David Foster Wallace has introduced me to the word fantod, and frankly, it is about time.

For years, my life has been overrun by strange visitations of the mind: reveries, phantasms, psychic weather, little interior disturbances wearing capes. I have searched for the proper name for them, but every candidate proved either too genteel or too grand. Reverie sounds as though one is gazing dreamily across a lake. Phantasm suggests a Gothic specter rattling the ancestral silverware.

But fantod—and especially the fantods—has the right nervous electricity. It sounds like a small, disreputable creature that lives behind the wallpaper and interferes with one’s plans.

I therefore feel considerable sympathy for David Foster Wallace. My own existence has been overwhelmed by fantods for years; I simply lacked the taxonomic equipment to identify them. Now, at last, I can point toward the psychic menagerie and say: “Ah. Fantods. I thought so.”

This discovery alone has made me very happy to be reading Infinite Jest. Any novel capable of giving a name to one’s previously unnamed inner fauna has already rendered a valuable public service.