DFW was a logophile; he collected old dictionaries and made a point to use exotic words in his writing. Why? Maybe because he liked the way they nettled on the mental tongue. Maybe because uncommon words' meangings are less watered down or muffled than common words. It’s a choice between the scalpel and the butter knife: both can do the jobs knives do, but one is sharper, more knife-ish, less trowel-like. The irony, of course, is that using those ‘scalpels’ makes DFW harder for most people to understand because they’re so unfamiliar.
I've also considered DFW's language choices in this way:
A person’s vocabulary is like a cave system. Every word is a room in that cave. The different definitions/conotations each word can represent are the stalactites, stalagmites, etc. One definition of the word "condone" is “to excuse”; a second is “to give tacit approval to” (Then there is the scenario where a band half-heartedly says they do not condone their fans' mosh pit and then play music that is very clearly meant to inspire more moshing). In the Condone Room of my Word Caves, the “tacit approval” definition might be a huge stalactite in the middle of the room while “excuse” is a smaller one in a corner of the room. In your Condone Room, it might be reversed. We both know both definitions of the word, but we may differ on which is more prominent. This creates potential for misunderstanding. When I say condone, I may be meaning (grammar?) “excuse.” When you hear me say condone, however, you may hear “tacit approval.” Usually, that’s not such a big difference, but it matters to DFW, I think, because that misunderstanding is part of the loneliness he’s writing about, part of the missed connections that this book deals with. Every effort we make to express ourselves to other people is prone to one species of misunderstanding or another.
But there’s another level of loneliness here. Pretend for a moment that we each have the “excuse” definition front and center in our respective Condone Rooms so that when you hear me say “condone,” we’re largely on the same page. Even then, there is variance in our understandings of “excuse” which we can represent by two stalactites’ unique shapes. The size and texture of “excuse” is different for you and I because of our different experiences and the way we’ve interpreted those experiences. To draw out the Word Cave metaphor further, imagine that our caves are made of different types of rock. I pick limestone. You can pick whatever. Because we have different rock types (different genes, experiences, and brain chemical firings) our Word Caves and the rock formations inside of them have developed differently. So even when we think we’re seeing and understanding and hearing the same stuff, we’re not. The difference is probably not too large in most instances, but there is a difference.
Consider ‘consequence.’ What does our generation know about consequence in comparison with our grandparents and parents? We have a million innovations that make it possible to live an insulated and- relative to those generations- less consequence-ridden life. We don’t have to plan ahead or think about the weight of consequences nearly as much as previous generations did because ours is such an instantaneous society. Don’t want a pregnancy but want the orgasms? BC or The Morning After Pill! Have a paper due next week? Cut and Paste! Lonely? Call a friend right now! Step on a nail? Tetanus shot!
Finally, all that might amount to a bunch of bupkiss; I'm vaguely familiar with Wittgenstein and DFW's feelings towards Wittgenstein's thoughts on what words are. Broom of the System plays with the Big W a bit and so does an essay in Consider the Lobster concerning language use. Someone with more confidence in their knowledge of this aspect of DFWs personal philosophy, please clear up whatever confusions I may have created here.
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