So, I looked it up in my handy Oxford American Dictionary widget; the standard descriptions note the double status as an adjective and noun, but I was struck by the following passage, entitled "Word Note". As I read the note, posted below, I noticed its increasingly idiosyncratic writing style and I thought to myself, "This certainly reads like David Foster Wallace." Lo and behold, the signature -- DFW; voila!
If my little epiphany today wasn't enough proof, I've decided to take a little time off from DFW -- although, don't worry, my X-mas list has a truckload of DFW books on it. Anyway, what am I currently reading? Dracula, by Bram Stoker...fun stuff, particularly for October.
myriadAs an adjective, myriad means "an indefinitely large number [of something]" (The Local Group comprises myriad galaxies) or "made up of a great many diverse elements" (the myriad plant life of Amazonia). As a noun, it's used with an article and of to mean "a large number" (The new CFO faced a myriad of cash-flow problems). What's odd is that some authorities consider only the adjectival myriad correct—there's about a 50-50 chance that a given copyeditor will query a myriad of —even though the noun usage has a much longer and more distinguished history. It's really only in nineteenth-century poetry that myriad starts showing up as an adjective. So myriad' s situation right now is confusing. It's tempting simply to recommend avoiding the noun usage so that there's no chance a reader will be bugged. The truth, though, is that any reader who's bugged by a myriad of is both persnickety and wrong—and you can usually rebut sniffy teachers, copyeditors, et al. by directing them to Coleridge's "Myriad myriads of lives teemed forth…."
--DFW
Conversational, opinionated, and idiomatic, these Word Notes are an opportunity to see a working writer's perspective on a particular word or usage.
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