Word: worded
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...continuing love of the word I am indeed grateful. At my present age I can recapture almost perfectly -- perhaps totally perfectly -- the emotion I felt when I first read certain pieces. I have just read again Whitman's threnody on the death of Abraham Lincoln...
...good as they used to be. What are my complaints, if I can call them that? I think the greatest handicap for me of being eighty-five is that I have lost my surefootedness. (I am surprised that the Shorter Oxford Dictionary does not have this word, but I was reassured to find it in Webster.) I do not now feel happy walking among the coarse hummocks of a grassy hill. I do not like walking in the dark at all. When I was a young student of seventeen or eighteen, I remember crossing the Umsindusi River near Pietermaritzburg...
...effort to convey complex ideas about literature, Calvino's most effective tools are mythology and visual imagery--what he calls icastic imagery, an archaic word in English, though common in Italian, from the Greek eikastikos, meaning "figurative...
WHEN Calvino chose the title of his essays, he considered but rejected the word "legacy." The word would have been more appropriate to Calvino's maturity and renown, and like the word "memo," it would have directed the essays towards the future. Furthermore, "legacy" would have been an admission that although Calvino's voice is bold and innovative, it is bound to this century; in post-2000 literature Calvino's voice may be influential, but it will not be able to solve problems that it could not foresee...
...problem with the word "legacy," though, is that legacies are not always useful. There may be regrets and emotional baggage, but great-grandfather's stamp collection eventually gets hocked. "Memo" is utilitarian and modest. No one expects a memo to be preserved out of pure sentiment, because a memo only aims to be helpful for what comes next. And his memos--subtle and insightful--will stick around, because they will remind future writers of what he and his contemporaries have discovered about fiction...