My Hitchens Word of the Moment
Saturday, March 14, 2009 at 11:33AM 
There are few writers who routinely shove me to my dictionary. William F. Buckley was one, Christopher Hitchens is another. Sometimes the similarities in their prose far outweigh their political, social or philosophical differences, and indeed these days the nexus of their opinions' evolution lends each a kind of funhouse-mirror image of the other. Each one a self-admitted situational son-of-a-bitch, both in apology and with a swagger. Each a furious laborer, each with a mote of self love in a swirl of self-deprecation.
Certainly there was admiration of Hitchens for Buckley, and I'd assume vice versa. Hitchens' eulogic farewell essay in the Weekly Standard rattles with echoes of the man he buries. It reminds me, as the Old Guards of the Old Guard die - Buckley, Mailer, Terkel, Updike, Vonnegut, add your own - of their ability to engage one another ferociously, yet with respect and civil regard, a regard given because it was earned, by reputation and skill it was commanded, and accordingly it was returned.
Hitchens is perhaps becoming one such. Whether I proudly embrace or hotly reject a Hitchens attitude, anti-theist, militaristic, libertarian-seeming or simply mouth-foamingly mad, I'll read it to the end. I don't agree with everything he writes, Hell, I don't know if I agree with half. To act otherwise is to risk being a dittohead. No, but I like the man because he compels me to think for myself, to do my homework.
Style? A writer can choose to elaborate the words into fitful fugues like the late David Foster Wallace or parse them bebop style like Vonnegut, or illustrate thought with beauty, clarity and restraint like the best of Updike. Hitchens strikes me as more of a boxer. I sure as all Hell wouldn't want to get in the ring with him, but I love watching him take it to it. Light on his feet, deft, cunning, occasionally brutal, versed in the strictures of Queensberry yet not above the occasional brawl (flipping off the audience of Bill Maher's show, for example).
It's the reading of it that gets me, see, those strata of sentences, thoughtful, portentous, often terse as a sharp smack. If sometimes thrown together, then still demonstrating consideration and craft. And those words, those gnarly nuggets of the over-read, one in damn near every single essay, critique, chapter. Routinely shoving me to my dictionary, and I keep an adequate one, the two-volume Shorter Oxford.
One such is "integument." It's used in Hitchen's review of Francis Wheen's book Marx's "Das Kapital: A Biography published in this month's Atlantic Monthly. I invite you to look up the etymology yourself, if you're enough of a word geek, but here it refers to a sturdy outer layer, a containment, something that keeps out as well as it keeps in, not always a good thing.
A good word well used is an onion of meaning, and its redolence flavors the whole. Use it poorly, it ruins the whole, and the writer reads as an ass. Show of hands now, how many of you have ever used "integument" in a sentence? If you're a spelling bee judge, put your hand down. Hitchens is one of the few I regularly read who can get away this exercise, and he can because he does it with nimble skill and level-eyed intent. I don't think he's interested in things that are Quite Interesting. Instead I think he's concerned with, as Peter DeVries' hepatic novelist Earl Peckham put it, the Sorry Scheme of Things Entire. More so, What The Hell to Do With It.
So enjoy "integument." Please use it sparingly, and if you see him, Thank Mr. Hitchens for me.
-kwm
Reader Comments (36)
I will try to make a conversation swerve to a point where I can actually use this word!
Well done! Careful, a few more posts like this, and people will start taking you seriously, and then you'll have to sell out that carefully constructed public persona of Funny Person for that of Social Pundit. And then no puppet in the world can save you....
And now I have a new author to track down and read....
I strongly agree. But no matter the source, I cannot read or hear any commentary on vocabulary without the memory of some 1930s comedy running gag of a gangster improving his intellect with the "new word of the day" method.
Can you name a film with this? I have a feeling more than one might exist.
My brain hurts.
You also need to exclude biology and botany teachers, they use it quite a bit. That's why I knew what it meant, at least in a planty sense.
Really cool that you mentioned Peter DeVries. I'm much too young to remember he when he was alive, but I have discovered him none-the-less. Really liked his "Stitch in Time."
As a reader of Hitchens, it does my heart good to know that one among my pantheon of comic deities is also a fan.
As an insatiable logophile and an aficianado of Mr. Hitchens and his cerebral jousting I read your paean with great interest. I agree with many of his caustic broadsides and greatly admire the incomparable acuity of many of his arguments although I wholly reject his scornful dismissal of theism because I believe it is sheer self-aggrandizing folly to attempt, not unlike fellow atheist Richard Dawkins, to prove a negative. As brilliant as is the mind of Mr. Hitchens I cannot disagree with another genius who also forged away at the art of wordsmithery and wrote that "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy".
Hitchens is Da' Bomb!
Sorry, had to say that. Not sure anyone in history has ever said that. I get the feeling when I read Hitchens that his purpose is to elevate the masses just enough that he can swat them down again. Not too many people aspire to that, which sets him apart. Buckley however just seemed to want to prattle on and on; etymological masturbation for it's own sake.
I actually used this word in my first book, Tales of the Black Earth (don't look for it, it's safely hidden away in obscurity)
"And as I watched the world fade to black, the horror of what had occurred in the classroom withered to distant, hazy recollections and hand-me-down memories; a cast off integument of images and feelings of a tedious, predictable life in which I had no vested interest. It felt as if a great weight had been lifted from my chest. As though I’d been liberated, set free."
He was on Bill Maher's show with (of all people) Salmon Rushdie and actor/rapper Mos Def. Mos was trying to convince Hitchens that all people have religion in their lives, whether it is a god or not. Something they believe in and gives their lives direction, to which Bill Maher raises Christopher's scotch glass and says "here's his."
Salman, not salmon.
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