Nerve gas, Weapon of chemical warfare that affects the transmission of nerve impulses through the nervous system.
According to Ryan Compton's Infinite Jest by the Numbers, Wallace used a vocabulary of 20,584 unique words to write the 577,608-word Infinite Jest. 10. 11. n+1 has a neat story about where the name for Michael Pemulis, Hal's drug-dealing friend at Enfield Tennis Academy, came from.
Most of the action in the novel takes place in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, or Y.D.A.U., which is probably Gregorian 2009. Critic Stephen Burn, in his book on Infinite Jest, argues that Y.D.A.U. corresponds to 2009: the MIT Language Riots took place in 1997 (n.