Big, Fancy Words

Notes from the newsroom on grammar, usage and style.

Times readers are a well-educated group. They expect sophisticated coverage and literate prose. They delight in good writing and don’t shy away from complicated topics.

On the other hand, they probably don’t carry an unabridged dictionary along with the newspaper as they take the subway to work. And they don’t expect a news article to pose the same linguistic challenge as “Finnegans Wake.”

Our choice of words should be thoughtful and precise, and we should never talk down to readers. But how often should even a Times reader come across a word like hagiography or antediluvian or peripatetic, especially before breakfast?

One benefit of reading The Times online is the “look up” function: double-click on any word and a little question mark appears. Click the question mark and you get a definition from the American Heritage Dictionary.

My colleague James Robinson, the director of Web analytics, shared some intriguing data with me: a list of the words that had been looked up most often by Times readers so far this year.

Before you check out the list, a few words of caution. Don’t take the precise ranking or numbers too literally. Obviously, how often a word is looked up depends partly on how much it’s used and how many people are reading that article online. If Tom Friedman uses some moderately unusual word (say, fealty), and I use a real head-scratcher on the same day (say, phlogiston), it’s a good bet that more readers will look up his word.

And remember, I’m not trying to ban these or any challenging words. Some uses may be perfectly justified. But we should keep in mind why we’re writing and who’s reading, and under what circumstances. And we should avoid the temptation to display our erudition at the reader’s expense.

That said, here’s the list. Check it out, then return for a few final comments.

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I’ll admit that there were two words on the list that had me thoroughly stumped: sumptuary (“of or regulating expenses or expenditures; specif., seeking to regulate extravagance on religious or moral grounds”) and phlogiston (“an imaginary element formerly believed to cause combustion and to be given off by anything burning”).

Our handling of “phlogiston,” though, showed one way to help readers with a tricky word, even if they don’t click to look it up. It was in a quote in a Science story about physicists who work on Wall Street, and we gave the background before using the word:

But it is not so easy to get new ideas into the economic literature, many quants complain. J. Doyne Farmer, a physicist and professor at the Santa Fe Institute, and the founder and former chief scientist of the Prediction Company, said he was shocked when he started reading finance literature at how backward it was, comparing it to Middle-Ages theories of fire. “They were talking about phlogiston — not the right metaphor,” Dr. Farmer said.

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Some entries seem self-referential: it’s no coincidence that a list of obscure and difficult words includes abstruse and recondite, not to mention solipsistic. And while many of these words may look like a foreign language, some actually are: sui generis, bildungsroman and my old friend schadenfreude all make appearances. And some entries just seem baffling: how did we end up using louche 27 times?

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Remember, too, that striking and very specific words can become wan and devalued through overuse. Consider apotheosis, which we’ve somehow managed to use 18 times so far this year. It literally means “deification, transformation into a divinity.” An extended meaning is “a glorified ideal.” But in some of our uses it seems to suggest little more than “a pretty good example.” Most recently, we’ve said critics view the Clinton health-care plan as “the apotheosis of liberal, out-of-control bureaucracy-building,” and we’ve described cut-off shorts as “that apotheosis of laissez-faire wear.”

So what do we say if someone really is transformed into a god?

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After Deadline examines questions of grammar, usage and style encountered by writers and editors of The Times. It is adapted from a weekly newsroom critique overseen by Philip B. Corbett, the deputy news editor, who is also in charge of The Times’s style manual.

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