The Liar s Dictionary, by Eley Williams Image: Doubleday
Have you ever caught a Mountweazel? Before reading Eley Williams s beguiling first novel, I d never heard of them. But Williams is an expert. She wrote her doctoral dissertation on them, and then she put her hard-earned knowledge to further good use in
The Liar s Dictionary, which is to word lovers what potato chips are to my husband minus the guilt.
What are these sly creatures? Mountweazels are fake entries deliberately inserted into dictionaries, encyclopedias, or other trustworthy reference works as traps to catch plagiarists and copyright infringements. As their name suggests, they are evasive and weaselly, distantly related to intentionally ambiguous or misleading weasel words. According to Wikipedia (which may well be filled with its fair share of Mountweazels), the term was coined by