“‘Everyone minds here. They mind so much, they mind all the time, they mind like anything. They mind the step and they mind the door, and they d’you mind if I just. And there they were, poor dears, minding like mad. Everyone minds; but no one understands. They cannot understand what could have possessed such an odd couple to behave so curiously; it’s all too hopeless, clueless, fatal, futile. The opposite from us Americans. We understand everything. We’re always understanding. It’s the thing to do. We can immediately see why the poor kid flipped after the raw deal she got. And what’s more, when you come right down to it, we understand his compulsions too.'”
Elaine Dundy, The Old Man and Me
Archives for June 16, 2009
TT: You could look it up
This list of the fifty words appearing in the New York Times that are most frequently looked up by the paper’s readers has been making the rounds. I use twenty-six of the words often enough to describe them as part of my working vocabulary: apoplectic, apotheosis, banal, enervating, ersatz, feckless and fecklessness, fungible, glut, inchoate (one of my all-time favorite words), interlocutor, hagiography and hagiographic, laconic, louche, neologisms, peripatetic, peroration, recondite, risible, sanguine, sartorial, schadenfreude, shibboleths, and solipsistic and solipsism (remember The Tao of Steve?).
Inquiring minds want to know: how is it possible that 1,865 readers of the New York Times don’t know what banal means?
UPDATE: A reader writes:
The list is probably skewed by younger readers since it only registers online activity. We codgers, who read the print version, are not reflected in the count. Codgers have had more opportunities to learn words like louche and feckless.
Makes sense to me.
TT: Almanac
“I have never been adventurous; I need to be quiet in order to be free.”
George Santayana, Persons and Places (courtesy of Anecdotal Evidence)