David Wallace - Both Flesh and Not - Essays

Focus Focus is now the noun of choice for expressing what people used to mean by concentration (“Sampras’s on-court focus was phenomenal”) and priority (“Our focus is on serving the needs of our customers”). As an adj., it seems often to serve as an approving synonym for driven or monomaniacal: “He’s the most focused warehouse manager we’ve ever had.” As a verb, it seems isomorphic with the older to concentrate: “Focus, people!”; “The Democrats hope that the campaign will focus on the economy”; “We need to focus on finding solutions instead of blaming each other,” etc. W/r/t those last two sample sentences, notice how the verb to focus on can take as its object either a thing-noun (“economy”) or a gerund (“finding”), and how its meaning and grammatical structure are slightly different in the two cases. With a noun, to focus on means “to concentrate attention or effort on,” i.e., the direct object is built right into the verb phrase; but with a gerund it means “to direct toward a particular goal”—there’s always a direct object like “attention/efforts/energies” that’s suppressed but understood, and the gerund actually functions as an indirect object. Given the speed with which to focus has supplanted to concentrate, it’s a little surprising that nobody objects to its somewhat jargony New Age feel — but nobody seems to. Maybe it’s because the word is only one of many film and drama terms that have entered mainstream usage in the last decade, e.g., to foreground (= to feature, to give top priority to); to background (= to downplay, to relegate to the back burner); scenario (= an outline of some hypothetical sequence of events), and so on.

Impossibly This is one of those adverbs that’s formed from an adjective and can modify only adjectives, never verbs. Modifying adjectives with these sorts of adverbs— impossibly fast, extraordinarily yummy, irreducibly complex, unbelievably obnoxious —is a hypereducated speech tic that translates well to writing. Not only can the adverbs be as colorful/funny/snarky as you like, but the device is a quick way to up the formality of your prose without sacrificing personality — it makes whoever’s narrating sound like an actual person, albeit a classy one. The big caveat is that you can’t use these special-adv.-with-adj. constructions more than once every few sentences or your prose starts to look like it’s trying too hard.

Individual As a noun, this word has one legitimate use, which is to distinguish a single person from some larger group: “One of the enduring oppositions of British literature is that between the individual and society”; “She’s a real individual.” It is not a synonym for person despite the fact that much legal, bureaucratic, and public-statement prose uses it that way — which is to say that it looms large in turgid crap like “Law-enforcement personnel apprehended the individual as he was attempting to exit the premises.” Individual for person and an individual for someone are pretentious, deadening puff-words. (For more on puff-words, please see the note at utilize .)

Fervent A beautiful and expressive word that combines the phonological charms of verve and fever . Lots of writers, though, think fervent is synonymous with fervid, and most dictionary defs. don’t do much to disabuse them. The truth is that there’s a hierarchical trio of zeal-type adjectives, all with roots in the Latin verb ferv re (= to boil). Even though fervent can also mean extremely hot, glowing (as in “Fingering his ascot, Aubrey gazed abstractedly at the brazier’s fervent coals”), it’s actually just the baseline term; fervent is basically synonymous with ardent. Fervid is the next level up; it connotes even more passion/devotion/eagerness than fervent . At the top is perfervid, which means extravagantly, rabidly, uncontrollably zealous or impassioned. Perfervid deserves to be used more, not only for its internal alliteration and metrical pizzazz but because its deployment usually shows that the writer knows the differences between the three ferv re words.

Loan If you use loan as a verb in anything other than ultra-informal speech, you’re marking yourself as ignorant or careless. As of 2004, the verb to lend never comes off as fussy or pretentious, merely as correct.

Feckless A totally great adjective. One reason that slippage in the meaning of effete is OK is that we can use feckless to express what effete used to mean. Feckless primarily means deficient in efficacy, i.e., lacking vigor or determination, feeble; but it can also mean careless, profligate, irresponsible. It appears most often now in connection with wastoid youths, bloated bureaucracies — anyone who’s culpable for his own haplessness. The great thing about using feckless is that it lets you be extremely dismissive and mean without sounding mean; you just sound witty and classy. The word’s also fun to read because of the soft- e assonance and the k sound — the triply assonant noun form is even more fun.

All of Other than as an ironic idiom for “no more than” (e.g., “Sex with Edgar lasted all of a minute”), does all of have any legit uses? The answer is both complicated and personally humbling. An irksome habit of many student writers is automatically to stick an of between the adjective all and any noun that follows—“All of the firemen slid down the pole,” “She sent cards to all of her friends”—and I have spent a decade telling undergrads to abjure this habit, for two reasons. The first is that an excess of of ’s is one of the surest signs of flabby or maladroit writing, and the second is that the usage is often wrong. I have promulgated the following rule: Except for the ironic-idiom case, the only time it’s correct to use all of is when the adj. phrase is followed by a pronoun—“All of them got cards”; “I wanted Edgar to have all of me”—unless, however, the relevant pronoun is possessive, in which case you must again omit the of, as in “All my friends despise Edgar.” Only a few weeks ago did I learn (from a bright student who got annoyed enough at my hectoring to start poring over usage guides in the hopes of finding something I’d been wrong about that she could raise her hand at just the right moment in class and embarrass me with [which she did, and I was, and deserved it — there’s nothing more ridiculous than a pedant who’s wrong]), however, that there’s actually one more complication to the first part of the rule. With all plus a noun, it turns out that the medial of is required if that noun is possessive, as in “All of Edgar’s problems stem from his childhood,” “All of Dave’s bombast came back to haunt him that day.” I doubt I will ever forget this.

Bland Here’s an adj. that the dictionaries are behind on. Bland was originally used of people to mean “suave, smooth, unperturbed, soothingly pleasing” (cf. blandish, blandishment ), and of things to mean “soft, mild, pleasantly soothing, etc.” Only incidentally did it mean “dull, insipid, flavorless.” As of 2004, though, bland nearly always has a pejorative tinge. Outside of one special semi-medical idiom (“The ulcerous CEO was placed on a bland diet”), bland now tends to imply that whatever’s described was trying to be more interesting, piquant, stirring, forceful, magnetic, or engaging than it actually ended up being.