“I have this dictionary,” said Murray @ Midnight into his mobile phone’s tiny mouthpiece.

“That’s fascinating,” replied Darren Saturday’s disembodied voice, with an added yawn at no extra charge. “I have this growth between two of the toes on my right foot, but I’m not bothering you about it, am I?”

“I’ve seen this alleged growth of yours,” Midnight said, tracing a pattern on his work desk with a badly chewed fingernail. “You do realise that it’s just another toe, right?”

“Tell me about the dictionary,” Saturday suggested.

“Well,” said Midnight, leaning back in his chair, “the thing of it is, I think it’s a pretty good dictionary. It’s by those people at Oxford - you know the people at Oxford? They take their dictionaries very seriously, and you can tell they put a fair amount of effort into this one, because there’s a lot of words in it.”

“How many words would you say?” Saturday asked.

Midnight picked up the dictionary and squinted at its cover. “You know,” he said, “I honestly don’t know. You’d think it would say somewhere, wouldn’t you?” He hefted the book and then dropped it back on his table with a loud bang, startling a nearby programmer [1]. “I’d say about 2kg worth of words?”

“Huh. That’s a lot of words,” Saturday allowed.

“This is what I’m saying. Any book that weighs that much has to have a lot of words in it, right? But…-”

“I knew there was going to be a ‘but’,” said Saturday. “I could feel it.”

“Sure,” agreed Midnight, “but… just recently I’ve been noticing something. About this dictionary.”

“And what, pray tell, is that?” asked Saturday.

“You know what?” said Midnight with a grin. “I love it when you do that ‘pray tell’ thing. You sound like such a nob. I mean, a serious nob, with all the extra nobby bits. Seriously.”

“Hey, wow,” said Saturday with mock enthusiasm, “how about we try a little bit of ‘to hell with you, Midnight, I’ve got better things to do with my time than listen to your crap’ on for size?”

“Why do you have to be like that?” said Midnight. “There’s no need to be like that. Being a nob and saying things like ‘pray tell’ are all part of your charm. At least,” he said after a moment’s reflection, “they are when you’re actually trying to be charming. The rest of the time they’re just, you know, annoying.”

The line went dead.

Midnight sighed, rolled his eyes, and began dialling Saturday’s number again.

“Are you finished?” Saturday said by way of greeting. “Are you done?”

“Yes, yes,” said Midnight, “we’re all done with the comments about the nobbiness, yes. So, anyway, the thing about the dictionary is-”

“What’s that noise in the background?” Saturday asked, interrupting.

“…What noise?”

“The noise that sounds like someone screaming in agony. That noise.”

“Oh, that. I think one of the programmers burned himself or something. You know what they say - when a programmer starts screaming it could mean anything, and sometimes even does.”

“Code monkeys,” Saturday said with a faint trace of disgust.

“Tell me about it,” said Midnight, and then he came to a stop, staring off into the distance. “What was I talking about?”

“I don’t know,” said Saturday. “I lost interest in this conversation a long time ago.”

“The dictionary!” exclaimed Midnight, snapping his fingers. “Yeah, yeah - the dictionary. So, I started noticing this thing about the dictionary. It has all these words in it, like we were talking about before, but it never has any of the words I want to look up in it.”

“That’s… That’s what you noticed? That’s… Man,” Saturday said vehemently, “my wife keeps telling me I should stop answering your calls. I don’t know why I don’t listen to her. Really. I don’t know why.”

“So, yeah,” continued Midnight, “it never has any of the words I want to look up in it.”

“Really never?” asked Saturday.

“Absolutely really never.”

“Okay,” Saturday said after a short pause, “that is a little weird.”

“I know!” said Midnight. “I thought so too! And then it occurred to me.”

“What occurred to you?”

“Well, before we get to that, I should say that I made a lot of fun of this dictionary after I started noticing this thing about the words not being in it. I called it The Anti-Dictionary, and The Crap Dictionary, and The Dictionary Of Crapness, and The Dictionary That Probably Doesn’t Even Have The Word Crap In It, Except Now That I’ve Looked, Apparently It Does, But It’s Still A Crap Dictionary, and so on.”

“Wow, no-one does passive aggressive like you, Midnight. No-one.”

“Whatever. Anyway, so yes, I made a lot of fun of this dictionary. And then it occurred to me, which is why I had to double-back in my narrative like that. It would have been confusing, otherwise.”

“Thanks for clearing that up,” said Saturday. “What was the thing that occurred to you?”

“Hmmm?” said Midnight. “Oh, the thing? The thing was that maybe they weren’t real words after all. The words I was looking up - maybe they weren’t real.”

“Maybe they weren’t real words?”

“Right. And this is the important part - maybe they shouldn’t have been in the dictionary. See?”

“Oh…,” said Saturday. And then, after a moment, “Oh! I get it! So it wasn’t the dictionary that was crap, it was you that was crap!”

“Well,” said Midnight with a frown, “I’m not sure I’d have put it like that, but that’s the general gist of it, yes.”

“I’d have felt really humiliated if I’d made that realisation after making fun of a dictionary like that,” said Saturday with an air of audible smugness. “Did you feel humiliated? I bet you felt really, really humiliated.”

Midnight sniffed. “I don’t know about humiliated, exactly,” he said. “But I did feel a little humblified.”

“Humbli… Is that one in the dictionary?” asked Saturday.

“What dictionary?” said Midnight, staring out his office window.