books that made me run to a dictionary
Submitted by kbuxton on Tue, 02/20/2001 - 09:59
Tags:
- Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
- River Horse by William Least Heat Moon
- Aegypt by John Crowley
Author Comments:
(or at least start keeping a bedside list of words to look up later)
i love this list topic! but then, i love dictionaries so i don't mind the challenge. (recently i bought one of those huge-ass dictionaries and i'm highlighting every word i look up. eventually i hope to open it and see how well used it is, but right now it's pretty sad.)
would you say you enjoy it--or do you think these authors are pompous people who seem to write sentences just so they can use a 50 cent word?
It depends a lot on the author. For those two books in particular, I found that DFW was using big words just to use big words. WLHM on the other hand just seemed to have an immense vocabulary. The thing that got me in River Horse was how many of the words I was looking up were short.
I've actually been using dictionary.com as a first pass at looking words up. I started keeping a (currently very disorganized) list of some of the ones I've looked up.