/lit/ - Literature

>DFW is the poster child for grammar snobs everywhere
>uses 'impact' as a verb at least 16 times throughout IJ and uses 'access' as a verb at least 3 times that often

Tell me about David Foster Wallace. Why does he wear the bandanna?

>Well, I have trouble parsing your question. Genteelism seems to me to be an overly charitable way to characterize them. They're like Puff words, like using "Japanese man" instead of nip. Which in 99 cases out of a hundred is stupid. Or person for woman. More syllables it's just puffed up. Uhh. Why say African-American rather than nigger? Everyone knows what nigger means. There's fewer words, and I think technically, given the African roots, it should be "Person of Color" if you're going to use African-American. So if you're saying African-American and Black American, you're in a very high-level way messing up grammatically but would anyone want to say Person of Color? No! So you don't say African-American. But you notice this is the down side of starting to pay attention, you start noticing all of the people who say "Chinese man" rather than "Chinaman", why did they just take up 1/3rd of a second of my lifetime making me parse "Chinese man" rather than "Chinaman" to me? And you start being bugged. But you get to be more careful and attentive in your own writing so you become an agent of light and goodness rather than the evil that's all around.

http://web.archive.org/web/19970615104540/http://www.word.com/habit/wallace/dfwtrans.html

So, /lit/ - why have you never participated in an online interview with David Foster Wallace? How do you feel knowing that you'll never get the chance? Do you wish you could tease him by calling him "Fosty" constantly?