Jul 282011
The Times Topics blog has a list of words that its readers look up most frequently in the Times‘ on-line dictionary. It contains true obscurities like “panegyric” and “crepuscular”, but it contains a few that should be gimmes for the paper’s typical liberal elite reader. I mean, “ubiquitous”? Really? And isn’t “brinkmanship” fairly self-explanatory? Perhaps an explanation lies in the fact that the Times is available to anyone with an Internet connection and so its readers have a broad range of vocabulary skills. And that’s not intended to sound like English major snobbery. If reading the Times teaches people incredibly useful words like “feckless” and “schadenfreude”, that can only be a good thing.
