The lid of my desk was still open. Everything I needed to do my work was there: notepaper, blank slips, pencils, pens. Hart’s Rules. Beneath Hart’s Rules were things I didn’t require to do my work: a letter from Ditte, postcards from Tilda, blank slips made from pretty paper, and a novel. When I picked it up, three slips fell out. Seeing Mabel’s name made my eyes well up. It was enough to bring on the morbs, I thought. And then I smiled.

Each slip had the same word but a variation on the meaning. I remembered the shock of hearing it, then Mabel’s delight and the racing of my heart when I first wrote it down. Cunt was as old as the hills, Mabel had said, but it wasn’t in the Dictionary. I’d checked.

The slips for C had been boxed up, but words for a supplement were stored in the shelves closest to my desk. Dr. Murray had started collecting them as soon as the fascicle for “A to Ant” was published. “Dr. Murray has already anticipated that the English language will evolve faster than we can define it,” Da told me. “When the Dictionary is finally published, we’ll go back to A and fill in the gaps.”

The pigeon-holes were almost full of slips for supplementary words. They were meticulously ordered, and it didn’t take me long to find the thick pile of slips with quotations from books dating back to 1325. The word was as old as Mabel had said it was. If Dr. Murray’s formula had been applied, it would certainly have been included in the thick volume behind his desk.

I looked at the top-slip. Instead of the usual information, there was a note in Dr. Murray’s hand saying simply, Exclude. Obscene. Below that, someone had transcribed a series of comments, presumably from correspondence. It looked like Elsie Murray’s handwriting, but I couldn’t be sure:

“The thing itself is not obscene!”

—James Dixon

“A thoroughly old word with a very ancient history.”

—Robinson Ellis

“The mere fact of its being used in a vulgar way does not ban it from the English language.”

—John Hamilton

I looked at the top-slip again; there was no definition. I put the slips back in their place and returned to my desk. On a blank slip, I wrote:

CUNT

1. Slang for vagina.

2. An insult based on the premise that a woman’s vagina is vulgar.

I gathered Mabel’s words into a small pile and pinned my definitions to it. Then I rummaged around for other slips. There was a handful, all meant for the trunk under Lizzie’s bed, but hastily hidden at one time or another, then half-forgotten. I gathered them up and put them between the pages of the novel for safekeeping.