Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus

You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

Several years ago, I was a part of a team that put together the first edition of the Oxford American Writers’ Thesaurus.

Have you seen this, Martha?

Yeah, great volume. I didn’t know you were involved, though.

I was. I was responsible for working with the writers who contributed usage notes.

So there were…

Oh, my God, you’re a rock star.

No, you know, it was just an editor’s job.

Though I did get to work with poet David Lehman, the very garrulous and talkative Simon Winchester, Zadie Smith, and David Foster Wallace.

You got to work with them?

We had a big group meeting where we all sat around and talked about what was going to be in the thesaurus.

I’ve been looking at the second edition of this thesaurus because it’s still amusing to me to thumb through it and look for the word note signed DFW.

That’s David Foster Wallace.

And as you know, Dave recently died.

And if you go through there, you’ll see something special.

You’ll see what was so amazing about him.

For example, if you go to the entry for that, you’ll see that, of course, he includes a footnote and a usage note.

He wrote, it so happens that you can occupy a bright child for most of a very quiet morning by challenging her to use that five times in a row in a single coherent sentence.

And when I read things like that, I begin to understand that he understood what was important about language.

It is fun.

I should see more of this in usage guides.

I want less didactic pounding of heads against rocks, you know?

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

There’s another one at the entry for if, IF.

And notice, both of these are really ordinary words.

He hasn’t gone for the exceptional stuff.

He hasn’t gone for the FAQs.

He’s just gone for that and if.

But at IF he writes,

From experience born of repeated personal humiliation, I can tell you that there are two main ways to mess up with if and make your writing look weak.

He’s talking about his own humiliation.

How rare is it for someone to offer grammar advice in light of their own personal failures?

It’s almost nonexistent, right?

The world of grammar mavens is always about the grammar maven being invincible and perfect.

Not if you’re David Foster Wallace.

He understood that an entry point into understanding grammar and usage and language is to make sure that everyone understands that we all make mistakes, even the best and brightest like DFW.

How wonderful.

And that’s right there in a thesaurus.

Who would have thought that you could find that kind of stuff?

Exactly.

And it encourages me and actually makes me laugh just a little bit inside.

I think about the people who will use this thesaurus over the coming decades and will be influenced by him and his genius.

It’s very comforting.

Yeah.

What a loss.

Call us to tell us about someone who’s left behind an influence on you in terms of language,

About the way you understand words, the way you write and speak.

Maybe it was a writer or a teacher.

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