The World Beyond BetterMost > The Culture Tent
In the New Yorker...
Jeff Wrangler:
--- Quote from: Front-Ranger on March 10, 2015, 02:02:15 pm ---Well, I bet that made your day! Guess it's time for you to start writing 25,000-word articles on the most arcane of subjects!
--- End quote ---
If I do, will they give me a teaching job at Princeton? ;D
serious crayons:
--- Quote from: Jeff Wrangler on March 10, 2015, 01:36:40 pm ---Good God! GOOD GOD! I CANNOT believe this!
I just started John McPhee's latest piece on writing (March 9 issue), and I am shocked, SHOCKED, to learn that as late as the year 2000, John McPhee--JOHN McPHEE--did not know the word sprezzatura.
--- End quote ---
I was surprised by that, too. But then, my theory is that everybody has surprising little gaps in their knowledge (I knew a Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist who once asked whether Mark Twain wrote Huck Finn, or the other way around.)
So what was even more surprising is that McPhee asked a bunch of other people who didn't know, either. It's not THAT arcane a word.
Plus, why rely on asking random people? Why not go to a dictionary or, in the year 2000, the internet?
Jeff Wrangler:
--- Quote from: serious crayons on March 10, 2015, 02:36:07 pm ---I was surprised by that, too. But then, my theory is that everybody has surprising little gaps in their knowledge (I knew a Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist who once asked whether Mark Twain wrote Huck Finn, or the other way around.)
--- End quote ---
That's kind of surprising, too.
--- Quote ---So what was even more surprising is that McPhee asked a bunch of other people who didn't know, either. It's not THAT arcane a word.
Plus, why rely on asking random people? Why not go to a dictionary or, in the year 2000, the internet?
--- End quote ---
He says he did check a dictionary, Webster's unabridged New International Dictionary, 2nd ed. As for the Internet, I suppose 15 years ago a lot of people, including middle-aged college professors who are noted writers, weren't as Internet savvy then as they are now. But you'd think somebody in the library at Princeton could have found a definition for him, if he'd asked.
Anyway, I'm looking forward to reading the rest of the article. I'll probably even read the fiction in this issue, since it's by Stephen King.
Front-Ranger:
I didn't know what the word eponymous meant for the longest time. I would come upon it every once in a while and think "I must look up that word" but I didn't have the time for some reason. Then, when I finally did, it was a letdown that such an important sounding word simply meant "of the same name." Now, I have to go look up cynosure. I used to know what it meant but I forgot. Okay, it means "a person or thing that attracts a lot of attention."
Jeff Wrangler:
Penultimate used to confuse me. It sounds to me like it ought to mean "the last," but it actually means "the next to the last."
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