Competition: Take six

In Competition No. 2721 you were invited to supply a short story incorporating the following: ‘rebarbative’, ‘solipsistic’, ‘lapidary’, ‘consequential’, ‘plangent’, ‘gibbous’. It was an impressive postbag with only the occasional stilted moment — you displayed considerable ingenuity in weaving the given words into a plausible and entertaining narrative. I was sorry to have to disqualify Adrian Fry’s amusing portrait of a village literary festival on account of a technical slip. Commendations, too, to Max Ross, Susan Therkelsen and John Plowman. The winners get £25; the bonus fiver is Brian Murdoch’s.

Suddenly made redundant, James was one very angry lexicographer — he was furious, enraged, livid, wild, SEE: mad. Solipsistic as he was, his entire self demanded revenge. Should he burn down the Press? No, why destroy all his hard-won definitions from A to F? A more subtle long-term sabotage suggested itself. He opened up the files and crabbedly went to the entry for ‘rebarbative’, the sense of which he swiftly amended to ‘having the laxative quality of rhubarb’. His new definition for ‘lapidary’ was positively lapidary: ‘pertaining to French rabbits’. Defining ‘gibbous’ he deleted everything lunar and substituted ‘(1) monkey-like; (2) coll. “kindly pass to me”’. ‘Plangent’ became ‘coming off at the flat edge of a circle’, which would certainly make some poor mathematician weep, looking it up in the future. The imagined consequential ructions when, in 20 years time these were noticed, gave him great satisfaction and present solace.
Brian Murdoch

Coming out of a somewhat solipsistic retirement to teach Classics again for a term, I gladly lost myself in school life, and was delighted to have a sobriquet bestowed — not the tediously trite ‘Loony’ (my name is Moon) but the literate Gibbous, with its apt allusion to my now hunched and possibly rebarbative appearance.