In the blur of reading the last few days (the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the usual) I had come across the words “carapace” and “anhedonia” in the same piece. It was as if the Ghost of William F. Buckley, Jr., had made a visit. I’ll admit I looked each of them up, knowing I had done so a couple of dozens times before. Some vocab words just don’t stick.
The 2 $10-dollar words haunted me a bit, and I had a desire to go back to the piece to see again how they were used, but I couldn’t remember what article they were in. I had read too many pieces quickly, on the surface, reading, but not entirely paying attention. Some multitasking was going on.
Since we are at the end of the aughts, I need not be haunted. I googled “carapace” “anhedonia” and took a shot with “the New Yorker” and up popped the piece!
It’s Sarah Lyall’s article about the Tom Ford film with Colin Firth, A Single Man. (It’s in the NY Times, but it still came up with my search words.) I was so happy to find my bedeviling words. Is this the greatest age for literary geeks, or what.
The other thing that made me smile was a NY Times.com alert. I have the most general of the Times alerts on my office computer. It’s the very big general things: Sullie’s landing in the Hudson, the massacre in Mumbai, major moves on the prime interest rate, Michael Jackson dying, that sort of thing. They don’t overdo these. They are not daily, sometimes not even weekly, only when a major general news thing has happened.
And on Thursday, 12/10:
NYTimes.com News Alert: Notre Dame Hires Brian Kelly as New Coach
OMG. The Times considers changes in ND’s coaching staff to be of national import, worthy of a news alert. Surely my father is looking down on this from the heavens and smiling too.
1 comments:
...“carapace” and “anhedonia”... Words, are they not wonderful! One of the more enjoyable things is playing with them.
Long live slaughtered similes and mangled metaphors. Or as a T-shirt I just saw said "A pun at maturity is fully groan."
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