Today’s Words That Work: Wrest

To Wrest (REST) — from the Old Norse for “to bend/turn” — is to get by effort; to take forcibly by violent pulling or twisting.

Example (as used by Leon Wieseltier in a New York Times review of Saul Bellow: Letters, edited by Benjamin Taylor): “Yet something is missing from the chortling celebration of Bellovian jollity, and that is its foundation in gloom…. The letters show a man constantly wresting high spirits from low, and forbidding himself ‘the newest wrinkle in anguish.’”