By Kevin Johnson, USA TODAY
Jan 2, 2003
Anu Garg triggers the kind of passionate reaction that actors, authors and memoirists would die for. "I am humbled by your story," wrote Sharon Barton, a staffing company manager in California. "It is a tribute to the human spirit."
"Your entire life story is inspiring," Dennis Anderson wrote. "I started to tear up when I related it to my wife. I'm so glad I stole that copy of The Wall Street Journal a year ago that contained the story about you."
It's tempting to tell such people to get a life, and it's hard to believe a guy can get e-mail like this for basically learning English. But India-born Garg, 35, who now lives near Seattle, has done a lot more. For the past nine years, while trying to improve his own command of the language, Garg has e-mailed a word a day (wordsmith.org/awad), plus its definition, pronunciation and roots, to an increasingly large group of recipients. His free e-mail list, which started with about 200 subscribers, has ballooned to more than 500,000.
The devotion of his acolytes has grown proportionally: Some teachers have made the daily entries required reading. Two New Jersey doctors use his words to create limericks (often salty). An online soap opera, "doug&Sylvia" (home.san.rr.com/wanger/douglas/), frequently revolves around each day's entry. And two homeowners in the Seattle area reportedly post the word of the day on signs on their front lawns.
Not surprisingly, Garg's new book, A Word a Day: A Romp Through Some of the Most Unusual and Intriguing Words in English (Wiley, $14.95), is turning out to be as popular as his Web site.
His mother is probably stunned. Growing up in India, Garg says, he moved frequently with his family, thanks to his father's job as a local government monitor. They lived, he says, in a succession of small villages, "one month here, six months there." Fortunately or unfortunately, his father was a bibliotaph (a person who hides or hoards books).
"So part of the move required packing all these books," Garg says. "My mother got sick of that." She advised her son not to read so much.
But Garg loved, and still loves, to browse dictionaries. After imagining how pleasant it would be to receive a new word every day in his e-mail box, he began the list while in computer science grad school.
The words he chooses are sometimes as common as "peninsula" or "bad hair day," and sometimes as rare as "gyrovague" (a term for a monk who travels from place to place) or "onychophagia" (the habit of biting your nails). Frequently, Garg will group a week's worth of words around a theme; for example, gender-specific nouns such as "gynarchy" (government by women).
The longer the list exists, the more Garg notices a trend. He likens it to "mithridatism." Mithridates, king of ancient Pontus, near the Black Sea, was fearful of being poisoned. So he dosed himself with increasingly large amounts of poison to acquire a tolerance. Mithridatism now refers to the process of building immunity to poison.
Similarly, he says, "longtime subscribers ... request more unusual words. And I, too, try to find unusual, intriguing and out-of-the-ordinary words."
Luckily for his fans, though, immunity to English isn't likely.