confabulist

English

Noun

confabulist (plural confabulists)

1. One who confabulates; a companion with whom one chats or confers.
   • 1849, Emma Robinson, Owen Tudor: An Historical Romance - Volume 2, page 26:

     I knew him only as a grey-bearded sage — he was my father's friend and close confabulist! " said Hueline, with a slight smile.

   • 1970, The People Their Rights and Liberties Their Duties and Their Interests:

     ... his heaven—the organ and confabulist of angels and spirits, their ideal brother.

   • 1993, Alex Blackburn, Writers' Forum, →ISBN, page 90:

     He's bonded Monte Alban guide, a sidewalk Sophist, Palenque wizard, brother in arms and drink confabulist, Mixtec and Zapotec, globetrotting cosmologist with answers for everything in his bag of tricks: solving problems for men floating belly-up, for doubting warriors who now scratch their heads.

2. One who invents elaborate stories.
   • 1995, Alexander McCall Smith, Heavenly Date: And Other Stories, page 121:

     The confabulist, who simply cannot resist making up stories, wastes an enormous amount of other people's time.

   • 1998, Sally Clark, Wasps: A Drawing Room Comedy for Distempered Times, page 33:

     Oh — well, you see, that part's true. But not everything I say is true. Part of my illness. I'm a confabulist.

   • 2001, L Rogers, BC Peace, PK Page: Essays on Her Works:

     The confabulist loves the tools of her trade, the stream of words that is a river of stars flowing through the knowable universe, but words are only anthills and mountains, aspects from which the river is seen.

Adjective

confabulist (comparative more confabulist, superlative most confabulist)

1. Involving the invention of elaborate stories.
   • 2007, Edo Van Belkom, Robert Charles Wilson, Tesseracts Ten: A Celebration of New Canadian Speculative Fiction, →ISBN, page 10:

     Why did he always come up with the most romantic and confabulist notions?

   • 2016, Paul Emmons, Luc Phinney, “Introduction: homo fabula”, in Confabulations : Storytelling in Architecture:

     The speculative drawings of architects raise the possibility that all architectural drawings, rather than representing a future building, are confabulist pre-enactments—that is, they tell the story of a world that may be, that could be, that might or even ought to be; but is not, and will never be.

   • 2018, Michael Ondaatje, Warlight, →ISBN, page 79:

     Those days and nights, as I began to enter the shadowy timetable of The Darter's life, I found myself within a confabulist pattern that drew together barge smugglers, verterinarians, forgers, and dog tracks in the Home Countries.