Comments on: David Foster Wallace’s Contribution to the Writer’s Thesaurus

By: Brooke

Brooke — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 01:18:31 +0000

Pedantic is itself pedantic

By: Alex

Alex — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 01:06:48 +0000

Adjectival is itself adjectival.

By: Brooke McQuale

Brooke McQuale — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 22:00:29 +0000

I believe I have an interesting situation which I had not experienced before and have not since. Quite some years ago my mother referred to one of our dogs (Henry, a rather portly Dachshund) as being a succubus. At the time I did not know the meaning of the word (although, at the time I did, taking, as one might comprehend the meaning of an unfamiliar word, by the context of the sentence (or, as in this case, the setting) it is found in). But, to be sure and after years of being told “to look it up” when asking the definition of a word, I proceeded to the nearest dictionary only to find that, according to it, my mother had grossly misused the word. When I reproached my mother (an English major and avid reader—which may actually explain why she used the word in the manner she did) informing her (with some amount of short-live schadenfreude) of the proper meaning of the word(Look it up!) to which she replied “Of course I know what the word means, I wasn’t using it that way, but merely meant that Henry looks like what succubus sounds like.” To me this is one of the finer examples of poetic license.

By: Maud Newton: Blog

Maud Newton: Blog — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 18:00:54 +0000

[...] month the OUP blog looked at a few other DFW [...]

By: Neil Fitzgerald

Neil Fitzgerald — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 09:41:54 +0000

An interesting post.

Surely we are here wandering into the classic lexical dichotomy of autological vs hereological – words that refer to themselves (tiny, pentasyllabic, seventeen-lettered) vs words that don’t refer to themselves – monosyllabic, huge, abbreviated.

All of which could bring us very neatly to the mindblowing Grelling–Nelson paradox:

“All adjectives, it would seem, must be either autological or heterological, for each adjective either describes itself, or it doesn’t. The Grelling–Nelson paradox arises when we consider the adjective “heterological.

Is “heterological” a heterological word? If the answer is ‘yes’, “heterological” is autological (leading to a contradiction). If the answer is ‘no’, “heterological” is heterological (again leading to a contradiction).”(SourceWikipedia)

By: roervimonal

roervimonal — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 22:04:49 +0000

montrocv