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Times readers are literate and well educated. But privately, away from the cocktail party, some of them may wonder: what exactly does “jejune” mean, anyway? If someone put a gun to my head, could I give a precise definition of “atavistic”?
Fortunately, for our online readers, help is readily available. Double-click any word in an article and a question mark appears; click the question mark and you get a definition from the American Heritage dictionary
I did not know that about the clicky looking-up of words! I do most of my NY Times reading on their mobile site, but I might have to change that.
One of the Times blogs published the list of most-looked-up from the last year (including one word which was coined as a joke, and is awesome. I'll leave that to you to figure out.)
( and here it is! )
Without turning this into a meme like those "which books have you read" things I will say that I'm only comfortably familiar with probably half the list, in terms of knowing the meaning well enough to understand in a sentence, and at least 3 or 4 of them I just finally looked up in the past few months after years of skimming over them.
There are probably ten or fewer that I would use in a sentence with any confidence, and at least ten that I have absolutely no idea what they mean. And I read. A lot.
Fortunately, for our online readers, help is readily available. Double-click any word in an article and a question mark appears; click the question mark and you get a definition from the American Heritage dictionary
I did not know that about the clicky looking-up of words! I do most of my NY Times reading on their mobile site, but I might have to change that.
One of the Times blogs published the list of most-looked-up from the last year (including one word which was coined as a joke, and is awesome. I'll leave that to you to figure out.)
( and here it is! )
Without turning this into a meme like those "which books have you read" things I will say that I'm only comfortably familiar with probably half the list, in terms of knowing the meaning well enough to understand in a sentence, and at least 3 or 4 of them I just finally looked up in the past few months after years of skimming over them.
There are probably ten or fewer that I would use in a sentence with any confidence, and at least ten that I have absolutely no idea what they mean. And I read. A lot.
