences. Yes, maybe bring in something of quiescent, quiescens, present participle of quiescere, ‘to come to rest, to be quiet’. As he ordered his space, he considered the composition of a new word as if he was concocting a recipe. Could borrow from quiescens-stock, then, but add to it the steadying influence of ‘elbow room’ or ‘ease’ implied by something like Old French eise, aise cognate with Provençal ais, Italian agio, ‘relieve from burdened or laborious duties’ then stir in, what? – something foraged from an Alpine stroll along to the cooling tributaries of fresh through fersh, ‘unsalted; pure; sweet; eager’ via Old English fersc, ‘of water’, itself transposed from Proto-Germanic friskaz. A neat enlivening spritz of etymology to this new word. So: his desk might be freasquiscent and ready for work?