Burrows’ dictionary dive churns out a hilarious book
His sojourn into the magic world of dictionary prose led to a comedic new book
The most original book to be published in quite some time is, in fact, a compilation of hundreds of sentences that were actually published elsewhere. In a dozen or so dictionaries, to be exact.
But author Jez Burrows gives credit where credit is due. The genesis of “Dictionary Stories: Short Fictions and Other Findings” (Harper Perennial, $16.99 208 pages) came from the simple act of looking up a word in a dictionary. The word was “study.”
“I wish I could remember why I was looking the word up,” Burrows says from a quiet room in the Mechanics Institute Library in San Francisco, a place he frequented while writing the book because of its lovely stack of dictionaries.
He recalls that he was working on a project for Facebook, where he was working as a designer at the time. Burrows was bemused when he came across the sentence used by the New Oxford American Dictionary to show how the word could be used.
“He perched on the edge of the bed, a study in confusion and misery.”
“I was completely blindsided by the sentence. It was like a flare being shot up, ‘Pay attention to me, this is really interesting!’”
At that point, Burrows was naive about the practice of lexicography (the editing or making of a dictionary). He says he assumed a person or team of people were writing the illustrative sentences “and having a lot of fun while doing so. But in the version of the dictionary I was using
“Inasmuch as a collage fiction project can go viral, it went viral. It took off from there.” — Jez Burrows, author
at the time, there are more than 80,000 sentences. So there’s a limit to the amount of fun you can have.”
Burrows thought it would be great fun to peruse sample sentences in a variety of dictionaries and put little stories together. A dozen ended up online.
“Inasmuch a collage fiction project can go viral, it went viral,” he says. “It took off from there.”
All of a sudden, the illustrator became the author. He signed a contract with Harper Perennial in mid 2016 and left Facebook, where he’d been for four years, and began work in earnest on his book the first week in November.
Burrows, 31, was born in in England and grew up on a farm in Devon, the youngest of three boys. He studied design at the University of Brighton and made his first visit to San Francisco in 2007 and knew then he wanted to return. So he did, seven years ago, and has lived in the same house in Noe Valley ever since.
Although he is British, he found that his writing was flavored by our November 2016 election. Using the New Oxford American Dictionary, he formed his thoughts into a little story called “What He Is,” using words such as “lying,” “brain-damaged,” “arrogant,” “bumbling,” “womanizer” and “moral compass” to develop a lively vignette.
“Dictionary Stories” is arranged with stories from A (having to do with Aggression, Apocalypse, Assassination) to Z (Zen, Zombies), and all are clever, thoughtprovoking and quite often mind-bogglingly funny. There are also a few with scary, impending death situations, as well as anxiety in general — and yes, those zombies.
Burrows roars with laughter when this is brought to his attention. “So, I’m still trying to figure this out. I don’t know if it’s because there’s naturally a lot of scary stuff going on in the dictionary or whether it’s my filter that is just picking it out. I think anyone writing anything in the first half of 2017 was just naturally prone to picking up that stuff.”
On the other hand, he continues, “the stories are so short, I was relying on something punchy and shocking. It could be a kind of weakness.”
Much to Burrows’ dismay, the British spellings of words were conformed to the publisher’s style, although he did sneak in one “aluminium.” When asked his favorite newly discovered words, he said he has a few.
“One was ‘minnie-beast.’ It’s broadly meant to refer to an insect or bug, and I was meant to know this, because it was apparently used in primary level teaching in England. It sounded so ludicrous! It sounded like an alien interpreting what an insect was.”
Another favorite was “flocculent.” “It’s a real workout for the mouth to pronounce,” Burrows says with a grin. (Editor’s note: It’s from the early 19th century, from the Latin floccus, or ‘tuft of wool.’ )
Burrows lists his rules for writing the book in the introduction, which explains that while most of the sentences are verbatim from the dictionaries, he has given himself permission to add punctuation, as well as conjunctions, prepositions or adverbs between sentences, to help with flow and readability.
Otherwise, he explains, “it sounded like a robot who’d been fed the complete works of Hemingway, short declarative sentences that were unconnected. I tried to keep it to the bare minimum because I wanted to be faithful to the constraint.”
Indeed, rule number two is, “the sum of all edits must constitute less than 5 percent of the final story.”
At the moment, Burrows is overwhelmed with the newness of being a published author, saying “I’m still not entirely prepared for people actually buying it, or reading it.” And, he was working on a speech he was giving at Columbia University the following week for a lexicography event. “Some of the lexicographers who wrote these example sentences might actually be in the room, which is exciting and terrifying in equal measure!”