Everyone I know has a list of least-favorite words. For various reasons, “moist” always seems to make the top three. But perhaps it takes a writer—someone who savors the sounds, textures, and histories of peculiar words—to compile a list of their most-favorites. A few I’ve placed in keepsake boxes over the years—little corrugated minerals that remind me of what words can do: “palaver,” “obdurate,” “crevasse,” “superfecund”….
I could go on, but it’s certainly not my list you’ve come for. You’re reading, I suspect, because you well know the consummate care and attention David Foster Wallace lavished on his prose—his reputation as a smith of endless creativity who, Alex Ross wrote in a series of McSweeney’s tributes, spent his time “keenly observing, forging acronyms, reanimating lifeless OED entries, and creating sentences that make us spit out our beer.”
Ross’s mention of the Oxford English Dictionary, that venerable repository of the vast breadth and depth of written English (sadly kept behind a paywall), helps us appreciate Wallace’s list, which features such archaic adverbs as “maugre” (“in spite of, notwithstanding”) and obscure adjectives as “lacinate” (“fringed”). Who has read, much less written, the Anglo-Saxon “ruck” (“a multitude of people mixed together”)? And while the equally rock-hard, monosyllabic “wrack” is familiar, I have not before encountered the lovely “primapara” (“woman who’s pregnant for the first time”).
Another page of Wallace’s list (above—click images to enlarge) includes such treasures as “tarantism,” a “disorder where you have an uncontrollable need to dance,” and “sciolism,” a “pretentious air of scholarship; superficial knowledgability.” While it is true that Wallace has been accused of the latter, I do not think this is a competent judgment. Instead, I would describe him with another of my favorite words—“amateur”—not at all, of course, in the sense of an unpaid or unskilled beginner, but rather, as it meant in French, a “devoted lover” of the English language.
These pages come to us from Lists of Note (and the Harry Ransom Center at UT-Austin), who writes that they are “just two pages from the hundreds of word lists he amassed over the years.” Perhaps one day we’ll see a published edition of David Foster Wallace’s favorite words. For the nonce, head on over to Lists of Note to see this minim of his lexicon transcribed.
Long before he played Gandalf or Magneto, Sir Ian McKellen was known as one of the finest stage actors in England. A stand out in the Royal Shakespeare Company, Sir Ian played the lead in its 1974 staging of Doctor Faustus and its 1977 staging of Macbeth. He was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1979 almost entirely because of his stage work.
If you want a sense of just how good Sir Ian is, watch his one-man show Acting Shakespeare. You can see it in its entirety above.
Developed on the road in the late ‘70s, the show is part a scholarly history of the Bard, part an autobiographical yarn and part a greatest hits of Shakespeare’s speeches. And Sir Ian is absolutely dazzling. At one point, he gives a spot on impersonation of Sir John Gielgud. At another he performs a scene from Romeo and Juliet playing both Romeo and Juliet. He shifts effortlessly from giving a soliloquy by Hamlet to delivering a witty anecdote about life on the stage with sense of timing of a veteran stand-up comedian.
Acting Shakespeare is a 95-minute long sustained display of acting bravura. It’s pretty entertaining too. Seriously, check it out.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow.
The web site Paleofuture features a 1934 issue of Everyday Science and Mechanics magazine, where Northwestern University president Walter Dill Scott made some farsighted pronouncements of his own. Scott believed that the physical college campus would no longer need to be a lynchpin for education, and that students could learn by way of radio and pictures. Fax machines and televisions would allow students to access lecture materials worldwide, and ensure that researchers could conduct their research remotely. He also figured that we’d all end up commuting by planes. Everyday Science and Mechanics wrote:
The university of twenty-five years from now will be a different looking place, says President Scott of Northwestern. Instead of concentrating faculty and students around a campus, they will “commute” by air, and the university will be surrounded by airports and hangars. The course will be carried on, to a large extent, by radio and pictures. Facsimile broadcasting and television will enlarge greatly the range of a library; and research may be carried on by scholars at great distances.
Airports and hangars aside, Scott’s conjectures hit pretty close to home. While fax machines and radio may have been supplanted by the Internet, the essence of our educational advancements is the same: university students can often listen to lectures and complete assignments online, spending only a few short face-to-face hours in the classroom. Other times, classes may be wholly available online, and students may never step foot on campus altogether. Scholars, too, can trawl through databases like JSTOR and PsycINFO without getting out of bed, conducting research as they travel.
Last year, we featured a clip of Nico singing “Chelsea Girls” at the Hotel Chelsea, the much-mythologized Manhattan institution that, at one time or another, housed a range of cultural figures including Mark Twain, Bob Dylan, Dylan Thomas, Charles Bukowski, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen, Patti Smith, Robert Mapplethorpe, Allen Ginsberg, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Iggy Pop, Gaby Hoffmann, Sid Vicious, and Arthur Miller. “The Chelsea in the Sixties seemed to combine two atmospheres,” writes Miller in a 1978 essay on his time there. “A scary optimistic chaos which predicted the hip future, and at the same time the feel of a massive, old-fashioned, sheltering family. That at least was the myth one nursed in one’s mind, but like all myths it did not altogether stand inspection.” That era more than arguably marked the Chelsea’s social and cultural heyday.
A few years later, in 1981, BBC’s arts documentary series Arena made its way to New York to investigate the history and then-current state of this veritable counterculture incubator. The film spends time with current Chelsea residents, former Chelsea residents, and Chelsea habitués notable, creative, and otherwise — the notably creative Andy Warhol, William Burroughs, and Quentin Crisp all make appearances. It also talks to the hotel’s staff and follows a tour guide as he leads a curious group through its storied corridors. “With all my misgivings about the Chelsea,” Miller reflects, “I can never enter it without a certain quickening of my heartbeat. There is an indescribably homelike atmosphere which at the same time lacks a certain credibility. It is some kind of fictional place, I used to think. As in dreams things are out front that are concealed in other hotels.”
Noam Chomsky is a pretty unlikely celebrity. As a preeminent anarchist theorist, his political writing is full of passionate intensity, but in his numerous public appearances, he conforms much more to images associated with his day job as a preeminent academic and linguist. He’s very soft-spoken—I’ve never heard him raise his voice above the register of polite coffee-shop conversation—and frumpy in that elder scholar kind of way: uncombed gray hair, an endless supply of sweaters and corduroy jackets…
So, yes, it’s amusing when, in the short clip above, a young Chomsky fan asks the 85-year-old “father of modern linguistics” for advice on how to talk to women. Chomsky’s nonplussed response is honest and heartfelt. He has nothing to offer in this regard, he says: “I got out of that business 70 years ago.” If it seems like Chomsky’s math is a little off—he was married in 1949—consider that he and his wife Carol met when they were both just five years old.
Theirs was a quietly charming romance. Chomsky, who has always possessed an extraordinary ability to keep his personal, political, and professional lives separate, did not speak much of their marriage until after Carol’s death in 2008. In the excerpt above from a Big Think interview shortly after, Chomsky tells a story of group of peasants in Southern Columbia who planted a forest in his wife’s memory. He’s also asked to define love. This time, he has a much more interesting response than his reply to the would-be pick up artist above: “I just know it’s—has an unbreakable grip, but I can’t tell you what it is. It’s just life’s empty without it.”
Ezra Pound was a key figure in 20th century poetry. Not only did he demonstrate impressive poetic skill in his Cantos; he also proved to be a crucial early supporter of several famous contemporaries, championing the likes of Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and H.D.. Before deservedly being condemned for his fascist politics and antisemitism, Pound established himself as one of the leading literary critics of his time. David Perkins, in A History of Modern Poetry, wrote, “During a crucial decade in the history of modern literature, approximately 1912–1922, Pound was the most influential and in some ways the best critic of poetry in England or America.”
Early in the 20th century, Pound helped found the Imagist poetry movement, which abided by three key laws:
1. Direct treatment of the “thing” whether subjective or objective.
2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.
In 1913, Pound wrote an essay entitled “A Few Don’ts.” Its rules, enumerated below, provide young poets with a much-needed reminder to reign in their egos and apply themselves assiduously to their craft.
In a nutshell, the rules state that each verse should be lean and purposeful, with no frills or filler to provide padding. They also emphasize the importance of possessing an awareness of the work of previous poets, and of using this understanding in the creation of new work.
Pay no attention to the criticism of men who have never themselves written a notable work. Consider the discrepancies between the actual writing of the Greek poets and dramatists, and the theories of the Graeco-Roman grammarians, concocted to explain their metres.
Use no superfluous word, no adjective which does not reveal something.
Don’t use such an expression as ‘dim lands of peace’. It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer’s not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol.
Go in fear of abstractions. Do not retell in mediocre verse what has already been done in good prose. Don’t think any intelligent person is going to be deceived when you try to shirk all the difficulties of the unspeakably difficult art of good prose by chopping your composition into line lengths.
What the expert is tired of today the public will be tired of tomorrow. Don’t imagine that the art of poetry is any simpler than the art of music, or that you can please the expert before you have spent at least as much effort on the art of verse as an average piano teacher spends on the art of music.
Be influenced by as many great artists as you can, but have the decency either to acknowledge the debt outright, or to try to conceal it. Don’t allow ‘influence’ to mean merely that you mop up the particular decorative vocabulary of some one or two poets whom you happen to admire. A Turkish war correspondent was recently caught red-handed babbling in his dispatches of ‘dove-grey’ hills, or else it was ‘pearl-pale’, I can not remember.
Use either no ornament or good ornament.
Let the candidate fill his mind with the finest cadences he can discover, preferably in a foreign language, so that the meaning of the words may be less likely to divert his attention from the movement; e.g. Saxon charms, Hebridean Folk Songs, the verse of Dante, and the lyrics of Shakespeare — if he can dissociate the vocabulary from the cadence. Let him dissect the lyrics of Goethe coldly into their component sound values, syllables long and short, stressed and unstressed, into vowels and consonants.
It is not necessary that a poem should rely on its music, but if it does rely on its music that music must be such as will delight the expert.
Let the neophyte know assonance and alliteration, rhyme immediate and delayed, simple and polyphonic, as a musician would expect to know harmony and counterpoint and all the minutiae of his craft. No time is too great to give to these matters or to any one of them, even if the artist seldom have need of them.
Don’t imagine that a thing will ‘go’ in verse just because it’s too dull to go in prose.
Don’t be ‘viewy’ — leave that to the writers of pretty little philosophic essays. Don’t be descriptive; remember that the painter can describe a landscape much better than you can, and that he has to know a deal more about it.
When Shakespeare talks of the ‘Dawn in russet mantle clad’ he presents something which the painter does not present. There is in this line of his nothing that one can call description; he presents.
Consider the way of the scientists rather than the way of an advertising agent for a new soap. The scientist does not expect to be acclaimed as a great scientist until he has discovered something. He begins by learning what has been discovered already. He goes from that point onward. He does not bank on being a charming fellow personally. He does not expect his friends to applaud the results of his freshman class work. Freshmen in poetry are unfortunately not confined to a definite and recognizable class room. They are ‘all over the shop’. Is it any wonder ‘the public is indifferent to poetry?’
Don’t chop your stuff into separate iambs. Don’t make each line stop dead at the end and then begin every next line with a heave. Let the beginning of the next line catch the rise of the rhythm wave, unless you want a definite longish pause. In short, behave as a musician, a good musician, when dealing with that phase of your art which has exact parallels in music. The same laws govern, and you are bound by no others.
Naturally, your rhythmic structure should not destroy the shape of your words, or their natural sound, or their meaning. It is improbable that, at the start, you will he able to get a rhythm-structure strong enough to affect them very much, though you may fall a victim to all sorts of false stopping due to line ends, and caesurae.
The Musician can rely on pitch and the volume of the orchestra. You can not. The term harmony is misapplied in poetry; it refers to simultaneous sounds of different pitch. There is, however, in the best verse a sort of residue of sound which remains in the ear of the hearer and acts more or less as an organ-base.
A rhyme must have in it some slight element of surprise if it is to give pleasure, it need not be bizarre or curious, but it must be well used if used at all.
That part of your poetry which strikes upon the imaginative eye of the reader will lose nothing by translation into a foreign tongue; that which appeals to the ear can reach only those who take it in the original.
Consider the definiteness of Dante’s presentation, as compared with Milton’s rhetoric. Read as much of Wordsworth as does not seem too unutterably dull. If you want the gist of the matter go to Sappho, Catullus, Villon, Heine when he is in the vein, Gautier when he is not too frigid; or, if you have not the tongues, seek out the leisurely Chaucer. Good prose will do you no harm, and there is good discipline to be had by trying to write it.
Translation is likewise good training, if you find that your original matter ‘wobbles’ when you try to rewrite it. The meaning of the poem to be translated can not ‘wobble’.
If you are using a symmetrical form, don’t put in what you want to say and then fill up the remaining vacuums with slush.
Don’t mess up the perception of one sense by trying to define it in terms of another. This is usually only the result of being too lazy to find the exact word. To this clause there are possibly exceptions.
In March of 1992, many years after photographer Dorothea Lange’s 1936 image of a migrant mother in California (above) became one of the most iconic images from the Great Depression, a camera crew sat down with two daughters of the subject of Lange’s photo. For about 40 minutes, Norma Rydlewski and Katherine McIntosh shared their stories with Blackside, Inc., a company founded by award-winning filmmaker Henry Hampton. In the footage and transcript of that conversation, accessible for the first time along with many more such interviews through Washington University Libraries, the family’s daily challenges come to life. The sisters describe not only their strong, beautiful mother but everything from field work and playing with dirt clods as children to early union meetings and the economical “saving grace” that was World War II.
When The Great Depression, Blackside’s seven-part documentary series, debuted on PBS in October of 1993, the program wove together short segments from extensive interviews with 148 people who experienced the Great Depression, including Rydlewski and McIntosh. As illuminating as the documentary is in its own right, the many additional hours of oral history that Blackside recorded in the process of creating it are a treasure trove of primary source material—all of it now viewable, browsable, and searchable online through the efforts of WU Libraries’ Visual Media Research Lab and Digital Library Services (DLS).
The diverse range of individuals whose reflections on the 1930s are now easily accessible include a grandson of Franklin D. and Eleanor Roosevelt, celebrated authors Maya Angelou and Gore Vidal, longtime New York Times political reporter Warren Moscow, actors Karen Morley and Ossie Davis, Morton Newman, who worked on the Upton Sinclair campaign for governor in California, and many more from all walks of life. The multicultural, multiregional approach brings needed depth and color to an era that is often remembered and depicted as a monolithic event dragging the nation down for a decade, says Special Collections assistant Alison Carrick, who managed the workflow of the digitization project.
“When we think about the Great Depression, images of the dust bowl and breadlines immediately come to mind,” Carrick says. “And that is part of the history Blackside covered with this series, but they also revealed complex and lively stories that are often overlooked—from union struggles, to heated political campaigns, Works Progress Administration projects, the New Deal, and more. What Blackside managed to do with this series and these interviews was to bring that period of history back to life in a vivid, engaging way.”
The intent behind The Great Depression Interviews project is to provide a seamless, powerful tool with much potential for interdisciplinary research.
“One of the best features of the site, thanks to DLS, is that it is text/keyword searchable,” Carrick says. “This creates a way for users to pinpoint a subject, name, or event and quickly look to see where it occurs in each transcript. Our hope is that this feature will lead users to other transcripts they might not have thought contained similar subject matter.”
I receive weekly reminders of my linguistic ignorance whenever I read anything by authors fluent in Latin. How could I not, whenever Clive James starts to pontificate on the greatness of, say, Tacitus?
“For students acquiring Latin in adult life, the language is most easily approached through those historians who really wrote chronicles — Cornelius Nepos, Sallust, Suetonius and Livy — but with the Histories of Tacitus you get the best reason for approaching it at all… What Sainte-Beuve said of Montaigne — that his prose is like one continuous epigram — is even more true of Tacitus.”
Fantastic! So, which translation should I read?
“There are innumerable translations but the original gives you [Tacitus]’ unrivalled powers of compression.”
As with Latin classics, so with other Indo-European language texts, including Beowulf, originally in Old English, Homer’s Iliadand Odyssey, in Classical Greek, and the ancient Vedic hymns of the Rigveda, in Sanskrit.
For those willing to take up the challenge of reading these canonic texts in their original form, the University of Texas’ Linguistics Research Center provides an excellent resource. In addition to hosting a multitude of Indo-European volumes in their entirety, the LRC has made 10-lesson crash courses, developed by several UT-Austin academics. Lessons include a brief guide to the alphabet, background knowledge on the language’s development, and a grammar guide, all available for the following languages:
Best of all, lessons are based on seminal texts from each language: Latin lessons rely on Tacitus’ Germania, Livy’s History of Rome, and Virgil’s Aeneid, while Homer, Hesiod’s Works and Days, and Plato’s Republic feature prominently in the Classical Greek classes. Students progress through each lesson by reading the original passages, and using the provided guides to translate them to English.
Ilia Blinderman is a Montreal-based culture and science writer. Follow him at @iliablinderman.
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
