Paul Dickson
This is a bonus episode because it's not in the usual format--me talking to person A about person B. For this one, I'm going directly to the subject: the prolific non-fiction writer Paul Dickson. I've been aware of and admired Dickson's work for a long time, probably not long after he set out on his own as an independent, aka freelance, writer in 1968. In time I came to think of him as my doppelganger, or me as his doppelganger, as I ended up hanging out my own shingle and writing about some of the same things he did, though nowhere near as prolifically: language, baseball, American history.
All told, he has produced more than 60 non-fiction books and countless newspaper and magazine articles. The Washington Post called him "a one-man book factory" and Public Libraries magazine commented, "Paul Dickson could be called the Energizer bunny of authors …One of the amazing attributes of this prolific writer is that he can't be pigeonholed: his subject matter is always changing."
A few of his recent books, all published within the past dozen years:
All told, he has produced more than 60 non-fiction books and countless newspaper and magazine articles. The Washington Post called him "a one-man book factory" and Public Libraries magazine commented, "Paul Dickson could be called the Energizer bunny of authors …One of the amazing attributes of this prolific writer is that he can't be pigeonholed: his subject matter is always changing."
A few of his recent books, all published within the past dozen years:
- "Words from the White House: Words and Phrases Created by Presidents of the United States"
- "The Official Rules: 5,427 Laws, Principles, and Axioms to Help You Cope with Crises, Deadlines, Bad Luck, Rude Behavior, Red Tape, and Attacks by Inanimate Objects"
- "Contraband Cocktails--How America Drank When it Wasn't Supposed To"
- "The Hidden Language of Baseball" (Expanded and Revised Edition)
- His newest book is "The Rise of the G.I. Army 1940-1941," the story of how the American Army was mobilized from scattered outposts two years before Pearl Harbor into the disciplined and mobile fighting force.
Paul Dickson's website.
A final note for language nerds like Paul and me: At one point in the episode we discuss "elegant variation"--H.W. Fowler's dismissive term for creating an elaborate synonym to avoid word repetition. I mention that I made up an example to illustrate the practice--a baseball writer calling a second baseman "the fleet-footed second sacker" on second reference. And that I once Googled "fleet-footed second sacker" (in quotation marks) and found an actual use of the phrase back in the 1920s. (It was actually 1917, in the Athens [Georgia] Banner.) Well, I just repeated the exercise and found three additional uses of the phrase in newspapers, the most recent in 1961. Try it yourself!
A final note for language nerds like Paul and me: At one point in the episode we discuss "elegant variation"--H.W. Fowler's dismissive term for creating an elaborate synonym to avoid word repetition. I mention that I made up an example to illustrate the practice--a baseball writer calling a second baseman "the fleet-footed second sacker" on second reference. And that I once Googled "fleet-footed second sacker" (in quotation marks) and found an actual use of the phrase back in the 1920s. (It was actually 1917, in the Athens [Georgia] Banner.) Well, I just repeated the exercise and found three additional uses of the phrase in newspapers, the most recent in 1961. Try it yourself!
