Write What You Know

David Foster Wallace is this fancy-pants young literary head. He writes interesting, perspective-bending fiction, full of words we don't know. And he also writes about sports, I guess.

In the recent New York Times PLAY magazine he was writing about Roger Federer. He's making some point about how what Federer does can only be described as beautiful. And Wallace thinks this is a big deal, what he is doing describing Federer this way, because we only use the figurative language from the battlefield to describe sports. But, insists Wallace, it really is beautiful, no matter how strange it may seem to describe a sport that way.

It is amazing that, with the World Cup still fresh in our memories, David Foster Wallace is apparently unaware that the world's most popular sport (by a healthy margin) is, in fact, the "Beautiful Game." It was hard to miss Nike's huge "play beautiful" ad campaign this past summer.

The moral of the story: when you know words like "anneal" it doesn't matter what point you're making with them.