THE DICTIONARY

The Dictionary was the starting point for this series. Unlike the information in the Bible or the Atlas, its contents are transient – words and their meanings are constantly appearing, changing and disappearing, so a dictionary is never entirely complete or current. Instead, it is of necessity an ephemeral text; the more it tries to be up to date, the more rapidly it dates.

This continual obsolescence makes it a thoroughly modern text and guarantees the lexicographer constant work – in theory at least. The more-or-less fixed points of human nature and the physical world are replaced by a sense of flow that resembles climate rather than landscape.

The sense of oppression or helplessness evoked by this piece is from three sources – the personal difficulties arising from an over-reliance on precarious freelance work, the professional problems of meeting constantly changing deadlines and production criteria, and the intellectual tension between the desire for comprehensive coverage and the need to produce a book of usable size.