No matter what else is conspiring against me—stupid deadlines, unrealistic expectations, idiotic drivers on the way to work—I count it a good day when I learn something new. And since I’m not all that smart, pretty much every day is a good day.
This morning I came across a new word in the Library of America’s anthology The Peanuts Papers. It’s from the late Umberto Eco’s essay “On Krazy Kat and Peanuts“:
Charlie Brown has been called the most sensitive child ever to appear in a comic strip, a figure capable of Shakespearean shifts of mood; and Schultz’s pencil succeeds in rendering these variations with an economy of means that has something miraculous about it. The text, almost always courtly (these children rarely lapse into slang or commit anacoluthon), is enhanced by drawings able to portray, in each character, the subtlest psychological nuance. Thus the daily tragedy of Charlie Brown is drawn, in our eyes, with exemplary incisiveness.
Anacoluthon. an-uh-kuh-LOO-thon. She’s a beaut, ain’t she?
