What an enticing prospect: A-Z elucidation, or at least the admission in print that most of life’s pressing questions are never answered. But won’t all the entries begin with ‘W’? Where has youth gone? Why dost thou lash that whore? Why are you looking at me like that? And of course the question that trails us from playgroup to dementia ward: well, if you will go on like that, what else did you expect?
But of course we’re not dealing with that kind of unexplained. The clue is on the cover: a person with popping eyes, flying through the air. This dictionary’s greatest fans will be people more interested in the exception than the rule, and often, it must be said, ignorant of what the rule is. To many of us, a great deal of what we encounter daily is unexplained. If you are in mid-life now, it is possible to have received what was described at the time as a good education and still know nothing of science or technology. Those on the other side of the cultural divide complain that the artists are proud of their deficiency, but this is seldom so. It’s easy, if you can read, to brush up your Shakespeare, but not so easy to use your spare half-hours to catch up on the inorganic chemistry you missed. It’s the people cringing from their scientific illiteracy who buy Stephen Hawking books they can’t read, as if having them on the shelf will make the knowledge rub off; they snap up tracts on atheism, too, to show that if they’re ignorant they’re at least rational. But still, our understanding of the mechanisms of the world remains fuzzy around the edges. If we were told that our computer worked because there was an angel inside, some of us couldn’t disprove it. The cultures were undivided in Leonardo’s day, but now those of us who deal in metaphors don’t know how to make machines. If we wanted to move a mountain, we would have to rely on faith.
The compilers of the dictionary have adopted a gentle, judicious, sometimes jaunty tone. There is at least one gratifying juxtaposition: the entry for Padre Pio, recently canonised under the papal fast-track procedure, appears on the same page as ‘pious fraud’. The entries, the editors say, represent the full range of positions ‘from the hostile sceptic to the credulous believer’. They have tried to operate without bias, avoid empty speculation and run to earth misconceptions, and they have cross-referenced liberally and cleverly. On the whole, a sobriety of tone prevails. Only a few entries feature sentences like: ‘The aliens returned, exchanging barking sounds with one another as they stripped him naked and sponged him down.’ The compilers are good at pinning down the origin of urban legends, and rural ones too. Alligators in the sewers of New York? Probably not, though alien big cats are real enough. Spectral pedestrians are never children, though many children are killed on the roads. They are better attested than phantom hitch-hikers, though the latter predate the motor car: there is a 17th-century case in Sweden in which a sleigh is involved. In keeping with the casualness of modern corpse disposal, phantom funeral processions are less popular than they were. On the whole, though, the older the world gets, the less we can explain and the more mysteries proliferate. Most anomalous phenomena are marginal, and are dull if only the strict truth is told, so even people anxious to be factual will embroider them in an effort to secure attention for the strange thing they witnessed, or half-witnessed. Maybe people once felt some reticence if they saw a spectre, a UFO, or the great god Pan in a grove, but we are a society beyond embarrassment now. Accordingly, the dictionary is in large part a record of mass hysteria, as well as factoids and fakes. Meet the Mad Gasser of Mattoon, Gef the Talking Mongoose and, more prosaically, Doug and Dave, self-confessed manufacturers of crop circles. Thrill to ‘penis panic’ – five dead in Benin. If that’s too culture-specific, consider joining an epidemic of mass-psychogenic illness: dizzy spells and vomiting seem to be international in their appeal and destined to be more popular than ever as odourless poison gas released by terrorists seeps into the places of the psyche no suicide bomber can reach.
Some people will be offended by the existence of the dictionary and its efforts at even-handedness, and will want to turn first to ‘scepticism’ and ‘hoaxes’. The American sociologist Marcello Truzzi discerned various categories of sceptic. First there are ‘proponents’, who have encountered one specific oddity, or hatched one peculiar idea, and want to bring it within the ambit of scientific knowledge, make it respectable; single-track obsessives, they are not interested in being dragged into the swamp of the paranormal. ‘Anomalists’, more broadly, seek to enhance scientific knowledge. Confronted with puzzling phenomena, they are willing to take an interdisciplinary approach, and realise that what is under investigation may not fit existing paradigms. They apply Occam’s razor, and try to test claims using existing methodology. They put the burden of proof on the claimant. A third category, ‘mystery-mongers’, are ‘fundamentally unscientific’. They don’t really want explanations. What they are sceptical about is the scientific consensus. Broadly, they are out for fun, at the expense of the establishment; but perhaps we should put in this category those who get little pleasure and much pain from paranoid ideas about how the world works: simmering psychosis finds a ready vocabulary in pseudoscience. Among the most angry, hostile and sceptical people of all are those who are about to divorce from the general consensus of how the world works, because they are convinced that a big secret about the cosmos is being kept from them by a conspiracy among their friends.
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