Leland Shaw, the shell-shocked World War II veteran featured in the novels Junior Ray, The Yazoo Blues, and Sailing to Alluvium by John Pritchard, “never hesitates to warp and work a word to his uses” according to Pritchard, who claims — in Sailing to Alluvium — that the word “smiteful” just fell out of Shaw’s mouth as he, Pritchard, was transcribing the character’s journals.
Editors of Wiktionary, the “lexical companion to Wikipedia,” took note and included the Sailing to Alluvium reference in the dictionary’s entry for the word “smiteful.”
When Pritchard was asked what Leland Shaw might think about the Wiktionary citation, Pritchard quoted a “telepathogram” he received from Shaw that said, “The entry’s value is predicated entirely upon the notion that we shall always have electricity.”
Sailing to Alluvium is available from NewSouth Books or your favorite bookseller.