DFW, thesaurus entries

At davemadden.org, a brief guide to David Foster Wallace’s contributions to the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus . Wallace contributed a couple of dozen notes on usage to the OAWT, at least some of which are available in the Mac’s version of the thesaurus.

Now I’m wondering if Wallace might have had something to do with a very strange sample sentence in the OAWT : “I observed this wheelchair dude in the vestibule waiting for me.” Infinite Jest is filled with men, dangerous men, in wheelchairs. I’m thinking in particular of a scene in the novel in which Rémy Marathe, posing as a survey-taker, sits in a hotel hallway and knocks on a door. The only vestibules in IJ though are found at the Enfield Tennis Academy. Is this “wheelchair dude” waiting for Hal Incandenza?

The “wheelchair dude” has disappeared from the Mac’s OAWT but lives on in this 2010 post.

Related reading
All David Foster Wallace posts (via Pinboard)