Matt Keally's Blog

With most newspapers having a seventh or eighth grade reading level, journalists really seem to love to sneak in five dollar words. Here are a few that seem to be used quite frequently as well as a few other words I find to be just plain annoying:

• crux: Tons of uppity, nasal-voiced government majors loved to throw this one around in my undergrad GER classes.
• heartbreaker: A real favorite of the SI staff at school. Is the losing team going to jump off a bridge?  Reading about sports shouldn’t have anything in common with reading a romance novel.
• naive: Another favorite of the nerdy, radical basement dweller.  Anyone who disagrees with them is usually labeled as “naive.”
• flummox: Sounds like some kind of digestive problem.
• pernicious: A high school teacher of mine used this one a lot in class and always seemed to squeal when he said it.  Plenty of words sound better than this one.
• uptick: This one is often used to massage statistics to favor the author’s viewpoint.
• tussle:  This has a real redneck sound to it.  Git yerself in a lil tussle?
• woe:  What is this, the Middle Ages?

Another one of my peeves is the increasing use of “women” as an adjective.  Get it straight: “women” is a noun, “female” is the adjective.

Most of these words I find in reading the Virginian-Pilot, the quality of which has really crashed and burned over the past year or so.  I read the print version when I go home since my parents have a subscription.  The paper is increasingly packed with ads, even on the front page.  Every time I get the print version, it takes forever to throw out all the crap to get to the actual news stories.  Furthermore, the Virginian-Pilot has been writing fewer of their own stories.  The quality of those stories that remain are terrible, hence the irritating five dollar words.  Unbelievably, they went so far as to remove the Business section.  The local section is really the only thing that remains that is unique to the paper and it’s been getting a lot thinner as of late.  The paper also does a tech section on Mondays which I never read since everything that’s in it was already out on the Internet weeks ago in some AP article.

Google News is great at collecting world and national news and does a solid job at retrieving interesting local stories.  I also use Digg, but I find that a lot of the popular stories seem kind of weird or have a definite bias cough:Huffington Post:cough.