The Dictionary of Lost Words(34)

Normally, I would take my time over the words I sorted. If the word was familiar, I would check my understanding of it against the example provided by the volunteer. If it was unfamiliar, I would commit its meaning to memory. These new words became the focus of my walk home with Da. If he did not know the word then I would explain it to him, and we would shuttle it back and forth in ever more elaborate sentences.

But listless started me yawning. It had thirteen slips of unvaried meaning, and it was easy to let my mind wander beyond the confines of the Scriptorium. I thought of what Ditte had said about the need for words to have a textual history. Well, listless certainly had that. The earliest quotation was from a book written in 1440, so its inclusion was assured, but it wasn’t nearly as interesting as Lizzie’s word, knackered. Lizzie had never once said she felt listless, but she was knackered all the time.

I pinned all the listless slips together, from oldest quotation to most recent. One was only partially completed: listless was in the top-left corner, and there was a quotation, but it had no date, book title or author. It would have been discarded, but my heart still raced as I put it in my pocket.



Mrs Ballard was already sitting at the table when I came into the kitchen, and Lizzie was making ham sandwiches for their lunch. There were three teacups already out.

‘What does knackered mean, Lizzie?’

Mrs Ballard scoffed. ‘You could ask anyone in service that question, Esme. We’d all have an answer.’

Lizzie poured the tea and sat down. ‘It means you’re tired.’

‘Why don’t you just say tired, then?’

She thought about it. ‘It’s not just tired from lack of sleep; it’s tired from work – physical work. I get up before dawn to make sure everyone in the big house will be warm and fed when they wake, and I don’t go to sleep till they is snoring. I feel knackered half the time, like a worn-out horse. No good for nothing.’

I took the slip from my pocket and looked at the word. Listless wasn’t quite like knackered. It was lazier. I looked at Lizzie and understood why she would never have cause to use it.

‘Do you have a pencil, Mrs B?’

Mrs Ballard hesitated. ‘I don’t much like the look of that slip of paper in your hand, Esme.’

I showed it to her. ‘It’s incomplete, see? It’s scrap. I’m going to reuse it.’

She nodded. ‘Lizzie, love, there’s a pencil just inside the pantry, near my shopping list. Would you get it for Esme?’

I put a line through listless and turned the slip over. It was blank, but I wavered. I’d never written a slip before. I’d been taking words for years – reading them, remembering them, rescuing them. I turned to them for explanation. But when the Dictionary words let me down, I’d never imagined I could add to them.

As Lizzie and Mrs Ballard watched on, I wrote:





KNACKERED


‘I get up before dawn to make sure everyone in the big house will be warm and fed when they wake, and I don’t go to sleep till they is snoring. I feel knackered half the time, like a worn-out horse. No good for nothing.’

Lizzie Lester, 1902

‘Don’t reckon Dr Murray will think that a proper quotation,’ said Mrs Ballard. ‘But it’s good to see it written down. Lizzie’s not wrong. It wears you out, being on your feet all day.’

‘What did you write?’ Lizzie asked.

I read it to her and she reached for her crucifix. I wondered if I’d upset her.

‘Nothing I ever said has been written down,’ she finally said. Then she got up and cleared the table.

I looked at my slip. It would have been at home in one of the pigeon-holes, I thought, and I wondered what Lizzie would think of her name and her words nestled against the likes of Wordsworth and Swift. I decided to create a top-slip and pin it to Lizzie’s word; then I remembered that all the K words were already published.

I left Lizzie and Mrs Ballard to their lunch and took the stairs two at a time. The trunk under Lizzie’s bed was more than half-full. I placed knackered on top of the pile.

This would be the first, I thought. It was unique because it hadn’t come from a book. But against all the rest, there was nothing to distinguish it. I pulled the ribbon from my hair and tied it around the slip. It looked forlorn on its own, but I could imagine others.



Da once told me that it was Dr Murray’s idea to make the slips the size they were. At first he sent prepared slips to volunteers, but after a while it was enough to simply instruct people to provide their words and sentences on pieces of paper six by four inches. Blank paper was not always available to some of the volunteers, and when I was small, Da would search for me under the sorting table to show me the slips cut from newspaper, old shopping lists, used butcher’s paper (a brown stain of blood blooming across the words) and even pages torn from books. I found these last shocking and suggested Dr Murray dismiss volunteers who ruined books. Da laughed. The worst offender, he said, was Frederick Furnivall. Dr Murray might think of dismissing him occasionally, but Frederick Furnivall was secretary of the Philological Society. The Dictionary was his idea.

Dr Murray’s slips were ingenious, Da said. Simple and efficient, their value increasing as the Scriptorium filled with words and storage became more and more limited. Dr Murray designed them to fit the pigeon-holes exactly. Not an inch of space had been wasted.