Walter Mitty (wol-tuhr MIT-ee) noun

   An ordinary, often ineffectual person who indulges in fantastic
   daydreams of personal triumphs.

[After the main character in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty by
James Thurber.]

   "The men you see rolling over the zoysia at 5 miles per hour are
   pretending to be Mario Andretti at Indianapolis. Nothing draws
   Walter Mitty from a soul like the sound of a riding lawn mower
   engine."
   Rheta Grimsley Johnson, Roar of the mower helps build a woman's psyche,
   The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, May 1, 1998.

One of the most important ingredients of fiction is its characters. Think
of any memorable book, play or movie and you'll recall its people--from
protagonist (and deuteragonist and tritagonist and ...) to antagonist are
folks one can feel, relate to, though not necessarily always agree with.
These are the people with depths, they are not cardboard characters or
people who live a 2D life, to use the publishing jargon. These multifaceted
people come alive on the pages of a book, on the stage of a theater, or on
the screen of a movie theater with all their foibles, follies and victories.
Perhaps the ultimate sign of their character is that they live on on the
pages of dictionaries. This week's AWAD focuses on a few of these fictional
persons who came alive and added a bit more color to our language.     -Anu

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The palest ink is better than the best memory. -Chinese proverb

Q: Some time ago you featured a quote/word about x in AWAD. Could you resend 
it?
A: You may search the archives at http://wordsmith.org/awad/search.html
   or browse them at http://wordsmith.org/awad/archives.html All the
   words and quotes since the beginning of AWAD are available there.

Pronunciation:
http://wordsmith.org/words/Walter_Mitty.wav
http://wordsmith.org/words/Walter_Mitty.ram