Reference & glossary
Subsidized-Time calendar
| Abbr. | Subsidized year | ≈ Gregorian |
|---|---|---|
| YW | Year of the Whopper | 2002 |
| YTMP | Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad | 2003 |
| YTSDB | Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar | 2004 |
| YPW | Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken | 2005 |
| YWQMD | Year of the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster | 2006 |
| YYTMRCYTPC | Year of the Yushityu 2007 Mimetic-Resolution-Cartridge-View-Motherboard-Easy-To-Install-Upgrade For Infernatron/InterLace TP Systems For Home, Office, Or Mobile | 2007 |
| YDPAH | Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland | 2008 |
| YDAU | Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment | 2009 |
| YG | Year of Glad | 2010 |
Glossary
- A.F.R.
Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents — the wheelchair assassins: a ruthless Québécois separatist cell of legless, wheelchair-bound assassins who hunt a master copy of the lethal film to use as a weapon against the United States; the novel's chief antagonists (the raid on the Antitoi brothers pp. 481-489).
- AA
Alcoholics Anonymous — with Narcotics Anonymous (NA) and "the NA-splinter Cocaine Anonymous" (p. 707) — the recovery fellowships whose Boston culture the novel documents at near-ethnographic length: the Groups (White Flag, Advanced Basics, Freeway Access), Commitments, the Crocodiles, the slogans, the Higher Power (see those entries). The fellowships are not interchangeable — Gately "personally is not hot on NA: so many relapses and un-humble returns" (p. 277).
- Abandoned All Hope
E.T.A. drug slang for quitting marijuana for good: because marijuana in the novel's Boston is "Bob Hope" (see that entry), to Abandon All Hope is to give up the Bob entirely. Pemulis names the move during the long drug summit of endnote 321 ("Abandon All Hope," p. 1064), and Hal adopts it: endnote 334 glosses the phrase as "Hal's Pemulis-inspired trope for putting down the secret daily Bob H." — a wry dark joke that hardens into how Hal names his abstinence to himself (p. 1076). Hal's withdrawal is dated from it: "the horrific way his head's felt, increasingly, since he abruptly Abandoned All Hope" (p. 796), a condition that by the next page is "the Abandonment of Hope" (p. 797).
- Accomplice!
- AFR
The same organization as A.F.R. (see that entry): Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents, the wheelchair assassins, written without the periods. One entity, two spellings — the unpunctuated form is standard in reader discussion and appears on some of this archive's pages.
- anhedonia
The clinical word for the inability to feel: the numb interior flatness — "an incapacity for feeling, a deadening of soul" — that the novel's essay-section on depression treats as millennial America's signature affliction and as Hal Incandenza's own secret state ("the hip empty mask, anhedonia," p. 695; Hal is nonetheless sure his father's suicide "wasn't because of standard U.S. anhedonia," p. 694). The same section is careful to rank it: "dead-eyed anhedonia is but a remora on the ventral flank of the true predator, the Great White Shark of pain" — Kate Gompert's predator-grade depression, which unlike anhedonia "is itself a feeling" (p. 695). Among the recovering, the word is nearly unsayable: at one Substance-recovery group meeting nobody "came right out and used the terms melancholy or anhedonia or depression" (p. 504).
- anhedonic
The adjective of anhedonia (see that entry): flattened, pleasure-dead. The novel hangs it on James Incandenza in the year a sudden flood of patent receipts left him "feeling post-carrot anhedonic and existentially unmoored" (p. 706) — the same flatness his son Hal later describes in himself (pp. 694-695).
- annular fusion
The novel's imaginary energy technology — a self-sustaining "cold" fusion process, made possible by James Incandenza's lens work, that turns waste into power in an endless ring; the science behind the ceded toxic territory and a key image for the book's circular, waste-into-fuel structure (pp. 63-64).
- annularity (the ring structure)
The novel's master figure: rings — cycles that feed on their own waste and output their own input. The word "annular" (ring-shaped) enters through the fusion process (see annular fusion) that burns toxins into energy whose by-products fuel the next burn, and the shape repeats at every scale: addiction's loops of relief and need, the yearly cycles of Subsidized Time, the Entertainment's viewers rewatching until they die, and — many readers hold — the book's own structure, whose end feeds its beginning. This archive's Annularity theme page collects the instances; the science itself is under annular fusion and annulation (see those entries).
- annulation
The ring-cycle science behind the novel's energy economy — the chemistry and physics of annular (ring-shaped) reaction cycles that James Incandenza's optics work helped make feasible (see annular fusion). His mock-memoir traces the fascination to a childhood image of turning "somersaults with one hand nailed to the floor": "This was how I first became interested in the possibilities of annulation" (p. 503); an interview with him was "posthumously included in a book on the genesis of annulation" (p. 65). At E.T.A. it is curriculum, and Anton Doucette's crisis is "this insurmagulate conceptual block that keeps him from grasping annulation" (p. 569).
- As of Yore
dramatizes JOI's father's garage monologue (scene 049, pp. 157-169)
- ATHSCME
Corporate name of the giant industrial air-displacement fans manufactured in Enfield; the in-text expansion is "The ATHSCME Family of Air-Displacement Effectuators," glossed in the same breath as "(meaning they make really big fans)" (p. 241). White-suited ATHSCME crews erect and service the tennis academy's inflatable winter dome, the Lung (p. 52); the border array of displacement fans blows the reconfigured territory's airborne oxides and toxins north into Canada (p. 385) — the aerial counterpart to the E.W.D. waste catapults — audible across metro Boston as a low faraway trill (p. 611) and shut off nightly for de-linting (p. 543). A recurring threat target: the A.F.R. demand cessation of all "ATHSCME rotary air mass displacement activity" within 175 kilometers of Canadian soil (endnote 304, p. 1057) and threaten to blow up ATHSCME towers (endnote 110, p. 1015); in Mario Incandenza's ONANtiad puppet-film a mock headline has President Gentle threatening to "IRRADIATE CANADA W/ AID OF ATHSCME HELL-FANS" (p. 407). What the letters stand for is never revealed and remains an open crux; the readings that circulate in general online discussion — a pun on the real public-sector union AFSCME, an ACME cartoon-supplier sight gag, "asthma" or a lisped "ask me," a MATCHES anagram, and the counter-observation that DFW punctuates true initialisms with periods (E.T.A., U.S.A.) but writes ATHSCME with none — are all unresolved.
- Big Buddy
E.T.A.'s peer-mentoring system: each upperclass player is assigned a small group of younger students and leads them in evening question-and-answer sessions — the framing of the 3-November scenes, e.g. Hal fielding Kent Blott's and Peter Beak's worries over an "undemanding visualization-type cartridge" (pp. 109-121).
- Blood Sister: One Tough Nun
"Blood Sister"; full E.T.A. viewing ~pp. 703ff
- Bob Hope
street name for marijuana ("B. Hope," pp. 76, 114); the "Bob Hope desiccating action" behind Hal's spit-flood
- C.U.S.P.
The Clean U.S. Party: Johnny Gentle's political vehicle, "the strange-seeming but politically prescient annular agnation of ultra-right jingoist hunt-deer-with-automatic-weapons types and far-left macrobiotic Save-the-Ozone, -Rain-Forests, -Whales, -Spotted-Owl-and-High-pH-Waterways ponytailed granola-crunchers" (p. 382), a germ-and-waste-phobic movement whose "first platform’s plank had been Let’s Shoot Our Wastes Into Space" (p. 382). Its rise from "the emergence of the fringe C.U.S.P. of Johnny Gentle, Famous Crooner" (p. 283) to the White House produces O.N.A.N., Subsidized Time, and the Reconfiguration (see those entries).
- Cage series
Cage, Cage II, Cage III—Free Show, Cage IV—Web, Cage V—Infinite Jim
- Commitment
In Boston AA, a Group's scheduled speaking trip to another Group's meeting: "Commitments are where some members of one Group commit to hit the road and travel to another Group’s meeting to speak publicly from the podium" and "Groups always trade Commitments: you come speak to us and we’ll come speak to you" (p. 343). The novel's long AA set-piece is the White Flag Group (see that entry) hosting a Commitment from Concord's Advanced Basics Group (pp. 343-367), and Gately's Higher-Power confession comes "On a White Flag Group Commitment to the Tough Shit But You Still Can’t Drink Group down in Braintree" (p. 442).
- corpus
This archive's word for the full set of scenes and endnotes in which a given character or topic appears or is mentioned — the pool of passages a page is built from. When a page says something is "not in the corpus," it means none of those passages state it; the claim would have to come from somewhere else in the novel.
- DMZ
the drug; street name 'Madame Psychosis', Pemulis's 'the tu-sais-qué'; fitviavi-mold-derived, G.C./M.S.-invisible (n.321 p. 1064); first naming: n.8 p. 984, 'DMZ/M.P.,' excluded from the Mild Designer class among CNS-rattlers — the M.P./Madame-Psychosis alias attached from first mention; distinct from Joelle's radio persona 'Madame Psychosis'
- E.T.A.
Enfield Tennis Academy: the elite junior tennis boarding school outside Boston founded by the filmmaker James Incandenza with his optics fortune; home base for the Incandenza family and the novel's tennis-world storyline (p. 54; the founding out of the optics fortune pp. 63-65).
- E.W.D.
Empire Waste Displacement Co.: the O.N.A.N.-subsidized hauler that gets the "tidy" U.S.'s toxic waste out and into the Great Concavity. Its shiny-truck, land-barge, and catapult facilities sit in Enfield; the block-long catapults — les trébuchets noirs, the black catapults, to the Québécois — fling twine-bundled waste-vehicles into the Concavity at parabolic altitudes exceeding 5 km, with "a sound like a giant stamping foot" (p. 241). The airborne displacement vehicles whistle overhead on rising arcs, blue alert-lights atwinkle (p. 121); E.T.A.'s litigation with E.W.D. over the flight-paths reaches the appellate stage (p. 286). The solid-waste complement to the ATHSCME fans.
- Ennet House
The drug-and-alcohol halfway house (full name Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House) below the tennis academy on the old Enfield Marine grounds, where recovering addicts live under close supervision; Don Gately works there as a live-in staffer (founding dossier p. 137).
- Eschaton
An elaborate global-thermonuclear-war game the tennis-academy juniors play on four courts, lobbing dead tennis balls as nuclear strikes at a map of the world, refereed by a student game-master; a set-piece that collapses into a real brawl (pp. 321-342).
- Eschaton combatants
The all-caps bloc designations of Eschaton (see that entry), the juniors' four-court thermonuclear war-game. Of a given day's players, "three compose a theoretical Anschluss designated AMNAT, another three SOVWAR, one or two REDCHI, another one or two the wacko but always pesky LIBSYR or more formidable IRLIBSYR," and the rest "can form anything from SOUTHAF to INDPAK to like an independent cell of Nuck insurgents with a 50-click Howitzer and big ideas"; "Each team is called a Combatant." (p. 323). The teams are "arrayed in positions corresponding to their location on the planet earth as represented in The Rand McNally Slightly Rectangular Hanging Map of the World" (p. 323), lobbing lobs in which "each of the 400 dead tennis balls in the game’s global arsenal represents a 5-megaton thermonuclear warhead" (p. 323). The designations are transparent pre-O.N.A.N. Cold-War shorthand — America/NATO, the Soviet bloc, Red China, Libya-Syria (with the more formidable Iran-Libya-Syria upgrade), South Africa, India-Pakistan — a real-map geopolitics the Interdependence era has officially superseded, which is part of the game's joke. In the disastrous I.-Day game, Timmy Peterson plays the SOVWAR premier, Kieran McKenna is AMNAT staff, and Josh Gopnik plays SOUTHAF (see the character table); afterward the capital-C usage walks off the map — "The I.-Day Combatants had been out there of their own volition." (p. 515). The game's wider all-caps apparatus follows the Combatants into play: a controlled game consists of "Spasm Exchanges—SPASEX", which can metastasize into all-out "Strikes Against Civilian Populations—SACPOP"; the winner is the "Combatant with the most favorable ratio of points for INDDIR—Infliction of Death, Destruction, and Incapacitation of Response—to SUFDDIR—self-evident" (p. 324); the pre-game summit haggles over "DEFCON-gradients, city-trading, and so on" (p. 325); and every escalation is argued in the rulebook's game-theoretic idiom of utility — a strike is chosen because it "has the most utility in the old game-theoretic matrix right now" (p. 335).
- Experialism
The novel's coined inversion of imperialism: instead of seizing territory, the Gentle-era United States forcibly gives a swath of it away — the "Reconfigured" toxic zone returned/gifted to Canada, "an intolerable blow to Canadian sovereignty" (p. 59). Schtitt decries training citizens for an "experialist and waste-exporting nation that's forgotten privation" (pp. 82-83); the Experialist migration dates from the Year of the Whopper (p. 93); reversing the arrangement is the A.F.R.'s reason for being (endnote 304, p. 1057).
- Familial Dysautonomia
Mario Incandenza's central neurological condition: "a neurological deficit whereby he can't feel physical pain very well." It went undiagnosed until he was six, after he let Orin tattoo his shoulder with the red coil of an immersion heater; other characters envy it, but it leaves real injuries undetected (p. 589).
- Father & Son Market
Hal's post-high candy run destination (p. 114); recurs in E.T.A.-neighborhood material
- feigning feigning
Hal's own phrase for the Hamlet problem the ending turns on. Lying paralyzed on the viewing-room floor in the book's final E.T.A. stretch, he reflects that Hamlet, "for all his paralyzing doubt about everything, never once doubts the reality of the ghost," and never questions "whether his own madness might not in fact be unfeigned" — that is, "whether Hamlet might be only feigning feigning" (p. 900). Madness performed as a performance, and so possibly real: the novel plants the formula just before its close, and readers apply it straight to Hal, whose Year of Glad interior voice is lucid while everyone in the room sees something inhuman.
- figurant
A film-industry term for the mute background extras in shows — "human furniture" whose "mouths moved but nothing emerged"; in Gately's fever-dream conversations the wraith uses the word for the presences that reveal "the camera, like any eye, has a perceptual corner, a triage of who's important" (p. 834). It becomes the novel's central image for people who feel unseen and unheard.
- Found Drama
hoax genre, I-XI (no IV/VII/VIII); joke explained n.145, fallout n.234
- Fully Functional Phil
the O.U.S./InterLace anti-Entertainment PSA puppet (scene 168, pp. 876-883)
- Good-Looking Men in Small Clever Rooms...
full title n.24 p. 991; recurs truncated in late Hal sections
- Herman the Ceiling That Breathed
Gately's childhood ceiling (pp. 915, 923); image-system spans scenes 173/175/177 and the hospital ceiling-watching
- Higher Power
Boston AA's deliberately open name for whatever a recovering addict surrenders to: "It’s suggested in the 3rd of Boston AA’s 12 Steps that you turn your Diseased will over to the direction and love of ‘God as you understand Him.’" — and "You get to make up your own understanding of God or a Higher Power or Whom-/Whatever" (p. 442). The openness is real: "Four-year White Flagger Glenn K.’s personally chosen Higher Power is Satan, for fuck’s sake" (p. 352); the "God" of the slogans is "just shorthand for a totally subjective and up-to-you ‘Higher Power’" (p. 366); and Gately, ten months sober, admits from a podium that he still has "no real solid understanding of a Higher Power" (p. 442) and prays anyway.
- Homo Duplex
n.24 p. 988; the film in which JOI spotted six-year-old John Wayne — Wayne's father made JOI excise John's segment
- Identify
Boston AA's term of art for how to listen: newcomers are told to "sit right up at the front of the hall where they can see the pores in the speaker’s nose and try to Identify instead of Compare. Again, Identify means empathize" (p. 345) — hear your own case in the speaker's story instead of cataloguing the differences. When a speaker is honest about the desperation, "boy can they ever Identify" (p. 347).
- Infinite Jest (V?)
"the Entertainment"/samizdat (existing ruling); predecessors Infinite Jest (I)-(IV), all unfinished/unseen (n.24 pp. 986-990)
- Interdependence Day
The annual O.N.A.N. holiday celebrating the union of the three North American nations, marked at the tennis academy by a formal gala dinner; falls on 8 November in the novel's chronology (p. 343; the family dinner p. 31).
- InterLace
InterLace TelEntertainment: the media conglomerate that replaced broadcast television with on-demand digital entertainment cartridges and "teleputers," dominating the novel's home-entertainment culture (the era's home-entertainment catalogue, p. 60, which prints "InterLace Telentertainment" — cited as written).
- It Was a Great Marvel That He Was in the Father Without Knowing Him
- le Jeu du Prochain Train
the A.F.R. Root Cult game of jumping before oncoming trains (n.304) — Les Assassins' "confinement to their epithetic wheelchairs" is, in the note's own words, "largely conceded" to trace to it; the cult itself is "Le Culte du Prochain Train" in main text (p. 732), though n.304's cribbed encyclopedia passage prints "La Culte" (kept as printed); the game is le Jeu, the cult le Culte
- Madame Psychosis
One name, two referents, and the novel trades on the confusion. (1) Joelle van Dyne's on-air persona: her cult midnight program on M.I.T.'s WYYY is "Sixty Minutes More or Less with Madame Psychosis" (p. 591; the show itself pp. 181-193); the name began as the stage name James Incandenza gave her — she "let Himself give her a stage name" — when she started appearing in his films (p. 297). (2) A Boston street name for the drug DMZ (see that entry), taken from the radio persona: "DMZ is sometimes also referred to in some metro Boston chemical circles as Madame Psychosis, after a popular very-early-morning cult radio personality on M.I.T.’s student-run radio station WYYY-109" (p. 170). Context decides: a voice on the radio or in a film credit is Joelle; a lozenge, capsule, or dose is the drug.
- Moment magazine
Steeply's soft-profile cover employer (scenes 077ff, n.234, n.269)
- Nuck
Derogatory U.S. slang of the reconfigured O.N.A.N. era for a Canadian, especially a Québécois: Pemulis sizes up "the Nuck in charge" of the Antitois' shop, a "lumberjackish" "Nuckwad" who, like "fucking Nucksters" generally, doesn't know the value of what he's holding (pp. 215-216); the novel's marker of casual anti-Canadian bigotry.
- O.N.A.N.
The Organization of North American Nations: the political union of the United States, Canada, and Mexico that governs the novel's world; the source of Subsidized Time and of the toxic territory ceded to Canada.
- O.N.A.N.T.A.
The Organization of North American Nations Tennis Association: the continental governing and ranking body of O.N.A.N.-era tennis. John Wayne was "the top-ranked junior male in Canada at sixteen as well as #5 overall in the Organization of North American Nations Tennis Association computerized rankings" and is now "currently ranked #3 in the O.N.A.N.T.A.’s Boys’ 18’s and #2 in the U.S.T.A." (p. 259) — the continental ladder ("O.N.A.N.T.A.-wise," p. 259) runs alongside the older national U.S.T.A. numbers, and every E.T.A. player is measured on both.
- P.G.O.A.T.
Orin Incandenza and his B.U. doubles partner's private name for Joelle van Dyne, the baton-twirling Boston University sophomore Orin fell for: "The schoolboy epithet they’d made up to refer to Orin’s twirler was the P.G.O.A.T., for the Prettiest Girl Of All Time" (p. 289). The beauty worked like a force field — "she was almost universally shunned" (p. 290), since no male could work up the nerve to approach her — the phenomenon U.H.I.D. would later name for her as the Actaeon Complex (see that entry). Her other acquired name is Madame Psychosis (see that entry).
- Pink2
A computer operating system in the novel's near-future setting: the second version of "Pink," described as Microsoft's first operating system after Windows, upgraded once the InterLace network made home entertainment fully digital. By the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment it is a dinosaur, but it is still the only system that runs the specialized math software the students' war-game Eschaton relies on (endnote 95, p. 1003; still on the era's teleputer spec sheet, p. 60).
- Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited
P.Y.E.U.; JOI's last company; predecessors Meniscus Films, Heliotrope Films, Latrodectus Mactans Productions
- Port Washington
The Port Washington Tennis Academy (P.W.T.A.), E.T.A.'s giant Long Island rival: "Port Washington Academy is gargantuan, the Xerox Inc. of North American tennis academies, with over 300 students and 64 courts" (p. 217). The two schools meet in "this mammoth annual early-November thing between E.T.A. and P.W.T.A." that "will try to be the best out of 108" matches (p. 259), after which the losing academy "has to get up on tables at the buffet supper afterward and sing" (p. 259).
- prorector
E.T.A.'s live-in coaching and supervisory staff, mostly academy graduates who fell short of the Show and stayed on; they have "the most direct supervisory contact with the kids" (pp. 51, 53) — the rung of adult authority below Schtitt and deLint that the students deal with daily.
- Pukers
E.T.A. slang for the academy's punitive conditioning drills — corrective discipline disguised as fitness. "Certain drills are well known to be nothing more than attitude-adjusters, designed to do nothing but dramatically lower life-quality for a few minutes"; drills like the disciplinary version of Tap & Whack "are known to the kids simply as Pukers. Puker-drills are really meant to do nothing but hurt you and make you think long and hard before repeating whatever you did to merit them" — while staying describable to parents and police as cardiovascular conditioning, "with all the actual sadism completely sub rosa" (p. 515). The insidious part is exactly that deniability: punishments "can take the form of what might look like straight-out athletic conditioning", which is why Schtitt and his prorectors, who set the A.M. drills, are feared beyond any academic. The word enters in Ann Kittenplan's forecast of the Eschaton debacle's fallout: "You’re all in for some serious Pukers is my prediction" (p. 515).
- S. Johnson
Avril's dog (named for Samuel Johnson), dragged to death behind the Volvo (n.269 pp. 1049-1050); Orin re-asserts the hit-and-run lie in n.110 p. 1015
- samizdat
The name used within the novel's world for the lethal film cartridge — the movie catalogued as Infinite Jest (V?) and more often just called "the Entertainment." Anyone who watches it is captured into a passive, infantile trance and will re-watch it, to the exclusion of eating, sleeping, or moving, until they die; because of this it is hunted as a contraband weapon, most fiercely by a Québécois separatist cell that wants a master copy to deploy against the United States. First on-screen victim pp. 33-37; the one eyewitness description of its contents, in a government dossier, p. 549; the film's catalogue entry is endnote 24 (pp. 986-990).
- Saprogenic Greetings, Inc.
Marlon Bain's company, member of the ACMÉ Family of Gags 'N Notions (n.234, n.269, scene 128)
- spine
This archive's word for the backbone of a character page: the character's events in the novel laid out in dated order, each one pinned to the scene or endnote it comes from. Major turning points are starred as pivotal; smaller appearances are kept as texture. Where a date rests on reasoning rather than an explicit date in the text, the page's Dating notes say so.
- Subsidized Time
The dating system of the novel's United States (part of the O.N.A.N. super-state), under which calendar years are no longer numbered but auctioned to corporate sponsors as a revenue measure, so each year carries a product name. The in-novel master list is on p. 223.
- teleputer
The combined television-and-computer console that is the standard home-entertainment device in the novel's world, on which InterLace's on-demand cartridges are watched (spec sheet p. 60; in use pp. 33-37).
- the Actaeon Complex
U.H.I.D.'s term for fear of transhuman beauty (p. 290); Carlisle sources it to Graves' Actaeon/Artemis (Carlisle C05)
- the Bottom
AA's floor: the point of desperation that finally lets an addict surrender and Come In. Speakers date their lives from it — hearing "the way he felt and the way I felt were, Out There, at the Bottom, before we each Came In" (p. 364); a Cocaine Anonymous speaker reaches "his last binge, the Bottom, which, predictably, occurred on a payday" (p. 708).
- the Crocodiles
White Flag's AA old-timers — the "old ruined grim calm longtimers" whom less senior members call the Crocodiles, clustered with "hideous turd-like cigars in one corner of the Provident cafeteria" (p. 354), "stone-faced chieftains who rule by some unspoken shamanistic fiat"; their decades of sobriety are what Gately half-fears and half-reveres.
- the Disease
Boston AA's name for addiction itself — not a habit or a moral failing but a patient, cunning antagonist: "They identify their whole selves with their head, and the Disease makes its command headquarters in the head" (p. 272); staying stopped is "nothing short of a daily miracle if you’ve got the Disease like he’s got the Disease" (p. 344). Ennet House's Eugenio Martinez figures the Disease as the Spider (see that entry).
- the Entertainment
The novel's usual name for the fatally captivating film at the center of the plot — also called the samizdat, and catalogued as Infinite Jest (V?). Its viewers lose all will to do anything but watch it again, and die. First victim pp. 33-37; described in a government dossier p. 549; catalogued in endnote 24 (pp. 986-990).
- the Great Concavity
The large tract of former New-England/southern-Canada land, ruined into a toxic-waste zone, that the United States has ceded to Canada under the O.N.A.N. arrangement; a source of continental resentment and of monstrous, oversized-wildlife lore (p. 93).
- the Great Convexity
The Canadian-side name for the ceded toxic territory the U.S. calls the Great Concavity: "the glass-walled Great Convexity whose southern array of ATHSCME Effectuators blow the tidy U.S.'s northern oxides north" (p. 385), Canada's experience of the U.S.'s Experialistic "gift" (p. 59). One place, two names, depending on which side of the reconfigured border is naming it (see the Great Concavity).
- the Infant
the Concavity cult object / feral-Infant lore (pp. 559, 562); resonates with Mme. Marathe & disability-deformity
- the Lung
E.T.A.'s inflatable dome raised over courts each winter; first ref p. 113 ("the delay in upping the Lung"); inflation = fourth Monday of Nov = 23 Nov YDAU (p. 268); recurs in E.T.A. winter scenes
- The Medusa v. the Odalisque
"the thing about the Medusa and the Odalisque" (n.145); viewed pp. 528-530
- the Militant Grammarians of Massachusetts
Avril Incandenza's prescriptivist activist outfit, "the academic PAC that watchdogged media-syntax" and invited French Academy speakers on "prescriptive preservation" (p. 288); the comic engine of the novel's language-and-grammar preoccupations.
- the mint-green Ford sedan
Steeply's "advertorial" Nunhagen-aspirin ad car — recurring surveillance prop (pp. 107, 341, 418, 655; Carlisle C06)
- the Mold Theory
The reader community's name for one of the main candidate answers to what broke Hal: that nobody dosed him — his own body synthesized DMZ endogenously, seeded by the basement mold he ate as a small child ("I ate this," scene 002, pp. 10-11). The textual hooks: DMZ is synthesized from a derivative of fitviavi, "an obscure mold that grows only on other molds" (p. 170); on a drug assay it reads as nothing but "a slight case of imbalanced yeast" (endnote 321, p. 1064); and no dose is ever shown on the page. The archive carries it as a live open reading — textually disciplined, though a minority position — graded in the What Happened to Hal adjudication.
- The Mr. Bouncety-Bounce Show
InterLace children's program; first appearance p. 35 (scene 007 — the attaché mistakes it for a bipolar-disorder documentary); the host wears an adult diaper (p. 648), rhyming with the diapered Libertine Statue; Blott's "Mr.-Bouncety-Bounce-Program"-brand bow-biters p. 111 (scene 036); Gately's beloved kiddy-show (p. 922); recurs as Hal's late-book viewing (scene 168; scenes)
- The ONANtiad
parent of Mario's I-Day puppet pageant (scenes 081ff)
- the Program
AA's Twelve-Step method as a proper noun — the thing Ennet House residents are told to work. A speaker who commits "the subtle but cardinal Message-offense of appearing to deprecate the Program rather than the Self" loses the room (p. 367); Gately comes to think "the Program might be more like deprogramming than actual washing" — un-brainwashing, "considering the psychic job the Disease’s Spider has done on them all" (p. 369).
- the Reconfiguration
The territorial redrawing at O.N.A.N.'s founding by which the Gentle administration forced the ruined New England/lower-Québec territory onto Canada — the political fact behind the Great Concavity and Great Convexity, Experialism, and the A.F.R.'s rage (see those entries). Rodney Tine is its "acknowledged architect of O.N.A.N. and continental Reconfiguration" (p. 92); most provinces "took the continental Anschluss and territorial Reconfiguration like good sports" while Québec's insurgent cells "completely lost their political shit" (p. 311). Mario Incandenza's Interdependence-Day film retells the whole "cartographic Reconfiguration" as puppet parody (p. 391).
- the Show
Tennis slang for the professional tour, the goal every E.T.A. junior is groomed toward: Stice frets about being "twenty and in the Show playing nonstop" (p. 104), and most E.T.A. prorectors are "depressed or traumatized about not making it into the Show" (p. 53).
- the Spider
Boston AA's figure for the Disease of addiction itself, coined by Ennet House's volunteer counselor Eugenio ("Gene") Martinez, who "called the Disease The Spider and talked about Feeding The Spider versus Starving The Spider" (p. 274; his taste for "entomologic tropes" is endnote 139's joke). The figure runs through the whole recovery strand: silence is "pure Spider-food" (p. 278); your personal will "is the web your Disease sits and spins in," so "You have to Starve The Spider: you have to surrender your will" (p. 357); Gately's first willing prayer asks "for his own sick Spider-bit will to be taken from him and fumigated and squished" (scene 074, p. 359); and in the trauma ward, offered narcotics, Gately recognizes the wheedling inner voice at once — "it's got to be Gately's own Disease. The Spider" (p. 887).
- the Subject
Orin Incandenza's term for the women he serially seduces — each one "the Subject," the language of both experiment and conquest: "Because the Subject’s pleasure in him has become his food" (p. 596). The first Subject in the book is already gone by morning, leaving only a note (pp. 42-43); the first one shown in his bed is a flashback, "The Subject after Bain's sister" (pp. 47-48); the last is the "Swiss hand-model" (p. 971) who is bait in the A.F.R.'s trap closing around him (pp. 596-601, with the character table's Luria Perec linkage).
- the Substance
Recovery Boston's capital-S umbrella noun for whatever a given addict is powerless over — alcohol, narcotics, cocaine, the Bob Hope: "people addicted to a Substance who abruptly stop ingesting the Substance often suffer wicked papular acne" (p. 200). At the White Flag podium it gets personified as "this Substance you thought was your one true friend, that you gave up all for, gladly" — which has finally "removed its smily-face mask to reveal centerless eyes" (p. 347).
- the veil
The face-covering worn by members of the Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed (see U.H.I.D.): the fellowship's recruiting circular urges "Come don the veil of the type and token. Come learn to love what’s hidden inside" (p. 190). Joelle van Dyne wears hers everywhere — held "secure against her face with a finger on her chin" on the T (p. 221), where she gets "asked about the deal with the veil with a lack of delicacy she rather prefers" (p. 222) — and removes it only in private (p. 236). Whether her veil hides disfigurement or "transhuman beauty" (p. 290; see the Actaeon Complex) is one of the novel's deliberately unresolved questions.
- the WhataBurger
The WhataBurger Southwest Junior Invitational: the marquee junior tournament in Tucson AZ that the whole E.T.A. fall season points toward — "The Port Washington meet. I.D. Day. The Tucson WhataBurger the week after" (p. 113), played over Thanksgiving (p. 267). The novel opens with Hal "seeded third, Boys’ 18-and-Under Singles, in the prestigious WhataBurger Southwest Junior Invitational out at the Randolph Tennis Center" (p. 4) in the Year of Glad, and the book's most famous flash-forward hangs on the year before: "I think of John N. R. Wayne, who would have won this year’s WhataBurger, standing watch in a mask as Donald Gately and I dig up my father’s head" (p. 17).
- the White Flag Group
The Enfield AA group at the novel's recovery core: "The White Flag Group of Enfield MA" meets Sundays in the cafeteria of the Provident Nursing Home, a couple of blocks from the tennis academy's hill (pp. 343-344); it hosts visiting "Commitments" from other groups, and it is where Gately, Joelle, and the Ennet House residents attend meetings.
- the wraith
The ghost that sits on the rail of Don Gately's hospital bed and converses directly inside his head, introducing itself as "just a plain old wraith, one without any sort of grudge or agenda, just a generic garden-variety wraith" (p. 829). Everything it says — the filmmaking, the figurant idea (see that entry), the grief over a son going empty and mute — identifies it as James O. Incandenza (pp. 829-845). The published text also hints the same wraith is behind the phenomena plaguing Ortho Stice; the manuscript history made that explicit (see Wraithster).
- Tunnel Club
The E.T.A. sub-14 boys' society of the campus tunnels: "the sub-14 E.T.A.s historically have a kind of Tunnel Club. Like many small boys’ clubs, the Tunnel Club’s unifying raison d’être is kind of vague" (p. 667). Activities run to hanging out in the better-lit main tunnels, "catching each other in lies about their lives and careers before E.T.A.," and recapitulating recent Eschatons, while "the Club’s only formal activity is sitting around with a yellowed copy of Robert’s Rules endlessly refining and amending the rules for who can and can’t join the Tunnel Club. A true boy-type club, the Tunnel Club’s least vague raison d’être has to do with exclusion. The vital No-Girls exclusion is the only ironclad part of the Tunnel Club’s charter." (p. 668) — hence perennially blackballed applicant Kent Blott. Its habitat maps early: the crawl-tunnel between Physical Plant and the Pump Room is "essentially unknown to staff and Administration, popular only with the Academy’s smaller kids’ Tunnel Club" (p. 52); its founder "as a very little boy" was Heath Pearson (p. 898). The post-Eschaton punitive tunnel cleanup becomes "a defacto Tunnel Club operation" (endnote 272, p. 1052), the boys doubling it as a hunt for Blott's rumored "Concavitated feral hamster" (p. 668).
- U.H.I.D.
The Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed: a support fellowship for people so disfigured (or so beautiful) that they cannot bear to be seen, whose members wear veils to conceal their faces; Joelle van Dyne belongs to it (recruiting circular pp. 189-190; founding legend pp. 226-227).
- U.S.O.U.S.
The United States Office of Unspecified Services: the shadowy intelligence agency, headed by Rodney Tine, that runs surveillance and covert operations around the missing film; the employer behind the agent Hugh Steeply (Tine as "Chief of Unspecified Services," p. 787).
- V.R.
Viewing Room: E.T.A.'s cartridge-viewing rooms — "V.R.6, one of the three little Viewing Rooms on the second floor of the Comm.-Ad. Bldg." (p. 109), where "The room’s new cartridge-viewer is huge and almost painfully high-definition; it hangs flat on the north wall like a large painting" (p. 109). The 3-November Big Buddy sessions sprawl on V.R.6's floor (pp. 109-121), and the late Hal sections put him flat on his back on the carpet of "Viewing Room 5, still on the second floor" (p. 897).
- Valuable Coupon Has Been Removed
the 1963 mattress-memoir of scene 099 is ALSO a JOI film (n.24 pp. 990-991, Sperber/n.24.c linkage)
- Various Small Flames
Carlisle's ID of the flames-loop cartridge Gately watches in scene 177's range
- videophony mask terms
Video-Physiognomic Dysphoria (VPD), Optimistically Misrepresentational Masking (OMM), Transmittable Tableau (TT) (pp. 147-149, scene 047) — feed the masks/U.H.I.D. system; JOI held a Tableaux patent (p. 64)
- Wave Bye-Bye to the Bureaucrat
Possible LDS-PSA parody/homage; Hal's repeat viewings
- WETA
E.T.A.'s own student-run station: "WETA student-run ‘radio’ got to ‘broadcast’ E.T.A.-related news, sports and community affairs for ten or so minutes over the closed-circuit intercom every Tuesday and Saturday" (p. 308), with Jim Troeltsch undislodgeable from the sports portion (p. 308). Not to be confused with WYYY (see that entry), M.I.T.'s actual FM station where Madame Psychosis broadcasts. John Wayne's career-wrecking drugged commentary goes out during the weekly WETA slot (pp. 701-706; the hall speakers "crackled to life for the start of weekly WETA," endnote 324, p. 1069).
- white flag
The surrender image Boston AA runs on, and the name the novel's central AA meeting takes (see the White Flag Group): to wave the white flag is to quit fighting — to admit the Disease has beaten you and hand over the very will that lost, AA's capital-S Surrender. The recovery sections put it flatly: "You have to Starve The Spider: you have to surrender your will" (p. 357). The idiom itself surfaces in Michael Pemulis's mouth, arguing against Hal's plan to quit everything at once: if you truly need a substance, "what do you imagine happens if you just hoist the white flag and try to go on without it, without anything?" (endnote 321, p. 1065) — the novel's two institutions of surrender and self-will trading their one shared word.
- Wraithster
A name from the book's manuscript history rather than its published text. In the 1993 first draft, Ortho Stice's nickname was "the Wraith" — not "The Darkness" — and Hal at one point calls him "Wraithster"; the revision moved that ghost-identification into subtext, leaving the published novel only hints that James Incandenza's wraith haunts Stice (p. 943). The draft naming is on record from Steven Moore's first-hand account of the manuscript, and discussions of the ending (this archive's included) still say "the Wraithster" for Stice-as-possessed.
- WYYY
M.I.T.'s "semi-underground" student radio station, home of Joelle van Dyne's late-night program "Sixty Minutes More or Less with Madame Psychosis," which airs after "Those Were the Legends That Formerly Were" (p. 182); a taped episode of the show surfaces at Ennet House (p. 591). (The host persona is glossed under Madame Psychosis; this row is the station and the show.)
- YDAU
Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment — a Subsidized-Time year; the ordinary-calendar year 2009. Most of the novel's present-day action takes place in it.
- YDPAH
Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland — a Subsidized-Time year; the ordinary-calendar year 2008.
- YG
Year of Glad — the last named year of Subsidized Time; the ordinary-calendar year 2010. The novel's opening scene, Hal's Arizona interview, is set in it.
- YPW
Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken — a Subsidized-Time year; the ordinary-calendar year 2005.
- yrstruly
The self-signature of the unnamed first-person narrator of the Christmas-Eve street section: "It was yrstruly and C and Poor Tony that crewed that day and everything like that" (p. 128) — a written tic (yours truly), not a proper name. He is called "Emil" only in Poor Tony's later section (pp. 299-306), and whether he is Ennet House's Emil Minty is a question the book leaves open and this archive keeps open (question-marked cross-links, not a merge).
- YTMP
Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad — a Subsidized-Time year; the ordinary-calendar year 2003.
- YTSDB
Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar — a Subsidized-Time year; the ordinary-calendar year 2004, the year of James Incandenza's suicide.
- YW
Year of the Whopper — the first sponsored year of Subsidized Time; the ordinary-calendar year 2002.
- YWQMD
Year of the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster — a Subsidized-Time year; the ordinary-calendar year 2006.
- YYTMRCYTPC
Year of the Yushityu 2007 Mimetic-Resolution-Cartridge-View-Motherboard-Easy-To-Install-Upgrade For Infernatron/InterLace TP Systems For Home, Office, Or Mobile — a Subsidized-Time year; the ordinary-calendar year 2007.
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