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From the Nieman Journalism Lab:
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.
[more] via N.Y. Times mines its data to identify words that readers find abstruse » Nieman Journalism Lab.
 readme:
June, moon, boon, loon. Much better month than May, dontcha think? Aren’t you actually sort of glad I skipped that nasty old month?
Besides, every recent monthly issue of this little circus has contained eighteen columns, six more than the twelve I write every month, so I’m really only a half a month late, right? Furthermore, at this rate, sooner or later I’m going to catch up with myself and disappear into some sort of ink-stained singularity unless I take a month off every so often. So I’m actually doing y’all a favor by goofing off. If this seems a bit confusing, you’re probably better off subscribing to TWD-by-Email, which will ensure the prompt arrival of my deathless prose in your e-mailbox every two weeks like clockwork. And by subscribing you’ll also be helping to pay the hosting bills of this site and buy food for the kitties. You do like cats, don’t you? They like you. Several of them mentioned you just today.
[Note: I wasn't really goofing off. Warm weather makes my ms much worse, and my energy level has been in the negative numbers lately.]
By the way, if you have problems reading actual content on the web (as opposed to, for instance, spending all day browsing LOLcats, like some people I could mention), check out Readability. It’s a browser bookmarklet that transforms the typical cacophony of type and ads on a page into one eminently readable column of nice, simple type. I have problems with my vision from the ms, and it has saved my sanity many times. If you just want to see the page as is, but with type large enough to read without messing with magnification settings every time you go to a site, NoSquint (an add-on for Firefox) is the ticket.
Continue reading this post » » »
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