Someone told me that David Foster Wallace’s mother used to pretend to choke every time he or his sister, Amy, made a grammatical mistake in conversation, and wouldn’t stop until they corrected the blunder. (Malcolm Knox tells the story better here.) While guilty grammarians might end up with particular types of problems, linguistic inadequacy certainly wouldn’t be among them. The sheer audacity of some authors’ vocabularies strikes a reader immediately, with John Banville and Vladimir Nabokov being two of the keenest examples. Like those two authors, Foster Wallace’s relationship with nouns, verbs and their accomplices so far outstrips mere familiarity that only ‘mastery’ really describes it with enough vigour or accuracy. But ‘mastery’ implies a kind of august formality, and Foster Wallace’s spirited deployment of his expansive lexicon revealed an obvious love for the components of the English language. He herded words together with the loving exactitude of a sheepdog and the creativity of a gastronomic chef.
What follows below is a selection of the words and a couple of phrases I took care to scrawl into notebooks while reading Foster Wallace’s short story collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. The words listed here are much depleted of their interest by their aggregation outside the context of the book — sorry. Yet, as a language enthusiast, I found the late writer’s generous and successful application of words — whether highly specific and obscure, or slangish — extremely affecting.
The list:
- dottle
- indole
- eccrine tang; uremic breeze
- equerry
- abreactive
- belletristic
- virid
- mentation
- natal face
- a minim of respect
- inculent
- urtication
- cruelly ferrous
- stochastic
- gambrel