Word of the Day + Quiz | foreshadow

foreshadow • \ˈfȯr-ˈsha-(ˌ)dō\ • verb

: indicate by signs


The word foreshadow has appeared in 33 New York Times articles in the past year, including on May 15 in Thomas Mallon’s response in “What’s the Best Book Written About Siblings?”:

The late Jim Harrison’s “Legends of the Fall” is itself a sort of sibling, the title novella in a volume containing two others. Best ever? Hardly. But sometimes “interesting” can be better than best, and this moody, unstable story — full of shifts in pacing and focus — stays with a reader well after it has concluded with the burial of Tristan, the middle and most magnetic of the three Ludlow brothers created by its author.

… The story’s narrative voice is arbitrary and godlike, always very distant but by turns lyrical and essayistic, superbly telling instead of showing: “Susannah’s character owed more to the early 19th than the early 20th century.” When the narrator has the future on his mind, he doesn’t foreshadow what he can simply foretell: We learn that Tristan will die “on a snowy hillside in Alberta late in December in 1977 at the age of 84,” nearly 50 pages and more than 50 years before it happens.


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