WORD WIDOWER
Nik Morton
“Your pronounciation
leaves a lot to be desired, madam,” the interviewer said in a rather curt
manner to his subject. The woman looked nonplussed, but not half as bad as I
felt.
I was fuming; fortunately we
didn’t have any smoke detectors. I turned the television off in haste.
“Dan, why’d you do that?” Sheila
demanded from the depths of the sofa. “It was a really interesting interview!”
“Interesting? It was pathetic! He
decries the poor woman’s pronunciation yet he can’t even pronounce the word
“pronunciation” properly!” Try saying that after a few drinks, I thought.
I threw on my jacket – well, put
it on, really. Ever tried throwing on any type of clothing? It goes all over
the place.
“Switch on, if you must. The television,
not me,” I quipped, trying to defuse my loving spouse’s incipient long silence.
“I’m going down to the pub,” I
said. “At least at the local they don’t pretend they can talk properly.”
Those ruby red lips were clamped
shut as she pointedly gazed at the blank screen, arms folded. Resolutely
staying quiet, Sheila grabbed the remote, jabbed the relevant button and the
machine’s single eye glowered accusingly at me.
“Do you want me to bring you back
some crisps?” I sallied in an inane attempt at a peace offering.
“Is that potato chips or crisps?”
she retorted without looking up,
“Very funny,” I snarled, quite
impressed despite myself, and walked out the door.
Her obscure reference alluded to
the inventor of crisps, George Crum, an American Indian chef – as opposed to
chief. He’d actually been trying to get one over on an obnoxious diner, railway
magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, who complained about the undue thickness of his
French fries. Crum’s frivolous attempt at extreme thinness backfired and in
fact was a hit with the magnate and soon the Saratoga Chips caught on, even if
their name didn’t.
Sheila probably got that piece of
useless information from the Discovery Channel. If she isn’t watching game
shows or soaps, she’s hooked onto educational television. But she never reads a
book. Except dictionaries.
Crosswords – and we have plenty
from time to time, though we deign to call them “differences of opinion” –
word-searches and daily doses of Countdown
– when it was being televised – kept Sheila quite content. As long as she had
the Big Dictionary within reach. Numbers were another matter entirely. She was
no good and marvelled at the Carol Vorderman replacement’s ability. And she
always got frustrated over that new craze, sudoku – those Japanese have a lot
to answer for – karaoke and sushi, for starters – well, not in the meal sense,
thanks very much, as sushi sounds like a raw deal, to say the least.
In every room in our house there
are half-read – or is that half-dead? – books, lying face down, spines
uppermost, like tents pitched to accommodate all those words. And they’re all
dictionaries: foreign words and phrases, allusions, euphemisms, idioms,
religious quotations, contemporary quotations, eponyms, slang and proverbs spring
to mind, though there are others...
I won’t beat about the bush. I’m
attracted to words too, though not as seriously as Sheila. I must confess to
having a fondness for the odd idiom or two – or even the plain straightforward
normal idioms. Idiotic, I know, but there you are. Certainly, Dr Johnson
disparaged their use – “colloquial barbarisms, licentious idioms and irregular
combinations” – and I don’t think he was talking about underwear. Not to mince
words, I suspect my predilection for idioms indubitably explains why all my
short stories get rejected.
*
The Big Dictionary is seventeen centimetres thick, all 3,333
pages of it. Thumb-indexed and very heavy, it has been in our family since 1935
and has all the names of each relative on the flysheet at the front. You could
say that, up to a point, it reveals the etymology of our family as well as that
of each word it contains.
It was love
at first sight for Sheila: she fell in love with this book first, then me.
A thirst
for knowledge doesn’t adequately describe her deep and seemingly insatiable
urge. She just wants to know everything. And since she has what amounts to a
photographic memory for facts –though not numbers, it’s quite possible that one
day she will actually achieve her aim. But what can she learn then, when she
knows it all?
Frightening
thought, to know everything. They called her a “know-all” at school, but they
don’t know the half of it!
Of course I
know that she’ll never know absolutely everything. It isn’t going to happen,
because in so many different areas of research they’re discovering new
information every day – even new planets.
We’ve known each other six months
and been married two of those. Naturally, the only place we could go to for our
honeymoon had to be none other than Wordsworth country. As it was a February,
while we stayed in Grasmere there wasn’t a daffodil in sight; it seemed like
poetic justice to me, though Sheila was a bit peeved. I cheered her up with a
visit to the great writer’s home Dove Cottage where William stayed with his
sister Dorothy. Strange, the associations you make with names, but I always
think of The Wizard of Oz when I hear
that name.
Fortunately there were no
dictionaries in evidence in the cramped little cottage; I had really feared
that Sheila might have attempted to purloin one.
Just like an addict who needed an
instant fix, the day after our honeymoon, Sheila started reading the Big
Dictionary from the beginning.
It didn’t take long after that
for me to realise that I was shaping up into a word widower.
Marriage and in fact any serious
endeavour can be a leap in the dark, a leap of faith, if you will, and to begin
with I’d faithfully hoped she would turn over a new leaf but the only leaves
she turned belonged in dictionaries.
*
When I returned from the pub, arms brimful with assorted
flavoured crisps and a bottle of her favourite stout, Sheila was listening to
the television – something about the engineering feats of Isambard Kingdom
Brunel – while reading the Zed section of the Big Dictionary.
This was not good news. I must have blinked for a
few days. When had she managed to get so far into the book?
Once she
read about zythum, a drink made in
ancient Egypt from fermented malt, she’d be thirsting for a replacement
dictionary. And nothing but a new edition would suffice.
Sadly,
Sheila was in for a shock. I’d tried to prepare her more than once, explaining
that the family tree had sort of obliterated the date of printing on the
flysheet, but she just ignored me and devoured another half-dozen exotic words.
What do you
do with unfamiliar words if you’re not a writer like Anthony Burgess? They
might come in useful for the Times
Crossword, I suppose, or for showing off in a pub quiz – both of which
Sheila has resorted to since she began reading the Big Dictionary.
But how was
I going to tell her that a new dictionary, printed seventy-three years since
ours, was going to contain thousands
of new words? Indeed, many of those words she’d memorised were either obsolete
or had changed their meaning or even been hijacked for politically correct or
socio-political purposes...
Scientific discovery alone
continually threw up new terminology; many branches of science even had their
own lexicons. Modern media dispensed slang and neo-words by the hundred every
day, or so it seemed. Jargon was everywhere. The hungry English language simply
laps up new words from any and every source and makes them its own.
She closed the big book with
about two pages left to read and I breathed a sigh of relief.
“I’m off to get some zeds,” she
said. “Let’s eat the crisps in bed, shall we?”
“What about the crumbs?” I
countered. She was a stickler for cleanliness though not tidiness.
“Don’t make any,” she suggested
sternly.
“Impossible!” I protested
cravenly.
“Is that two words?” she teased
at the door.
My heart lurched. “You’ve been
reading the dictionary of quotations as well, haven’t you?”
Sheila nodded. “Samuel Goldwyn. In two words: im possible.”
“And where are you up to in that book?”
“Francis Bacon.”
“A while to go yet, then?”
“It might take some time, yes,”
she replied. “As Bacon said, I have taken
on all knowledge to be my province.”
“Which dictionary are we reading
tonight, by the way?” I asked, ever hopeful.
“Dreams,” she said.
“Oh.”
“You’ll have to wait for the next
few pages of the Sex Dictionary until you buy me the latest New Oxford English.”
I sighed, crestfallen. “All
right,” I said with a sinking heart. “It’s a deal.” Once she got into that
tome, with all its new words, I knew full well that she’d have no time for me
at all. Yes, word widower summed me up precisely.
***
Previously published
in Pen and Plot Webzine, 2013
Edited by novelist Rosean
Mile, Pen and Plot has now been removed from the web
***
Short stories can contain
humour as well as drama. Some of my tales in Spanish Eye contain humour, while others are tragic, dark or
poignant. An assortment of emotions in
22 cases of Leon Cazador, half-English half-Spanish private eye.
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