Dave's CornerWords worth keeping.

THE STORY BEHIND THE CORNER

From a dictionary to a lifelong exercise.

In the recollection he shared for WordCraft, Dr. David McAuley had memorized the dictionary by the age of eighteen. For years afterward, its passages remained remarkably accessible to him. During college, his teachers were often surprised that he could respond to questions about a newly introduced topic by recalling something he had read in that original dictionary.

As the years passed, he developed a more playful way to keep that knowledge within reach. He wrote long passages filled with expressive words and their synonyms, sometimes describing an entirely fictitious situation and sometimes letting one deliberately discordant paragraph follow another. The point was not to produce a polished novel. It was to put familiar words back to work.

Dave's Corner carries that personal exercise into WordCraft. The stories below draw on the vocabulary, situations, and word associations in his original study notes. Each sentence pairs a highlighted term with several alternatives in parentheses, so a reader can compare meanings without constantly leaving the passage.

The biographical account above was supplied by Dr. McAuley for this section. The stories are new fictional adaptations, not accounts of actual people or events and not verbatim reproductions of the notes.