Concrete pencil

By John Hill on April 3, 2008 8:59 AM |

Tagged with:

I HAVE discovered some excellent words recently.

Mythomanic – someone who tells compulsive lies about themselves.

Like a man of my acquaintance, we shall call him M, who was always claiming that he had beaten Tim Henman at tennis, that his dad invented jeans and that he was an Olympic fencer.

The last time I saw him he told us he was off the next day to train the South African Air Force in South America, and that he was some kind of spy, but couldn’t tell us for whom.

Later, when we tried to put him, dead drunk, in a taxi he refused to tell the driver his address, repeating “it’s classified”.

I have known several people like this, and now I know the word for them. It’s an excellent word, perfectly describing the forceful urge behind the lies.

Someone I grew up with, we shall call him T, claimed his grandad had given him a box containing a number of sure-fire ideas to make him a millionaire.

The contents of course he kept secret, and somehow we all managed to ignore the colossal hole in the logic of the lie – why wasn’t grandad minted?

What makes these people do this? The ones who seem sane and hold down jobs but endlessly lie to you. And it so often goes unchallenged.

Perhaps the patient listeners fear that to challenge the speaker would be to push him or her over the edge.

All it would take is one “bollocks” the next time they are holding forth about being king of the masons, or whatever, and their faces would collapse.

Obsidian is another word I’ve enjoyed a lot. And hieratic.

In the book I’m reading, in one two-page chapter, I had to look up the following: spoor, guanaco, schist, sluice, obsidian, latifundia, araucaria, mansard, damask and maxilla. Of those I can only remember the meanings of three, and they will fade by tomorrow.

Something troubles me now every time I turn to the dictionary. A new realisation that everyone else probably had years ago and I’m just slowly catching up with.

It is this: I am never going to know all the words.

In the dark, back of my mind, unchallenged until recently, lay the silly notion that over my life I will have read enough writing and have looked up enough words that my own internal dictionary will be complete.

But it never will. Just as I will never have heard all the music, or read all the books, or been to all the cities, or met all the people.

Not only that – in the dictionary of experience, I’m not even at the As.

I’m still at the bit you normally ignore, where they explain the pronunciation squiggles.

There’s probably a word for them too, which I will never know.