One of the final writing projects David Foster Wallace completed before his untimely death last month was a set of digressive notes to the second edition of the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus (to which he was one of nearly a dozen contributors). In one note, he explains why feckless is “a totally great adjective”:
“The great thing about using feckless is that it lets you be extremely dismissive and mean without sounding mean; you just sound witty and classy. The word’s also fun to use because of the soft-e assonance and the k sound—and the triply assonant noun form is even more fun.”
He also explains how the verb form of privilege is “currently used only in a particular English subdialect that might be called academese,” on which he elaborates: “There’s pretty much only one rhetorical situation in which you’d want to use… pretty much any transitivized-verb construction that’s three times longer than it needs to be—this is in a university course taught by a professor so thoroughly cloistered, insecure, or stupid as to believe that academese constitutes intelligent writing.” And, he warns us, “mucous, an adjective, is not synonymous with the noun mucus. It’s worth noting this not only because the two words are fun but because so many people don’t know the difference.”
It’s playfully erudite moments like these that made Wallace such a delight to read; he will be missed. His friends and literary peers, and publishing colleagues, will remember him this afternoon in a memorial service at the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts—the 4 p.m. service is open to the public.