"I came across this new vocabulary while scanning the complete list of words that David Foster Wallace circled in his American Heritage dictionary. If you're a DFW enthusiast, you've probably already seen the abbreviated list that the Harry Ransom Center released in March. But Brow Beat was curious to see more, and the Ransom Center kindly indulged us. You can see all of the words that DFW circled in his dictionary, hyperlinked to their definitions, by clicking here.What's notable about the list is that along with many three-dollar words that seem rather difficult to pronounce (witenagemot), DFW also marked up more run-of-the-mill entries like the ones for bisque and tennis. Tennis, as anyone who's read Infinite Jest knows well, was of great interest to DFW, who also played the sport competitively. Did he circle bisque while writing 'Consider the Lobster'? We'll never know."
This is great. Ablative absolute sticks out to me--perhaps because it's the first word, perhaps because it's one of the few dual words, perhaps because it's a grammatical term--but many are fascinating, especially (as Slate notes) the more prosaic ones.
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