Words David Foster Wallace Circled in His Dictionary (Oblivion, A Supposedly Fun Thing, Ulysses)

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TL;DR

Three companion posts (all 2010-06-01) in which the DFW Words blogger "Don" applies his signature project — cataloguing the words Wallace circled in his American Heritage Dictionary — to three books other than Infinite Jest: Wallace's story collection Oblivion, his essay collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, and, tellingly, Joyce's Ulysses. Each post lists a circled word, its dictionary definition, and the sentence in which it lands in the target book. They advance no theory about Infinite Jest; their value to the IJ reader is as corroboration and context for the marginalia artifact whose IJ application is catalogued separately — evidence that the same pool of circled words seeds Wallace's whole oeuvre (and that he was reading his dictionary against Joyce as well as writing from it).

Key claims

The three lists apply one artifact — Wallace's circled American Heritage Dictionary — across his own work and Joyce's: Oblivion (sixteen words, e.g. Bespoke, Catastasis, Preterition, Quondam, Rebarbative), A Supposedly Fun Thing (e.g. Alfresco, Exergue, Lugubrious, Mavourneen, Mazurka), and Ulysses (the longest list, e.g. Antipode, Bibulous, Coxcomb, Delectation).
Several circled words recur across the lists, showing the same marked vocabulary surfacing in different books: Corporation appears in all three; Bespoke and Catastasis appear in both the Oblivion and Ulysses lists — a small demonstration that Wallace deployed the circled pool repeatedly rather than once.
The Ulysses list is the pointed one: it records circled words Wallace's dictionary shares with Joyce, positioning the marginalia as reading notes as much as a writer's word-hoard.
The A Supposedly Fun Thing post closes with one of Don's periodic word counts — "There are 117 instances of the word" tennis in that collection — the same tallying habit he applies to IJ and Americana elsewhere on the blog.

Themes

Wallace's vocabulary and dictionary marginalia; the writer's word-hoard; influence and reading (the Joyce/Ulysses dimension); the continuity of style across Wallace's oeuvre. No Infinite Jest interpretive theme is advanced.

Cross-references

The flagship IJ application of the same project (the circled words that appear in Infinite Jest, with definitions and passage locations), of which these three are the non-IJ siblings; at least one word here — preterition — also turns up in that IJ list, per the companion note.
The full circled-word census (the ~494-word AHD list), of which these per-book lists are curated subsets.
The same blogger's influence posts (End Zone, Americana), which likewise read Wallace against his sources.

Notable passages

The lists are word/definition/citation tables rather than prose; the only running-text remark is the A Supposedly Fun Thing tally that "There are 117 instances of the word" tennis in that collection.