I'm afraid that part of the answer to this is that it merely comes from *attempting* (and I emphasize the word) to read writers such as Eco and Pynchon, who write from these seemingly unfathomable depths. for an instance, I wandered onto the word loxodrome reading Pynchon's Mason & Dixon (but, of course, you have to also wonder enough to LIU in order to discover rhumb lines and loxodromic curves.)