Now that Thanksgiving has come and gone, I guess you could say that the Christmas shopping season is well upon us. If you are a bibliophile like me, you likely wish for a few volumes under the tree. If you are shopping for a book lover this year, I have the perfect gift for you: “More Words That Make a Difference”–the follow-up volume to equallly irresistable book “Words That Make a Difference.” Like the earlier book, “More Words that Make a Difference” is a collection of wonderful and provocative words, complete with pronunciation guides and definitions. What makes each book different is that the definitions include a sample passage in which the author uses the carefully chose word. And these aren’t ordinary authors, or ordinary passages. “Words That Make a Difference” included samples from The New York Times; the latest book includes sample prose from some of the greatest writers featured in the pages of The Atlantic since it was established in 1857.
Written by Carol and Robert Greenman, each book contains a wonderful selection of words presented in their original passages. They must have taken some time to assemble. Here is a sample from “More Words That Make a Difference.”
mellifluous
sweet-sounding or smooth flowing: Latin, mel, honey+fluere, to flow
In Paris, where the sense of style is everywhere, so that one looks around for the one mind that planned it all, Hemingway achieved such an instinct for how words should sound and how a sentence should hang, that very often the “true sentence” pleased him because it was the mellifluous sentence, the artly balanced sentence. In time Hemingway became as fond of his sentences as a matador of his veronicas, and “true sentences” were too often a run of sentences chic and marvelously phrased, displays of his technique.
-Alfred Kazin, June 1964
Wow, what a sentence. And what a book. Find it here at Levenger.
