List No. 110

MIDWESTERNISMS

David Foster Wallace

1997

In April 2011, almost three years after his suicide, David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel, The Pale King – a sprawling, brilliant and often difficult work largely set in offices of the Internal Revenue Service in the Midwestern United States – was published. Research for the novel had begun long before, in 1997, the year after publication of his magnum opus, Infinite Jest, at which point it had a working title of Sir John Feelgood (“SJF”). One of Wallace’s first tasks had been to write, in his spiral notebook, this list of “Midwesternisms”.

– Pronouncing ‘theater’ like it had a y in it – theayter theyater

– Pronouncing ‘vehicle’ with a h – pronouncing the h in ‘vehicle’

– Solicism: ‘Itty-tiny.’ ‘An itty-tiny little man

– ‘Because you know why?’

– Preceding a question with ‘Question’: ‘Question. Why aren’t office supplies a revenue expenditure instead of an operating expense.’

Malaprops

– ‘The office encouraged them that whoever had a problem should…’

– ‘This stuff’s all been mulling around in my head.’

– ‘The more I keep [?], I realise how little I know.’

– ‘That irks my feelings.’

– ‘He would have made short work of me in a hurry.’

– ‘The thing is that I’m serious.’

– ‘It just got all scrabbled up in my head.’

– ‘Involved’ for ‘evolved.’ ‘And it involved into a bad situation.’

– ‘I had a circumstance happen.’

– ‘Whatnot.’ ‘and whatnot.’

– ‘Set’ for ‘sit.’ ‘Set down. Go on and set yourself down here.’

– Academic stutter (not a true stutter; the stutter of compression and density, the plosive a bottleneck – ‘The the the the radical discontent of business under the New Deal.’

– ‘Just let them get it under their belt and chew on it a while.’