The Will Leitch Experience

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Words Invented By David Foster Wallace’s Mom

D. T. Max’s highly anticipated Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (public library) is out this week, and though it lacks the captivating prose of a great biography, it has a certain encyclopedic quality that is sure to galvanize DFW fanatics.

 I was delighted to find among the Max’s factlets one about words invented by Wallace’s mother, an English professor, which went on to permeate DFW’s own writing:

No one else listened to David as his mother did. She was smart and funny, easy to confide in, and included him in her love of words. Even in later years, and in the midst of his struggle with the legacy of his childhood, he would always speak with affection of the passion for words and grammar she had given him. If there was no word for a thing, Sally Wallace would invent it: ‘greebles’ meant little bits of lint, especially those that feet brought into bed; ‘twanger’ was the word for something whose name you didn’t know or couldn’t remember. She loved the word ‘fantods,’ meaning a feeling of deep fear or repulsion, and talked of ‘the howling fantods,’ this fear intensified. These words, like much of his childhood, would wind up in Wallace’s work.

And, indeed, it did. From Infinite Jest:

Orin’s special conscious horror, besides heights and the early morning, is roaches. There’d been parts of metro Boston near the Bay he’d refused to go to, as a child. Roaches give him the howling fantods.

Read more. [Image: Wikimedia Commons]

I am proud to report that my old friend and Daily Illini colleague Mike Cetera — who turns 37 today, by the way — has used “Howling Fantods” as his fantasy football name for several years now. Our fantasy league is MORE LITERARY THAN YOURS.