Illustration by Leo Espinosa

In 2000, Abe Crystal, an undergraduate from Columbia, South Carolina, was enrolled in a writing class I teach at Princeton, and one of his assignments was to compose a profile of another student, whose name was Grainger David. This Grainger happened to be the undergraduate president of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s University Cottage Club and was as smoothly verbal and self-possessed as any of Fitzgerald’s characters, including Amory Blaine, of “This Side of Paradise.” In the profile, Abe Crystal mentioned, without amplification, that Grainger David had “sprezzatura.”

Sprezzatura? Of course, in this advanced age of the handheld vocabulary, everyone on earth knows what sprezzatura means, but in 2000 I had no idea, and I reached for an Italian dictionary. Nothing. I looked in another Italian dictionary. Nothing. I looked in Web II—Webster’s unabridged New International Dictionary, Second Edition. Niente. I picked up the phone and called my daughter Martha, who has lived in Italy and co-translated John Paul II’s “Crossing the Threshold of Hope” into English from the Vatican’s Italian.

Her credentials notwithstanding, Martha was no help.

I tried my daughter Sarah, a professor of art and architectural history at Emory, whose specialty is Baroque Rome. Her answering machine was as helpful as Martha.

That evening, I happened to attend a crowded reception at the New York Public Library with my daughter Jenny, the other translator of the Pope’s book, and her husband, Luca Passaleva, who was born, raised, and educated in Florence. “Hey, Luc. What is the meaning of ‘sprezzatura’?”

Luca: “I don’t know. Ask Jenny.”

Jenny: “I don’t know, but that couple over there might know. He’s in the Italian consulate.”

Consul: “Ask my wife. She is literary, I am not.”

Signora: “I’m very sorry. I have no idea.”

Back in Princeton the next day, I had a scheduled story conference with Abe Crystal, his profile of Grainger David on the desk in front of us. With my index finger touching “sprezzatura,” I said, “Abe, what the hell is this?”

Abe said he had picked up the word in Castiglione’s “The Courtier,” from 1528. “It means effortless grace, all easy, doing something cool without apparent effort.”

Soon after he left, I called Sarah again, and she picked up. She said Abe had it right, but the word “nonchalance” should be added to his definition. She said that Raphael carried the ideal of sprezzatura into painting. “He painted his friend Baldassare Castiglione as the ideal courtier, the embodiment of sprezzatura. It’s now in the Louvre.”

Robert Bingham, my editor at The New Yorker for sixteen years, had a florescent, not to mention distinguished, mustache. In some piece or other, early on, I said of a person I was writing about that he had a “sincere” mustache. This brought Bingham, manuscript in hand, out of his office and down the hall to mine, as I had hoped it would. A sincere mustache, Mr. McPhee, a sincere mustache? What does that mean? Was I implying that it is possible to have an insincere mustache?

I said I could not imagine anything said more plainly.

The mustache made it into the magazine and caused me to feel self-established as The New Yorker’s nonfiction mustache specialist. Across time, someone came along who had “a no-nonsense mustache,” and a Great Lakes ship captain who had “a gyroscopic mustache,” and a North Woodsman who had “a timber-cruiser’s guileless mustache.” A family practitioner in Maine had “an analgesic mustache,” another doctor “a soothing mustache,” and another a mustache that “seems medical, in that it spreads flat beyond the corners of his mouth and suggests no prognosis, positive or negative.”

Writing has to be fun at least once in a pale blue moon.

Dodge had a great deal more hair on his upper lip than elsewhere on his head. With his grand odobene mustache he had everything but the tusks. . . . His words filtered softly through the Guinness Book mustache. It was really a sight to see, like a barrel on his lip.

Inevitably, all this led to Andrew Lawson. Andrew Lawson? The great Scottish-born Andrew Lawson, structural geologist, University of California, Berkeley, who named—perhaps eponymously—the San Andreas Fault. Andrew Lawson was lowered in a bucket into a caisson in San Francisco Bay in order to decide if the south pier of the Golden Gate Bridge could be constructed where it is.

With his pure-white hair, his large frame, his tetragrammatonic mustache, Lawson personified Higher Authority.

Querying letters poured into The New Yorker’s office like water over the sides of a caisson. With utmost generosity, the writer Charles McGrath, then a young New Yorker editor, voluntarily answered them.

A tetragrammatonic anything and a term that seems to have stalled in the Italian Renaissance are points of reference that might just irritate, rather than illuminate, some readers. Make that most readers. The perpetrator is the writer. Mea culpa. Meanwhile, though, in a contrary way, we have come upon a topic of first importance in the making of a piece of writing: its frame of reference, the things and people you choose to allude to in order to advance its comprehensibility. Mention Beyoncé and everyone knows who she is. Mention Veronica Lake and you might as well be in the Quetico-Superior. Obviously, if you mention New York, you can count on most readers to know what that is and where. Mention Vernal Corners and you can’t. It’s upstate. What would you do with Scarsdale? Do you need to say where it is? Step van, Stanley Steamer, black-and-white unit, gooseneck trailer. If you know what a gooseneck trailer is, raise your hand.

One hand rises among thirty-two.

“Where are you from, Stacey?”

“Idaho.”

To sense the composite nature of frames of reference, think of their incidental aftermath, think of some old ones as they have moved through time, eventually forming distinct strata in history. At the University of Cambridge, academic supervisors in English literature would hand you a photocopy of an unidentified swatch of prose or poetry and ask you to say in what decade of what century it was written. This custom is called dating and is not as difficult as you might imagine. A useful comparison is to the science of geochronology, which I once tried to explain with this description: