David Foster Wallace Took Book Blurbs Way More Seriously Than He Let On

In 2004, he coined the word blurbspeak, defined as “a very special subdialect of English that’s partly hyperbole, but it’s also phrases that sound really good and are very compelling in an advertorial sense, but if you think about them, they’re literally meaningless.” On the other hand, he wrote about two dozen of them over the years, and Lucas Thompson argues that they’re genuinely worthwhile writing.