>SUPERVERBOSE

The last chapter of The House At Pooh Corner begins, "Christopher Robin was going away." In it, the animals in the Hundred Acre Wood throw Christopher Robin a going-away party, and when it's over, he and Pooh find an enchanted place in the forest, a circle of trees where "they could see the whole world spread out until it reached the sky." The boy, who is going away to boarding school, discusses all the things he's learning, and the bear dimly tries to keep up. The boy, who loves to do Nothing, wistfully says that he won't be doing Nothing as much anymore. "They don't let you," he says. He asks Pooh never to forget him, and hopes that whatever happens, Pooh will understand. But Pooh, of course, doesn't understand what he's supposed to understand. It ends:

So they went off together. But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on top of the Forest, a little boy and his Bear will always be playing.

( I can't get through this chapter without crying. )

Kristen Wiig plays a recurring character on Saturday Night Live named Judy Grimes, whose schtick is that she's a travel expert, but gets much too nervous on air to give any travel tips. Instead, she just keeps negating herself, making a statement and then saying, "just kidding." As the sketch winds up, she eventually dives into some rapid-fire, bravura, all-in-one-breath monologue along these lines:

I'm fine. Besides, I... can't come back another time because I'm too busy -- just kidding, I'm not busy -- just kidding, I am but I don't have any time for you -- just kidding, I don't know how to make time -- just kidding, but I know how to make pies -- just kidding, I don't -- just kidding, I do, and I'll make one right now -- just kidding, I can't, because I don't have a pan -- just kidding, I do, but I gotta buy sugar -- just kidding, I have what I need, but I don't have a stove -- just kidding, there's a stove under here, it's hot -- ouch! -- just kidding, there's no stove under here, there's one at my house, let's go there right now -- just kidding, we can't all go together, it's hard to travel in a group -- just kidding, we can't do it because my car's not big enough -- just kidding, we're in right now, this whole studio's my car -- just kidding, it isn't -- just kidding, it is -- beep, beep! Get out of my way! -- just kidding, we're not in my car -- just kidding, I wrecked my car -- just kidding, I ran into a tree -- just kidding, it was a bush -- just kidding, it was a man, he was very upset -- just kidding, he laughed -- just kidding, he died -- just kidding, it was a dream -- just kidding, it wasn't a dream, it was a movie I rented -- just kidding, I bought it, and now I regret it, it wasn't very good -- just kidding, it was okay -- just kidding!

This is exactly the narrative structure of David Lapham's Young Liars. Oh, it starts out coherent enough. There's a great premise -- a guy in love with a girl who has a bullet in her brain, which makes her utterly fearless, obedient but unpredictable, and constantly in danger of death. There's a bevy of fun supporting characters. There's a breathless, rock & roll aesthetic, which veers from extremes of violence to heartbreaking tenderness. There's a bunch of compelling, plotty twists and turns, intriguing flashbacks, and dark foreshadowing, with a killer climax at the end of issue #6.

Unfortunately, it then goes on for 12 more issues.

In those issues, Lapham breaks down everything he's built up over the first six to replace it with something else. And then he does it again. And again. And again. Oh, the next part of the story is Sadie's coma dream. Just kidding, it's real and she's an alien from Mars. Just kidding, a different character is the alien. Just kidding, the narrator is a schizophrenic. Just kidding, he's sane but he's being manipulated by a conspiracy. Just kidding, the conspiracy is the aliens. Just kidding, the aliens are taking over the conspiracy. Just kidding, the aliens are just a metaphor for corporate takeover. Just kidding, the narrator is a liar. Just kidding, everybody's a liar. Just kidding, this is all stories told by a psychotic washed-up rock star. Just kidding. Just kidding. Just kidding. The first time one of these shifts happens, it's intriguing. Then it's shocking and enthralling. Then it's confusing. Then irritating. Then maddening. Then really, really boring.

I read all 18 issues of Young Liars in one day. Stray Bullets made me a fan of Lapham, so I decided to subscribe to YL, but my time is highly circumscribed, so the series started and ended before I began reading it. What this experience crystallized for me is that I deeply dislike this narrative structure. Don't get me wrong -- I dig some reality-bending in a story. It's a great spice. What I do not dig is when the story's basic reality gets fractured so often or so severely that I no longer know what the story's basic reality even is anymore. If I go long enough with no idea what is real, it turns out I really no longer care what is real, and the whole thing gets much less interesting. Plus, I completely lose faith that interesting plot danglers from early on are going to be paid off in any coherent way.

I read a great dissection of Heroes, which very accurately described it as a narrative Ponzi scheme, constantly borrowing from the future to disguise the fact that it's actually based on nothing. This is Young Liars' problem as well. Between this, the disappointing run on Detective Comics, and the indefinite cessation of Stray Bullets (along with my vanished faith that that series will ever draw its strands together), I think I'm done with David Lapham now. He's a fantastic stylist, but it turns out I'm only impressed by that when it's paired with good storytelling.

This is something I sent out at work, and it got a good enough reception that I decided to post it here as well. We're in the midst of a massive project at CU, replacing the student system and a bunch of peripheral systems with Oracle PeopleSoft products. There is a lot of pressure, a lot of intensity... and a lot of status reporting. Some of that, especially as it travels up the chain, takes on a glossy, nonspecific quality. In talking about it with Laura, we were reminded of another place where that kind of status reporting happens...

---

My ESPN-loving spouse started this train rolling, and it became unstoppable. Now I just have to write it all down. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you:

Project Status Report, consisting entirely of clichés from sports interviews. (With substitutions, where appropriate.)

• It is what it is.
  
• There were factors beyond my control.
  
• We came to code, but I'm not gonna lie, it's been a tough match so far.
  
• This time around, the software problems just wanted it more.
  
• But I'm just gonna settle down, focus on doing my best. I can only control myself, you know what I mean? I'm gonna step up, and from this point forward, I'm just gonna focus on my game. I mean, work. That's what matters, sticking with my guys, doing my work. I'm gonna do everything I can to get this project to the Superbowl. I mean, completion.
  
• I'm a team player. It's not about me, it's about the whole team. We have to pull together.
  
• It's been tough out there, but we'll get our game back. It's still early in the project. We've got a lot of go-lives after this one, and we're just gonna take it one go-live at a time. We've still got a long timeline ahead of us. We're not circling any go-live on the calendar. Every go-live is important.
  
• Replacing student systems is a professional business, you've gotta understand that. Stuff that happens out there, it's not personal.
  
• It's easy to see the things that went wrong in this go-live, but there were things that went right. Anyway, this go-live is not over. We're gonna get back out there and give it our best, stay focused, and take it to the next level.
  
• We're gonna get back into the office next week, practice the things we need to practice, take another look at the PeopleBooks, and keep working hard.
  
• I'm only thinking about the next go-live on the schedule. It's not about momentum -- the project happens one go-live at a time.
  
• I'm just glad to be here. I want to help the project any way I can.
  

Early in my Buffy-watching project, I swore off both DVD extras and Television Without Pity recaps, because they were just way too spoiler-laden. Now that I've finished watching all episodes of Buffy and Angel, I'm (slowly!) going back through the whole saga, reading the recaps and watching the extras.

I just finished season three of Buffy for the second time, and am amazed anew. What a marvelous achievement. It's just such great television, and this time through I found myself appreciating a couple of things that had passed me by the first time:

( Here begin the spoilers )

I became an Etta James fan in kind of a backwards way. Being quite the dedicated Eurythmics fan back in the 80's, I even paid attention to their quirky little side projects. One of these was the soundtrack for a 1989 movie called Rooftops, which I never saw but was apparently fairly awful. Dave Stewart did some songs for it, and one of these was a track called "Avenue D", on which Etta was the vocalist. I didn't really know who she was, aside from the fact that I recognized her name and knew she'd been around a while. I did read a little article saying something like, "Dave Stewart does his best work when paired with a soulful singer, and James certainly fills the bill." I was at NYU at the time -- I actually remember listening to the 45 at Tower Records, liking the song, and buying it. I really dug her performance on that song. I looked into her a little more (which in those pre-Internet days meant just paying attention to what records of hers were in the stores), and found that she had done a comeback album the previous year called Seven Year Itch. A friend and I split the cost of the cassette, and I really liked that too. I bought her next couple of records, then lost track of her for a while.

10 years or so later, I became conscious of "At Last", again in a backwards way -- Stevie did a cover of it at a benefit concert where everybody sang standards. I fell in love with the song then, and heard Etta's version later in the movie Pleasantville, and loved it again. Still, I never got around to pursuing her further, until this past Christmas, when I put The Essential Etta James on my Amazon wish list, and received it. I'd been listening to it a lot in the car when I heard that she was coming to Boulder in concert. I decided that I needed to go, and I found a fantastic ticket online: 2nd row aisle seat.

( Peculiarity ensues )

I've just seen Watchmen again, this time in IMAX, and now I think I'm ready to write about it. There are a number of people (say, for example, Adam) who found the Watchmen graphic novel to be one of the best things ever. I do not fall into this group. Don't get me wrong -- I love Alan Moore, and I liked the book very much, but I didn't find it overwhelmingly compelling and revelatory in the way that some people do. To me it felt like a good, well-written story that resisted superhero clichés in some interesting ways. A solid B or B+.

Now, I think there were a couple of things working against me at the time I read it. One was the fact that I read it in the mid-90s rather than the mid-80s. By that time, various aspects of it had been frequently imitated in various ways, and what was revolutionary and groundbreaking about it no longer seemed so.

Laura has a story about being assigned Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler in a college class, and complaining to the professor, "These guys write in such a clichéd style, it's driving me crazy!" To which her professor of course replied, "No, no, see, these guys invented this style. It was their thousands of imitators who turned it into a cliché." Well, I had a bit of the Hammett/Chandler effect going when I read Watchmen, even though intellectually I understood that Moore was the originator. His ideas just couldn't have the same impact on me that they would have had if I'd read them first.

My other disadvantage is the fact that the book is so highly and universally praised. Reading something after hearing bunches of people call it The Most Awesome Thing Ever I Mean Ever can hardly help but be a slightly disappointing experience. It's the expectation theory.

Well, having read quite a bit of the press around the movie and how it compares to the book, I think it's safe to say that I missed entire layers of that book in my first reading. I'd really love to reread the graphic novel, perhaps with some kind of Annotated Watchmen alongside it. (Okay Watchmen book, go stand over there in the line marked "to read." Yes, I know there are 112 books in the line. Hey, I pick randomly from the group, so maybe you'll get lucky.) Like the book, I think the movie benefits from repeated viewings. I know I was catching things this time around that completely passed me by on the first viewing. However, my overall opinion remains the same, which is that it is a very enjoyable superhero movie, with a great story, some excellent writing, magnificent visuals, and a couple of sublime performances, but it is also significantly flawed in certain ways.

( From here, it gets a little spoilery )

I'm feelng a weird kind of grief today, because the Rocky Mountain News just closed. It was both sudden and not sudden. The writing had been on the wall for a long time. There are conflicting stories about the reason, or rather reasons. There's the economy, of course. There's Craigslist, which has drained millions away from classified ads by offering a better product, for free. Newspapers all over the country are struggling for those reasons. Denver had some peculiar circumstances alongside these. It was one of the last non- consolidated newspaper towns. I remember when I was taking media classes at NYU in 1988, even then the prof was saying that the vast majority of major cities had only one newspaper, or multiple newspapers owned by the same conglomerate. Denver was the exception back then, and remained so until 2001, when the RMN and the Denver Post consolidated. Now, things have contracted further, and the News has died. Scripps, its corporate owner, tried to find a buyer for it, but the smart money is not buying newspapers these days. A good summary of the reasons for the paper's demise is here. (I'd recommend against reading the comments. Actually, that holds true for almost everything on the Internet.)

The sudden part was that the closing was announced on Thursday night, and the final edition of the paper was on Friday. Just like that. That final edition had lots of good stuff about the Rocky's history (it was just short of its 150th birthday) and reflections on what the paper has meant. Most of those stories were prepared ahead of time, I'm sure. Still, it feels so strange to have the announcement and the end so close together.

I grew up with the Rocky Mountain News. It's the newspaper I've been reading since I was able to read. It has a feature called "The Mini Page", a newspaper for kids with puzzles that I used to work through. I've been reading Doonesbury in that paper for more than 25 years, as well as Peanuts, Calvin & Hobbes, Mutts, etc. I wrote a letter to the paper when I was in high school, annoyed at the fingerpointing frenzy over Dungeons & Dragons that was happening at the time. I still remember getting the phone call verifying my identity, and seeing the letter printed alongside a fantasy-oriented drawing. When I went to live in New York, I tried to find a paper that was like the Rocky. I couldn't stand the Post, and found the Village Voice unbearably hipper-than-thou. The Times was good, but had no comics, which was a dealbreaker for me. I finally settled on the Daily News. Still, when I came home, I was very glad to see the Rocky again, and subscribed to it immediately at my dorm. That was while the Newspaper War between the Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post was still going, and subscriptions were super cheap. When Laura and I started living together, we had the News delivered, and we've read the Spotlight section together every night before going to bed, for the last 10 years or so.

Now it's gone. The Denver Post arrived at our doorstep this morning. I'm sure we'll continue our subscription -- we value the newspaper too much to not get one. Still, it feels like a step down. I loved the News's pop music writer, and the one from the Post feels like he was trained at the Village Voice school of indie snobbery. Also, the Post is in this very annoying broadsheet format. I loved the Rocky's tabloid arrangement, but the Post forces a whole lot of unfolding and re-folding. Endlessly bothersome. Some of the writers from the Rocky came over, and all of the comics did, but it's not the same.

I miss my Rocky already.

I wrote a series of superhero-themed interactive fiction games called Earth And Sky. If you're interested in learning what the games are like without actually, y'know, playing them, you may be in luck.

Recently, a group of IF enthusiasts over at ifMUD played through all three games in a chatroom environment, as part of a venture called Club Floyd. Floyd is a bot on the mud who can act as a game interpreter, so a group of people can (virtually) gather to play a game in Floyd's room. This makes for a lovely combination of playing, kibitzing, snarking, and even the occasional insight or analysis. I showed up for the sessions, so I was sometimes able to offer a bit of information about the making of the games.

Transcripts are here:

Part 1: Earth And Sky

Part 2: Another Earth, Another Sky

Part 3: Luminous Horizon

I've mentioned here a few times before that I love my LAUNCHcast station. I created a custom station there (after being driven from the previously shuttered radio.sonicnet, and Imagine Radio before that) in 2003, and over the course of the next five years rated a total of 25,094 artists, albums, and songs.

Imagine my chagrin when I was informed via email at the end of last year that CBS Radio is taking over LAUNCHcast, and that customized stations will be eliminated. After a quick trip through the stages of grief, I started in on the project of finding a new fix for my internet radio jones.

I had a few requirements:

• I want to be able to construct a station based on a fixed list of artists, with the occasional movie or show soundtrack thrown in, e.g. Rocky Horror or West Side Story. I'd try to put it together using the list of artists I'd added to my LAUNCHcast station.
  
• I want to be able to adjust that station at will.
  
• I want to hear new artists, ones that aren't on my list but that I have a chance of liking based on who is on the list.

Based on a bit of Googling, I identified five candidates: last.fm, Slacker, Pandora, mystrands, and Jango. Then I tried them out, one by one. I took a lot of notes during that process. On the off chance that those might be worthwhile to somebody, I post them here:

( Much net.radio geekery follows )

The winner: Slacker! Though in my opinion it's still not as good as LAUNCHcast, I've managed to build a station I'm reasonably happy with. Pandora was a relatively close second.

My new Slacker station is called Giant Leaps, after the game I'm writing for Textfyre [Wow, that page says my game will be released in March! I will be quite shocked if that happens. Though it doesn't say March of what year...] and the wide variety of music I've tried to include in it.

It occurs to me, albeit many years later than it should have, that when I have some writing appear elsewhere on the net I should probably post a pointer to it here.

So, in that spirit: I've written a review of Peter Nepstad's epic IF game 1893 for IF-Review.

Okay, I'm glad that Women's Basketball magazine exists. Really, I am. But man oh man, does it ever have some bad writing. Check out this recent article opener:

As the 2009 NCAA women's basketball campaign gets under way, "change" is in the air.

Yep. That theme is not limited to aspirants who have been seeking residency at a house bathed in white at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, in Washington, D.C.

"A house bathed in white"? Such a poetic turn of phrase, but whatever do you mean? Oh, I see, you'll be qualifying that further. But wait, 1600 Pennsylvania Ave [That's "Ave" as in "Ave Maria", given that the abbreviation for avenue has a period at the end] in what city? You could mean any bathed-in-white-house that happens to have that address!

Or how about this one:

"You can't turn it on and turn it off. You have to play your best all the time."

That coaching cliché has been accepted as gospel truth since the first Olympics back in 776 BCE, if not the first mammoth hunt, and every player has heard it pronounced over and over again as though it is written in stone in some secret, sacred cave.

I love how the mammoth hunt part is presented as conjecture but the 776 BCE part comes across as straightforward fact. Thanks, time-traveling reporter! Oh, and I cheer for "secret, sacred cave", not just because of the wonderful sound of it, but because it's just the sort of place you'd expect to find something that's repeated over and over again to everyone.

This article also goes on to explain that the Detroit Shock have definitively disproven this eternal gospel truth. Talk about making history!

These articles remind me of nothing so much as some of the lamer student papers I've received. I'm just waiting for one to begin, "Webster's Dictionary defines 'winning' as..."

Oh, it's a sad, sad day. It's now official: I've seen every episode of every Joss Whedon show. I suppose it's a happy day, really -- it's been a very satisfying journey since the day I saw Serenity (October 1, 2005, as it happens.) Still, I can't help feeling a little grief at the fact that I'll never watch another new episode of Buffy or Angel.

Well, at least I had a good sendoff. I was quite pleased with this season of Angel. Like season 7 of Buffy, the show found its feet again after a dreary and depressing previous season. It was both funny and thrilling, with a solid premise that was low on the endless angst and high on the superheroics of old. Not only that, it had a lovely elegiac quality, bringing back moments and characters from previous seasons like some kind of victory lap, or maybe a greatest hits album.

( Do I even have to start with how spoiled you all are? )

And thus it ends. But hey: only 74 days to Dollhouse!

To top off my fortnight of word-related posts, I am channeling Rob Gordon and making a Top 5 list of my favorite words, either learned or relearned, from my recent trip through a small thesaurus. I love these words either for their sound, or simply for the fact that they exist.

5. niminy-piminy: Affectedly dainty or refined.

4. rejectamenta: Things thrown away or dismissed.
[I have got to incorporate this one into my repertoire. Though I suppose I should be careful, since it apparently has an excretory connotation -- not that most people hearing it would know that!]

3. absquatulate: To leave in a hurry; depart.

2. hemidemisemiquaver: In music notation, a sixty-fourth note.
[Every time I think of this one, I feel like shouting it out a la Zippy The Pinhead: "Hemidemisemiquaver! Hemidemisemiquaver! Hemidemisemiquaver!"]

And of course, the Number One favorite word has to be:
1. sesquipedalian: Having many syllables; given to the use of long words.
[I have to love something that so perfectly and beautifully enacts what it describes.]

Oh, and as I mentioned in the comics post, honorable mention goes to "defenestrate."

Welcome to the miscellany bin. This post holds all the words that I've learned from various places, ones whose categories couldn't gather enough critical mass to merit a post of their own.

( Words, words, words )

I don't tend to watch a lot of TV, but the shows I do watch, I tend to cover pretty thoroughly. There must be something in that habit that explains why almost all my TV vocabulary comes from two shows: M*A*S*H and The Simpsons. Turns out you can learn a fair amount from M*A*S*H and The Simpsons!

( Homer Sez: Increase Your Wordiness )

And finally, one of my favorite COMBO SCOREs of all time is spoken by one of my favorite Simpsons characters:

• arglebargle or foofaraw: Argument or disturbance over nothing
  [In "Last Exit To Springfield", in which Homer leads a power plant strike, newsman Kent Brockman asks: "Tonight, on Smartline, the power plant strike: arglebargle, or foofaraw?"]

I went through a long period of loving Dungeons And Dragons and other such RPGs, though I could never quite find the ideal like-minded, theatrical, story-and-character-loving group of peers for it, or so I imagined anyway. Maybe every group stays permanently out of character and treats the whole thing as a gold-grubbing exercise. (Darths And Droids is somewhat persuasive on this point.) Thank you, single-player CRPGs!

Anyway, I kept hearing that these games were going to make me lose the boundary between fantasy and reality, and send me wandering through underground steam tunnels, but instead I just learned some awesome new words.

( Can I cast Enhance Vocabulary on myself? )

Despite what Allan Bloom would have us believe, rock music can be a source of learning. Behold the many and variegated words (and phrases) I've learned from paying attention to popular music over the years.

( I Know There's A Word For This )

I do have a couple of COMBO SCORES to award as well:

• desultory philippic: A rambling, somewhat disappointing tirade
  [Simon and Garfunkel put "A Simple Desultory Philippic (or How I Was Robert McNamara'd Into Submission)" on their Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme album and sent me to the dictionary twice!]
  
  
• scaramouche, scaramouche, can you do the fandango?: Clown from commedia dell'arte, can you perform a Portuguese folk dance?
  [Unlike many rock songs, which string meaningless lyrics together out of nonsense words, Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" strings meaningless lyrics together out of actual words.]

Today's installment focuses on some of the vocabulary I've gained from my lifelong enthusiasm for comics. I've been a Marvel comics reader since I was six years old, as well as an aficionado of newspaper strips, Mad magazine (in my tweens/teens, anyway), graphic novels, and these days, webcomics.

( Face front, effendi! )

Sometimes you get not just one brand new word but a whole string of them thrown at you. For those, I am awarding a COMBO SCORE, and I am pleased to give the first one to Avengers #93:

• Poltroon! Craven recreant!: Coward! Cowardly coward!
  [See, the Super-Skrull is fighting the Vision, and the Vision decides to flee rather than continue the fight. Because the Vision can pass through walls, the Super-Skrull can't give chase, and so he shouts this in frustration at the fleeing android. It's the kind of moment that makes me love those early Marvels.]

Also, I should give extra credit to Chris Claremont for teaching me a variety of foreign words. One of Claremont's enduring mannerisms was to make sure we were constantly reminded of each character's nationality by either transliterating that character's speech (e.g. "I dinna ken what ye mean, Dani!") or peppering it with foreign phrases, or, most often, both. Consequently, Japanese characters were always hissing that Wolverine was "gaijin" (foreigner), Colossus was constantly exclaiming "boizhe moi!" (my God!) and so on.

In 2004, I was firmly, completely convinced that after the close election in 2000, and the disaster of the previous four years, there was no way that our country would ever re-elect George W. Bush. On the day after that election, I was as upset, depressed, and angry as I'd ever been in my life. After that happened, I decided that the USA was, essentially, a lost cause. I felt fundamentally alienated from my country, a country that would legitimately elect George W. Bush after not-even-really electing him once, and seeing him bungle his job badly. I felt as if my hopes had died on that day.

Today, I found out that they were only mostly dead. Today I feel so proud to be part of a country that would defy the world's story about it, defy my own story about it, and elect Barack Obama as its president by a stunning electoral margin. Today I look forward to having a president I really, genuinely like. I don't think I've ever felt that way.

I keep thinking of a passage in I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, in which Angelou, her family, and almost her entire town of Stamps, Arkansas was gathered around the radio in her Grandmother's general store, listening to Joe Louis fight Primo Carnera in 1935. As Louis would get in a good jab, the crowd would cheer. When Louis looks as if he's about to go down, Angelou writes, "My race groaned. It was our people falling. It was another lynching, yet another Black man hanging on a tree." And when Louis finally triumphs, and is declared the champion of the world:

Champion of the world. A Black boy. Some Black mother's son. He was the strongest man in the world. People drank Coca-Colas like ambrosia and ate candy bars like Christmas. Some of the men went behind the Store and poured white lightning in their soft-drink bottles, and a few of the bigger boys followed them. Those who were not chased away came back blowing their breath in front of themselves like proud smokers.

It would take an hour or more before the people would leave the Store and head for home. Those who lived too far had made arrangements to stay in town. It wouldn't do for a Black man and his family to be caught on a lonely country road on a night when Joe Louis had proved that we were the strongest people in the world."

I love us for what we did tonight. It feels really good to love us again.

As revealed in the comments section of my original Words Infocom Taught Me post, we learn words from lots of unexpected places. Reading Eugene Ehrlich's Highly Selective Thesaurus has reminded me of many of them. Now that I've finished the book, I've decided to write a short series of blog posts, detailing words I've learned from various geeky sources. First in line is a fuller list of words from Infocom games, this time complete with definitions and comments explaining the context of each word, for those who don't know the Infocom canon by heart:

( >OPEN FROBOZZ MAGIC DICTIONARY )

It looks like Zork II wins the Infocom top vocabulary builder award!