Hathos to you, too, bub

Over his many years as a critic, book/daddy has repeatedly heard two criticisms against him -- and against just about any practicing critic: You show off by using too many fancy words and you're a snob. Oh yes, and a third: You critics are always giving away the endings.

The latter charge is maddening and a hopeless one to respond to. My mother-in-law will ask me about a movie I've seen, and I'll start to describe it -- "It's about this guy, the world has ended and he's the only one left alive, or so he thinks and" -- just about then is when she's starts frantically waving her hands telling me I've already told her too much, while my wife is loudly shushing me, too. All that such people really want to hear is the answer to: "Should I see it (or read it)?" I had a friend who wouldn't even read the jacket copy of books before he finished them. How he ever decided to read anything was a mystery to me.

Yes, I've occasionally come across a review that irritated me by giving away too much, but in my experience, it's a relatively rare crime. Perhaps there are repeat offenders out there who seem to be pissing off the entire population, judging from the near-religious wrath this felony generates.

The second charge (snobbery) is levelled at just about anyone who passes judgment on works of art, so I simply shrug it off -- mostly, it means, we don't have the same taste.

But the first charge always puzzled me because at The Dallas Morning News, the editors and copy editors worked diligently to plane down our prose. The habit dies hard: In all that I've written in this post so far, "diligently" is about as difficult as it gets. When book/daddy did throw in a word that I suspected the editors would yelp about, a word I really felt was necessary, I would argue: Don't we want our readers to be better readers? To learn something? To fucking get up and look up the damned thing? I always did as a kid -- and often still do.

So for four years, that's what James Meek, author of the terrific novelThe People's Act of Love, did: looked up every word he came across that he didn't know.