The perfect gift for the cat-loving bibliophile in your life?

Fantod is an obscure word with an equally obscure origin. It's used by Dickens in The Pickwick Papers, and Twain uses it in Huckleberry Finn. Appropriately enough, Gorey also uses this word to title the short animations he created for PBS's Mystery! Definition? A state of nervous irritability or an outburst of emotion; a fit. Pure Gorey, to the bone.

(ta, Cos)

Posted by: richard | http://mechanicalcat.net/cgi-bin/log | Sun Dec 15 23:59:55 2002

Damn, can't find a store in Oz that sells it :( [first actual use of froogle, no dice]

Posted by: darren | http://soup.polydistortion.net | Mon Dec 16 23:56:24 2002

David Foster Wallace uses it in _Infinite Jest_, usually modified with "howling", and given to mean an intense version of what we might call "the irrits". The protagonist's mother is prone to attacks of the howling fantods about various matters of interior arrangement.

Posted by: acb | http://dev.null.org | Tue Dec 17 00:17:00 2002

I almost read that once. I gave up about 50 pages into it, because it was too heavy-going.

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