Wednesday, April 12, 2006
DFW on the OED
It is rather bittersweet catching one of your heroes in a youthful error. Witness the following sequence of quotes from David Foster Wallace:
"I'm an OED man, myself"- Hal Incandenza, Infinite Jest (1996)
"I have read the OED, but I have a vastly abridged version of the OED. I wouldn't say that I've read it all. When I was 13 I decided to try to get through it all and I got continuously up through K and then I began to skim."- Foster Wallace in Stim E-zine (1996)
"Listen: the OED is priceless. The only disadvantage it's got is that the entries are so interesting and chocked with subsidiary info that sometimes what was originally supposed to be a quick one-word dash to the dictionary becomes a two-hour perusal of cross-references and ramifications and etymologies and the sorts of illustrative sentences that make your saliva flow with sheer interest. "- Foster Wallace, quoted as an "Editorial Review" of the actual OED, on amazon.com (circa 2006)
To put it lightly, there is no "vastly abridged" OED. The Shorter Oxford is a dictionary (and in this author's opinion much inferior to Chambers), while the OED is the dictionary. It's hilarious that a famous sesquipedalian like Foster Wallace should have finished the mammoth Infinite Jest without having a copy of the OED to refer to, and that only now he has actually picked up a copy. I myself am shortly to become a published OUP author (Oxford Handbook of Clinical Crosscover, Aug 2006), and will be paid the princely sum of £250 in OUP vouchers. I intend to spend it immediately on a Compact OED, from which to refer while I complete my meisterwerk.
"If we had no faults of our own, we would not take so much pleasure in noticing those of others."- de La Rochefoucauld
"I'm an OED man, myself"- Hal Incandenza, Infinite Jest (1996)
"I have read the OED, but I have a vastly abridged version of the OED. I wouldn't say that I've read it all. When I was 13 I decided to try to get through it all and I got continuously up through K and then I began to skim."- Foster Wallace in Stim E-zine (1996)
"Listen: the OED is priceless. The only disadvantage it's got is that the entries are so interesting and chocked with subsidiary info that sometimes what was originally supposed to be a quick one-word dash to the dictionary becomes a two-hour perusal of cross-references and ramifications and etymologies and the sorts of illustrative sentences that make your saliva flow with sheer interest. "- Foster Wallace, quoted as an "Editorial Review" of the actual OED, on amazon.com (circa 2006)
To put it lightly, there is no "vastly abridged" OED. The Shorter Oxford is a dictionary (and in this author's opinion much inferior to Chambers), while the OED is the dictionary. It's hilarious that a famous sesquipedalian like Foster Wallace should have finished the mammoth Infinite Jest without having a copy of the OED to refer to, and that only now he has actually picked up a copy. I myself am shortly to become a published OUP author (Oxford Handbook of Clinical Crosscover, Aug 2006), and will be paid the princely sum of £250 in OUP vouchers. I intend to spend it immediately on a Compact OED, from which to refer while I complete my meisterwerk.
"If we had no faults of our own, we would not take so much pleasure in noticing those of others."- de La Rochefoucauld
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