Stem-winding and Spellbinding Sentences Minicast - 18 March 2009

<p>Recently The New Yorker magazine ran a profile of the writer David Foster Wallace, who died last year at the age of 46. The article included a line that I think Foster himself might have appreciated. It went like this: 'He was known for endlessly fracturing narratives and for stem-winding sentences adorned with footnotes that were themselves stem-winders.'<br> <br> So what's a stem-winder?<br> <br> Stem-winder goes back to the mid-19th century. It refers to an invention that was as nifty and state-of-the-art then as the coolest iPhone apps today.<br> <br> Think back to the days...