The New York Times has an online feature that enables readers to click on a word they don't recognize and get an instant definition. This clicking then provides the Times with some interesting statistics: The most-clicked words are the ones that are proving most cryptic to readers. A list of them will be, then, roughly, a list of the most difficult words in current use by New York journalists.
So the Times issues this list every year, providing a fun quiz for its readers, and a way to prove your erudition. Which of these do you know? The first three of the 2010 list are: inchoate, profligacy and sui generis. Easy, right?
I thought I knew inchoate. But you learn something new whenever you look up a word you have been tossing around for years. I would have said disordered, incoherent, and I was close but slightly off: unformed, just made, rudimentary. Ditto for profligate: I would have said extravagant or loose-spending, but I was not aware of the other meaning, licentious or dissolute. Sui generis - unique, literally "of its own kind" - I know because I often feel like correcting people who use it for some reason to mean ex nihilo, from nothing, without precedent, out of the blue.
The rest of the list includes some surprisingly easy ones (who would have to look up "overhaul"?), but most of them are genuine cocktail-party stoppers, real beauties: obduracy, jejune, Manichean, canard, cynosure. Wouldn't you like to use these every day? It's like a catalogue of gems, some lustrous, some angular, some bright and aqueous, some dark and serrated. Let's take them out of the box and pass them around.
I will begin by admitting the ones I really did not know. One of them is a trick: baldenfreude (No. 6 on the list). It turns out it is a joke word coined by Maureen Dowd in a column she was writing about U.S. television networks. I tried to read the column, but the details of the landscape she was describing were so foreign to me I didn't even get the joke. Anyway, it's only on the list because it generated a large number of clicks, and you can now forget about it.
There's only one other I had never heard: renminbi, a unit of Chinese currency. It means "people's currency." There are two other words on the list that I have heard a great deal but never quite feel confident about defining. Sclerotic: I would have guessed it meant seized up or withered in some way, and it does indeed refer to a condition, but more precisely it means hardened, and so can be used metaphorically to mean intransigent. Comity: it turns out it has three different meanings depending on context: 1. an association of nations or groups, 2. the recognition by a court of law of the decisions made by another court of law, 3. religious harmony. I wish we knew which of these was in most current use at the NYT, but we don't.
Of all the others, I would like to single out jejune for discussion as it is one of my favourites and I am always dissatisfied with its dictionary definitions. Dictionaries say something like "shallow and puerile," or "dry and uninteresting," whereas it's commonly used to mean slightly pretentious. It comes from the Latin for fasting (the French word for fast is still jeun); its metaphorical meaning derives from the idea of scantness, barrenness, lack of nutritional substance. But it's that idea of the puerile or juvenile that seems to dominate contemporary use: If you say someone is being jejune these days, you tend to mean sophomoric. I'm not sure where this connotation has come from, and I would welcome ideas from readers.
Another interesting aspect of this annual list is how it differs from the previous year's: The changing lexicon of abstruse words must to some extent reveal linguistic fashions. Schadenfreude - the word that Dowd was playing with - actually appeared on last year's NYT list, but not on this year's. And NYT editors noted in their blog about questions of usage that it didn't appear much in the newspaper at all until the 1990s. Perhaps schadenfreude has been a vogue word whose time has peaked, and now all we have left are these punning iterations - as happened to beatnik and fashionista. Or it just may mean that people are now so familiar with the meaning of the word that they don't need to look it up any more.
I am struck too that louche, saturnine, phlogiston and fungible were frequently looked up in 2009, but not in 2010. Do we simply know all these words now? (I don't: I had to look up the last two.) Or were they simply tossed around more last year? What exactly was fungible (interchangeable) about 2009? What was any newspaper in 2009 doing discussing phlogiston (the essence of fire, a concept abandoned some 400 years ago)?
The fact that we can record these queries always raises the question among newspaper people about the level of vocabulary we should be striving for. It's fine to assume one's readers are not uneducated, say most editors in mainstream publications, but merely showing off one's erudition is not in the service of communication. I would say that we can only learn and understand new words by encountering them, somewhere, for the first time, and that this is what many people read newspapers for.