12/17/2023 0 Comments The gentle reader book![]() “At the end of the day there’s no proof I’ve been here at all.” It is Lizzie who assures Esme of the relevance of “bondmaid” and provides its definition.ĭictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams is published by Vintage (£14.99). “Everything I do gets eaten or dirtied or burned,” Lizzie, the housemaid working for very little money for the dictionary’s first editor, tells Esme. To others, this gentle, hopeful story will be a balm for nerves frazzled by the pandemic or patience fried by sexism. Some readers may be deterred by Esme’s virtuousness and smooth edges. She puzzles over the definition of “mother” and whether it excludes a woman who has a stillbirth, or who gives her daughter up for adoption, or whose son dies in the first world war. Do words mean different things to men and women? And if they do, is it possible that we have lost something in the process of defining them?” From the local suffragettes Esme learns that “sisters” can mean comrades. Williams writes that her novel “began as two simple questions. Eventually, she includes these and others heard on the streets (knackered, latchkeyed, cunt, fuck and dollymop) in her own manuscript, Women’s Words and their Meanings. Then she starts collecting more words that the editors exclude or lose. In the novel, this is Esme’s doing: when the word falls off a table in the Scriptorium or “scrippy” – the Oxford garden shed in which the dictionary is compiled – she pockets it. Most volumes contained five (although a considerable minority consisted of three, four, or six. Reader's Digest Condensed Books was a series of hardcover anthology collections, published by the American general interest monthly family magazine Reader's Digest and distributed by direct mail. As Williams explains in her author’s note, uses of the word had been supplied by members of the public – an important part of how the dictionary was compiled – but the piece of paper showing the final definition is still missing from the archives today. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. A bondmaid is a young woman bound to serve until her death.
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