FROWSY!

I got two interesting books Wednesday, one on loan and one for keepsies, that I'm really excited about.

One of my favorite classmates, Jeff, handed me The Word Finder, something he calls "his nerdiest English major possession." It was given to him by an old retired English teacher from his high school who keeps tabs on the school's students, even though he doesn't teach in the classroom anymore. He decided that Jeff was one of those students who would do something with English and bestowed upon him this book and another called, I believe, Great Ideas.

The Word Finder is weird. The Preface says, "What is The Word Finder? Is it a new kind of thesaurus? The answer is emphatically 'no!'" It's an adjective-finder. Say I'm trying to think of a modifier for the word corpse, which I swear is the first page I opened to just now, I would look it up using the convenient alphabet side tabs and find

adjectives
poor; little; galvanized; sundried; good-looking; bleeding; dripping; handsome; desiccated; mangled; unrecovered; mutilated; disfigured; peaceful; lovely; charred; shriven; bloated.

verbs
animate--; attend--; bear--; bury--; collect--s; desert--; destroy--; discover--; disinter--; dismember--; dispose of--; drag for--; exhume--; grapple for--; hide--; hunt--; identify--; inter--; lament--; lay out--; mourn--; preserve--; recognize--; regard--; restore--; strew with--s; stumble on--; trip over--; view--; --decays; --decomposes; --disintegrates; --putrefies.
(See remains, carcass.)

It's just as fascinating to look at what modifiers get printed as it is to think about those that don't. Corpse is perhaps a distracting example because I find myself tripping over "trip over--" and "--putrefies," but looking up woman I find, just selecting a random row, "frightened; fruitful; frigid; frowsy; full-blossomed." What the hell! My eyes are also jumping down to "home-making." Jerks!

... Whatever. The guy who wrote the intro's named Dr. Edward J. Fluck. So whatever you say Dr. Fuck...

The other book is called Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. And I haven't read any of it yet, but I like the pictures. Most likely, more to come on that later.