“If you leave now, you’ll catch Mr. Hart with Mr. Bradley,” Dr. Murray said, hurriedly writing out the note. “I left them arguing about the word forgo. Hart is right, of course; there is no rationale for an e. But Bradley needs to be convinced. This should help, though Bradley won’t thank me for it.” He handed me the note and, seeing my bewilderment, added, “The prefix is for-, as in forget, not foregone. Do you understand?”

I nodded, though I wasn’t sure I understood at all.

“Of course you do. It’s straightforward.” Then he looked at me over his spectacles, one corner of his mouth turning up in a rare smile. “That’s forward, without an e, by the way. Is it any wonder Bradley’s sections are so slow to materialise?”

Mr. Bradley had been appointed by the Delegates as a second editor nearly a decade earlier, but Dr. Murray was in the habit of putting him in his place. Da once said it was his way of reminding people who the engine-driver was and that it was best to let such comments go unanswered. I smiled, and Dr. Murray turned towards his desk. When I was outside the Scriptorium, I read the note.

Common use should not override etymological logic. Forego is absurd. I regret its inclusion in the Dictionary as an alternative spelling and would be happy for Hart’s Rules to discourage it.

J.M.

I knew about Hart’s Rules; Da always had a copy to hand. “Consensus is not always possible, Esme,” he once told me, “but consistency is, and Hart’s little book of rules has been the final arbiter of many an argument about how a word should be spelled or whether a hyphen is required.”

When I was a child, Da would sometimes take me with him to the Press if he had reason to speak with Mr. Hart. Mr. Hart was known as the Controller. He was in charge of every part of the printing process of the Dictionary. The first time I walked through the stone gateway into the quadrangle, I was awed by its size. There was a great pond in the centre with trees and flower gardens all around. The stone buildings rose two and three storeys high on all sides, and I’d asked Da why the Press needed to be so much bigger than the Scriptorium. “They don’t just print the Dictionary, Esme. They print the Bible, and books of every kind.” I took that to mean that every book in the world came from that place. The grandeur suddenly made perfect sense, and I’d imagined the Controller to be a bit like God.