Dolphy pursued a curious profession. His colleagues, when answering queries about his work, often described him quite meanly as a "reverse lexicographer". Dolphy himself, being of mildly macabre character, sometimes preferred to call himself "word killer". He worked at keeping dictionaries up to date. But whilst other compilers sought to capture new words and meanings, ever alert to the punch and thrust of the modern language, his job was to make room for them by eliminating all the words and meanings that had fallen into obsolescence.

When he retired, after forty-six years of scrupulous service, he had disposed of thousands of tools, techniques, sayings, dishes, games and measurements; hundreds of breeds of cattle, species of birds, insects, snakes and fish; and dozens of rare kinds of plants and varieties of vegetables and fruit. With a pen stroke, Dolphy condemned such things to eternal obscurity. Who would know ever again that a mistigris was a blank card, replacing the jack of clubs, used as a wild card in a form of draw poker? And who could call by its name the unpointed sword once borne before English sovereigns at their coronation, as an emblem of mercy the curtana? What poet would now write an anacreontic, convivial and amatory in tone, after the manner of its Greek originator Anacreon? Would book lovers identify the form of book-binding with a limp leather cover projecting to fold over the edges of the leaves as yapp? Could anyone describe a hen that was brownish or tawny with streaks of other colour as brindled?

Dolphy began to spend the idle hours of his retirement in second-hand bookshops and musty emporia that dealt in the curiosities of antiquity. He would rummage through their shelves stacked up to sagging ceilings, leafing through penny dreadfuls, out-of-date-essays, obsolete traveller's guides, old textbooks on physiology, mechanics or moral instruction, maps overtaken by the inexorable passage of human politics; journals, periodicals, containing strange but true tales; books of hours, and all manner of registers; almanacs, polemics, apologies, critiques, broadsides and handbooks. He borrowed books from the town library, forcing reluctant and incredulous assistants to bring out of dusty storage old folios, ancient user's manuals, volumes from vast encyclopedias and old dictionaries. For hours and days he would consult centuries old translations of writings older still.

He read Aristotle, Boccaccio, Chrysippus, Democritus, Meister Eckhart, Marsilio, Ficino, Grossteste, Hesiod, Irenaeus, Joachim of Fiore, Kepler, Leucippus, Marsilius, Newton, Origen, Protagoras, Quintilian, Roscellinus, Sappho, Teresa of Avila, Archbishop Ussher, Verrocchio, Wolff, Xenophanes, Ysster, Zwingli, and even most of De Umbris Idearum and the Clavis Magna by Giordano Bruno; which gave him an oblique insight into the ancient art of memory, and a headache.

Dolphy read slowly and copied down rare words; gradually an idea formed in his mind, a plan took shape. He decided to write a story using as many of these forgotton words as he could: not in order to perpetuate the use of chatelaines, sets of short chains attached to a woman's belt for carrying keys, or to encourage the worship of sundry xoanons, primitive wooden images of deities supposed to have fallen from the sky, but so as to rescue simple words which still appealed to him.

In ten years he gathered more than eight thousand of them, more than enough for his story, which he set about writing with great enthusiasm. After a month of long days spent hunched over his desk, it was complete. His task done, he settled into a life perhaps more anonymous even than before, content to leave the typewritten manuscript in his desk drawer, satisfied that he had moved the disused words out of historical exile and into the sun. He was sure that his story would be a curiosity to be marvelled at in years to come, a small lamp in a dank forgotten corner of the vast rooms of language.

Dolphy's story was never published, as might be expected of such an eccentric work. But it so happened that many people across the world came to see something of it. Because he had no heirs or family, after his death Dolphy's property was auctioned. Some of the furniture, including two buttoned leather chairs and the desk were bought by an insurance office clerk, who believed they would lend his study an air of writerly contemplation, a fine atmosphere in which to write to his friends. Judging Dolphy's manuscript to be nonsense, and being a thrifty individual, the clerk decided to fold each of the thick pages into an envelope, the typewritten side on the inside. Enclosed safely in the unread words, the barest trace of a story impossible now to understand, he sent his letters across the world.

©Copyright Owen Gregory 1997