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- Feed Preview Words I Learned From Reading David Foster Wallace
You say hello, I say goodbye.
Welcome buzzfeeders. I’ve had to abandon this blog to devote more time to Publicly Relating. If you’re interested in taking over “Words I Learned From Reading David Foster Wallace,” ple...
https://dfwwords.wordpress.com/2009/01/29/you-say-hello-i-say-goodbye/
vertiginously
vertiginous (adj.) – whirling; spinning; rotary “It turns out the cause of poor tendony Mrs. R–‘s meltdown in the kitchen is that she has either a grandniece or removed cousin who’s doi...
gonfalon
gonfalon (n.) – a banner suspended from a crossbar, often with several streamers or tails “More than a few large homes around Franklin Park or out on the east side even have enormous multisto...
sine die
sine die (Latin) – without fixing a day for future action or meeting “The American Conversation is an argument, after all, and way worse than our fear of error or anarchy or Gomorrahl decaden...
animalculum
animalculum (n.) – microscopic organism such as an amoeba or paramecium “Nor does he give any examples to help explain irregular participles and transitivity (“The light shone” vs. “I s...
pleonasm
pleonasm (n.) – the use of more words than are necessary to express an idea; redundancy “In other words, it is when a scholar’s vanity/insecurity leads him to write primarily to communicate...
anapest
anapest (n.) – a metric foot composed of two short syllables followed by a long one, as in the word seventeen “You can’t say, ‘Where’s it?’ So the choice is between ‘Where is it?’...
indurate
indurate (adj.) -physically or morally hardened “First off, the avoid-terminal-prepositions rule is the invention of one Fr. R. Lowth, an 18th-century British preacher and indurate pedant who d...
androsartorial
androsartorial (adj.) -men’s fashion From andro– (prefix) meaning “male” and sartorial (adj.) meaning “relating to clothes” “Let us grant – as a thought experiment if nothing else...
pourparler
pourparler (n.) -an informal, preliminary discussion “If that last line of Pinker’s pourparler reminds you of Garner’s “Essentially, descriptivists and presecriptivists are approaching di...