The eNotes Blog The David Foster WallaceDictionary

The David Foster WallaceDictionary When David Foster Wallace died in 2008, he left behind a legacy of three excellent novels, several short story collections, and numerous essays. But what many of his fans may not be familiar with is Wallaces secret preparations for (perhaps?) another project, a dictionary. Thanks to The Telegraph, some of those notes are now available online. If youre anything like me, youll find comfort in the authors shared  frustration  with words like utlization (Kill it! Kiiiill it!) and curiosity at the paradoxical nature of adjectives like colloquialism. I only wish someone else would take up the flame and create a very biased dictionary, complete with personal commentaries in the manner of DFWs. Sure, some quirky collections are out there (Foyles Philavery is one I particularly enjoy) but I crave that Wallace zing found below. Any takers? Read on for some excerpts of David Foster Wallaces amusing views on parts of the English language. Utilize A noxious puff-word. Since it does nothing that good old  use  doesn’t do, its extra letters and syllables don’t make a writer seem smarter; rather, using  utilize  makes you seem either like a pompous twit or like someone so insecure that she’ll use pointlessly big words in an attempt to look sophisticated. The same is true for the noun  utilization, for  vehicle  as used for  car, for  residence  as used for  house, for  presently,  at present,  at this time, and  at the present time  as used for  now, and so on. What’s worth remembering about puff-words is something that good writing teachers spend a lot of time drumming into undergrads: â€Å"formal writing† does not mean gratuitously fancy writing; it means clean, clear, maximally considerate writing. Pulchritude A paradoxical noun because it refers to a kind of beauty but is itself one of the ugliest words in the language. Same goes for the adj. form  pulchritudinous. They’re part of a tiny elite cadre of words that possess the opposite of the qualities they denote.  Diminutive,  big,  Ã‚  foreign,  fancy  (adj.),  classy,  colloquialism, and  monosyllabic  are some others; there are at least a dozen more. Inviting your school-age kids to list as many paradoxical words as they can is a neat way to deepen their relationship to English and help them see that words are both symbols for real things and real things themselves. Mucous An adjective, not synonymous with the noun  mucus. It’s worth noting this not only because the two words are fun but because so many people don’t know the difference.  Mucus  means the unmentionable stuff itself.Mucous  refers to (1) something that makes or secretes mucus, as in â€Å"The next morning, his mucous membranes were in rocky shape indeed,† or (2) something that consists of or resembles mucus, as in â€Å"The mucous consistency of its eggs kept the diner’s breakfast trade minimal.† Myriad As an adj.,  myriad  means (1) an indefinitely large number of something (â€Å"The Local Group comprises myriad galaxies†) or (2) made up of a great many diverse elements (â€Å"the myriad plant life of Amazonia†). As a noun, it’s used with an article and  of  to mean a large number (â€Å"The new CFO faced a myriad of cash-flow problems†). What’s odd is that some authorities consider only the adjective usage correct - there’s about a 50-50 chance that a given copy editor will query  a myriad of  - even though the noun usage has a much longer history. It was only in 19th-century poetry that  myriad  started being used as an adj. So it’s a bit of a stumper. It’s tempting to recommend avoiding the noun usage so that no readers will be bugged, but at the same time it’s true that any reader who’s bugged by  a myriad of  is both persnickety and wrong - and you can usually rebut snooty teachers, c opy editors, et al. by directing them to Coleridge’s â€Å"Myriad myriads of lives teemed forth.† Unique This is one of a class of adjectives, sometimes called â€Å"uncomparables†, that can be a little tricky. Among other uncomparables are  precise,exact,  correct,  entire,  accurate,  preferable,  inevitable,  possible,  false; there are probably two dozen in all. These adjectives all describe absolute, non-negotiable states: something is either false or it’s not; something is either inevitable or it’s not. Many writers get careless and try to modify uncomparables with comparatives like  more  and  less  or intensives like  very. But if you really think about them, the core assertions in sentences like â€Å"War is becoming increasingly inevitable as Middle East tensions rise†; â€Å"Their cost estimate was more accurate than the other firms’†; and â€Å"As a mortician, he has a very unique attitude† are nonsense. If something is inevitable, it is bound to happen; it cannot be bound to happen and then somehow e ven more bound to happen.Unique  already means one-of-a-kind, so the adj. phrase  very unique  is at best redundant and at worst stupid, like â€Å"audible to the ear† or â€Å"rectangular in shape†. You can blame the culture of marketing for some of this difficulty. As the number and rhetorical volume of US ads increase, we become inured to hyperbolic language, which then forces marketers to load superlatives and uncomparables with high-octane modifiers (special  Ã‚  very special  Ã‚  Super-special!  Ã‚  Mega-Special!!), and so on. A deeper issue implicit in the problem of uncomparables is the dissimilarities between Standard Written English and the language of advertising. Advertising English, which probably deserves to be studied as its own dialect, operates under different syntactic rules than SWE, mainly because AE’s goals and assumptions are different. Sentences like â€Å"We offer a totally unique dining experience†; â€Å"Come on down and receive your free gift†; and â€Å"Save up to 50 per cent†¦ and more!† are perfectly OK in Advertising English - but this is because Advertising English is aimed at people who are not paying close attention. If your audience is by definition involuntary, distracted and numbed, then  free gift  and  totally unique  stand a better chance of penetrating - and simple penetration is what AE is all about. One axiom of Standard Written English is that your reader is paying close attention and expects you to have done the same. Focus Focus  is now the noun of choice for expressing what people used to mean by  concentration  (â€Å"Sampras’s on-court focus was phenomenal†) and  priority  (â€Å"Our focus is on serving the needs of our customers†). As an adj., it seems often to serve as an approving synonym for  driven  ormonomaniacal: â€Å"He’s the most focused warehouse manager we’ve ever had.† As a verb, it seems isomorphic with the older  to concentrate: â€Å"Focus, people!†; â€Å"The Democrats hope that the campaign will focus on the economy†; â€Å"We need to focus on finding solutions instead of blaming each other†. Given the speed with which  to focus  has supplanted  to concentrate, it’s a little surprising that nobody objects to its somewhat jargony New Age feel - but nobody seems to. Maybe it’s because the word is only one of many film and drama terms that have entered mainstream usage in the last decad e, e.g.,  to foreground  (= to feature, to give top priority to);  to background  (= to downplay, to relegate to the back burner);  scenario  (= an outline of some hypothetical sequence of events), and so on. Fervent A beautiful and expressive word that combines the phonological charms of  verve  and  fever.  Lots of writers, though, think fervent is synonymous with  fervid, and most dictionary defs. don’t do much to disabuse them. The truth is that there’s a hierarchical trio of zeal-type adjectives, all with roots in the Latin verb  fervere  (= to boil). Even though  fervent  can also mean extremely hot, glowing (as in â€Å"Fingering his ascot, Aubrey gazed abstractedly at the brazier’s fervent coals†), it’s actually just the baseline term;  fervent  is basically synonymous with ardent.  Fervid  is the next level up; it connotes even more passion/devotion/eagerness than fervent. At the top is  perfervid, which means extravagantly, rabidly, uncontrollably zealous or impassioned.  Perfervid  deserves to be used more, not only for its internal alliteration and metrical pizzazz but because its deployment usually shows that the writ er knows the differences between the three  fervere  words. Feckless A totally great adjective.  Feckless  primarily means deficient in efficacy, i.e., lacking vigor or determination, feeble; but it can also mean careless, profligate, irresponsible. It appears most often now in connection with wastoid youths, bloated bureaucracies - anyone who’s culpable for his own haplessness. The great thing about using  feckless  is that it lets you be extremely dismissive and mean without sounding mean; you just sound witty and classy. The word’s also fun to read because of the soft  eassonance and the  k  sound - the triply assonant noun form is even more fun. Noma This medical noun signifies an especially icky ulcerous infection of the mouth or genitals. Because the condition most commonly strikes children living in abject poverty/squalor, it’s a bit like scrofula. And just as the adj.  scrofulous  has gradually extended its sense to mean â€Å"corrupt, degenerate, gnarly†, so  nomal  seems ripe for similar extension; it could serve as a slightly obscure or erudite synonym for â€Å"scrofulous, repulsive, pathetically gross, grossly pathetic†Ã¢â‚¬ ¦ you get the idea. Hairy There are maybe more descriptors for various kinds of hair and hairiness than any other word-set in English, and some of them are extremely strange and fun. The more pedestrian terms like  shaggy,  unshorn,  bushy,  coiffed, and so on we’ll figure you already know. The adj.  barbigerous  is an extremely uptown synonym for  bearded.  Cirrose  and  cirrous, from the Latin  cirrus  meaning â€Å"curl† or â€Å"fringe† (as in  cirrus clouds), can both be used to refer to somebody’s curly or tufty or wispy/feathery hair - Nicolas Cage’s hair in  Adaptation  is cirrose.  Crinite  means â€Å"hairy or possessed of a hair-like appendage†, though it’s mainly a botanical term and would be a bit eccentric applied to a person.  Crinose, though, is a people-adj. that means â€Å"having a lot of hair†, especially in the sense of one’s hair being really long. The related nouncrinosity  is antiquate d but not obsolete and can be used to refer to somebody’s hair in an amusingly donnish way, as in  Madonna’s normally platinum crinosity is now a maternal brown.  Glabrous, which is the loveliest of all hair-related adjectives, means having no hair (on a given part) at all. Please note that  glabrous  means more baby’s-bottom-hairless than bald or shaved, though if you wanted to describe a bald person in an ironically fancy way you could talk about his  glabrous domeor something.  Hirsute  is probably the most familiar upmarket synonym for  hairy, totally at home in any kind of formal writing. Like that of many hair-related adjectives,  hirsute’s original use was in botany (where it means â€Å"covered with coarse or bristly hairs†), but in regular usage its definition is much more general.  Hispid  means â€Å"covered with stiff or rough little hairs† and could apply to a military pate or unshaved jaw.Hispidulous  is mainly just a puffed-up form of  hispid  and should be avoided.  Lanate  and  lanated  mean â€Å"having or being composed of woolly hairs†. A prettier and slightly more familiar way to describe woolly hair is with the adjective  flocculent. (There’s also  floccose, but this is used mainly of odd little hairy fruits like kiwi and quince.) Then there are thepil-based words, all derived from the Latin  pilus  (= hair).  Pilose, another fairly common adj., means â€Å"covered with fine soft hair†. Last but not least is the noun  pilimiction, which names a hopefully very rare medical disorder â€Å"in which piliform or hair-like bodies are passed in the urine†. Outside of maybe describing some kind of terribly excruciated facial expression as  pilimictive, however, it’s hard to imagine a mainstream use for  pilimiction.  Tomentose  means â€Å"covered with dense little matted hairs† - baby chimps, hobbitsâ€℠¢ feet and Robin Williams are alltomentose.  Ulotrichous, which is properly classed with  lannate  andflocculent, is an old term for â€Å"crisply woolly hair†. Be advised that it is also, if not exactly a racist adj., certainly a racial one - AC Haddon’sRaces of Man, from the early 1900s, classified races according to three basic hair types:  leiotrichous  (straight),  cymotrichous  (wavy) andulotrichous.