The Swifts: A Dictionary of Scoundrels

Back in the old tights-­and-­doublets days of the Swift family, every child had been named either Mary or John. It got terribly confusing at dinnertime when someone asked a John to pass the potatoes and ten hands shot out at once, and so Mary Swift XXXV had begun the tradition of naming her children using the Family Dictionary. The idea stuck, and the Swifts prospered. People often overlook a Mary or a John, but they seldom forget a person named Meretricious or Flinch.

­Shenanigan couldn’t remember the day she was born, but she could picture it very well: the hospital room, the nurses, her mother, tired and smiling as ­Shenanigan’s father fussed over her pillows. She pictured herself too, wrapped up like a little peanut with a shock of disobedient hair already erupting out of her head. She pictured the Dictionary—and this part was easier, because she was looking at it—­an ancient, leather-­bound monster of a book, bursting its bindings with pages of calfskin and parchment and paper, with entries in crisp modern fonts, wonky typewritten letters, and hand­scrawled script with longS’s that looked like F’s.

The Dictionary would have been brought in, set on the bed (­Shenanigan pictured the nurses’ noses wrinkling in distaste), and opened at random by ­Shenanigan’s mother. Her eyes would have been closed. She would have run her finger down the page and stopped on the word and definition that would become her child’s name.

­Shenanigan could picture this so well because every Swift’s first day began in exactly the same way. .