David Foster Wallace is in your Mac's thesaurus

I just love this: Over at his blog, the writer Dave Madden points out the “word notes” in your Mac’s thesaurus which were written by David Foster Wallace. Some of them are quite hidden! For example, look up the word “beauty” in the Dictionary app, click on the “Thesaurus” button at the top, and you’ll find this “Word Note”:

pulchritude. A paradoxical noun because it means beauty but is itself one of the ugliest words in the language. Same goes for the adjectival form pulchritudinous. They’re part of a tiny elite cadre of words that possess the very opposite of the qualities they denote. Diminutive, big, foreign, fancy (adjective), colloquialism, and monosyllabic are some others; there are at least a dozen more. Inviting your school-age kids to list as many paradoxical words as they can is a neat way to deepen their relationship to English and help them see that words are both symbols for things and very real things themselves. —DFW

It turns out that the Mac’s thesaurus program is actually the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus—a reference book featuring idiosyncratic annotations by a number of famous writers and word-people, including David Auburn, Michael Dirda, David Lehman, Stephin Merritt, Francine Prose, Zadie Smith, Jean Strouse, David Foster Wallace, Simon Winchester and the Globe’s own Erin McKean. Here’s David Auburn’s entry on “pulchritude” (it’s filed elsewhere, under “sex appeal”):

pulchritude. While very useful as a synonym for sex appeal, it shouldn’t be understood to mean sexy in the manner of the modern desiccated zombie-eyed runway model. Indeed, it stands as a rebuke to that contemporary beauty standard, evoking as it does the plush, statuesque overabundance associated with Broadway chorines of an earlier era. As a bonus you also catch a whiff of the trying-to-be-euphemistic-but-still-vulgar vaudeville patrons ogling them.

Head on over to Madden’s blog for a list of the rest of DFW’s entries.