If The New York Times ever strikes you as an abstruse glut of
antediluvian perorations, if the newspaper’s profligacy of neologisms and
shibboleths ever set off apoplectic paroxysms in you, if it all seems a bit
recondite, here’s a reason to be sanguine:The Times has great data on the
words that send readers in search of a dictionary.As you may know, highlighting a word or passage on the Times website
calls up a question mark that users can click for a definition and other
reference material. (Though the feature was recently improved, it remains a mild
annoyance for myself and many others who nervously click and highlight text on webpages.) Anyway,
it turns out the Times tracks usage of that feature, and yesterday, deputy news
editor Philip Corbett who oversees the Times style manual offered reporters a
fascinating glimpse into the 50 most frequently looked-up words on nytimes.com
in 2009. We obtained the memo and accompanying chart, which offer a nice lesson
in how news sites can improve their journalism by studying user behavior.All of the 25-cent words I used in the lede of this post are on the
list. The most confusing to readers, with 7,645 look-ups through May 26, is sui
generis, the Latin term roughly meaning “unique” that’s frequently used in
legal contexts. The most ironic word is laconic (#4), which means “concise.”
The most curious is louche (#3), which means “dubious” or “shady” and,
as Corbett observes in his memo, inexplicably found its way into the paper 27
times over 5 months. (A Nexis search reveals that the word is all over the arts
pages, and Maureen Dowd is a repeat offender.)Corbett also notes that some words, like pandemic (#24), appear
on the list merely because they are used so often. Along those lines, feckless (#17) and fecklessness (#50) appear to be the favorite confounding words
of Times opinion writers. The most looked-up word per instance of usage is saturnine (#5), which Dowd wielded to describe Dick Cheney’s policy on torture.This is mostly just interesting — quiz: how many of these words can
you define? — but it’s also a reminder that news sites are sitting on a wealth
of data, from popular search terms to click rates, that can help them adjust to
reader preferences. So are Times scribes being asked to rein in their
vocabularies? That might be a Sisyphean (#37) task, but no, Corbett merely
advised reporters to “avoid the temptation to display our erudition at the
reader’s expense.”
Sat -- Saturnine? Like, the planet?
The New York Times compiles a list of the top fifty words that send readers scrounging for their unabridged dictionaries.