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Thursday, March 12, 2009

Books A Pulchritudinous New Thesaurus

Posted by Unpaid Arts Intern on Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 4:03 PM

posted by Arts Intern Matthew Vollono

Attention all writers, bloggers, pretentious ransom note composers, and anyone else looking to better their writing with esoteric words designed to make you look smart: the latest version of the Oxford American Writers Thesaurus, is the best edition of the book yet printed.

In addition to the usual grammatical hijinks, there's an introduction by Rick Moody, along with Word Notes (comments from contributing writers about word entries) by Erin McKean, Stephin Merritt, Zadie Smith, Simon Winchester, and Francine Prose (among others).

Besides being insightful, Word Notes have a unique way of bringing a writer's own thought process to the surface by way of their passion for the English language.

Take this entry from David Foster Wallace on the word "pulchritude":

“A paradoxical noun because it means beauty but is itself one of the ugliest words in the language. Same goes for the adjectival form pulchritudinous. They’re part of a tiny elite cadre of words that possess the very opposite of the qualities they denote. Diminutive, big, foreign, fancy (adjective), 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 things and very real things themselves.”

456d/1236896560-wallace_davi_foste_no-20000210039r.2.gif

illustration by David Levine

from the OUP Blog

 

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1
(My comment did not work.)

I always mistake "boon" for something bad. But I doubt that really qualifies as a paradoxical word.
Posted by ROM on March 13, 2009 at 10:40 AM · Report
2
Problems with the second edition of The Writer's Thesaurus begin with its cover tagline, "For the Writer in Everyone." The last thing the world needs is more writers, and to this end I have myself vowed to write much less if anything in 2009, right after this comment is posted. If this guidebook, published by Oxford University Press for a mere $40, is meant to help people compose their emails and write angry letters of rebuke to hedge fund manipulators and ponzi scammers, it will have served a purpose, but I fear that the intention of credited editrix Christine A. Lindberg is starry-eyed enthusiasm for freeing the Pulitzer Prize winner lurking in every coffee shop diarist and Lone Blogger. Problems with the book continue with Rick Moody's foreword, which in its jangly rhythms and aliterate diction, its catalog of cliches and its advertisements for itself, shows the author very much a non-beneficiary of the insights and guidelines found in the subsequent pages. The contrast with David Foster Wallace's Word Notes is telling. Elegantly composed, these notes by the late author show him surprisingly to be, or to have been, a prescriptivist grammarian. Anyway, once you get past page X of the front matter, the guidebook is great (a list of the Word Notes by Wallace and other contributors, which includes Bryan Garner, a lawyer who appears to have once lived in Portland [because many of the examples of bad grammar in his own usage guides are derived from the Oregonian and the Downtowner], begins on page XXII).
Posted by dkholm on March 14, 2009 at 10:37 AM · Report

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