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| | Review: Transcendental Wordplay |
 | | Forging an idiom to sustain his undying voice was the culmination of Thoreau's "ascetic heroism against dirt, disease, and death." Viewing language as "the mode of man's immortality," Thoreau would re-create American English, extending its resonance with an extraordinary seasoning of etymological joking. |
 | | Joining Thoreau in the lineup are Emerson (the "gentle twists" in his prose were "not quite puns in themselves but akin to satiric wit"), Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, and Dickinson, with cameos by Poe as well as Irving, Cooper, and others. |
 | | Even more pages are dedicated to the minor philologist-pedagogues who flooded early-nineteenth century America with competing spellers, grammars, dictionaries, thesauri, joke books, lexicons, "synonymies," etymologies, and modest proposals to remake the mother tongue or invent a new one. |
| www.calliope.org /thoreau/westrvw.html (736 words) |
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