What about the word, “indeed”? That’s a word I associate with TNY. Indeed, I always use the word, “indeed,” when I’m pretending to be a New Yorker person.

You’re onto something there, Carolita. “Indeed” gets a whopping 390 hits. Not “irony” numbers, but then nobody could realistically expect that.

I’d like to cross a few words off this list to prevent high school graduates from overusing them in the future; I’m disenchanted with “parameter,” “facetious,” “recapitulate,” and “interpolate,” among others. They’re all circumlocutions!

Also, how come so many of these words describe unpleasant personality traits? I request that the population as a whole cease its churlish, obsequious, xenophobic, jejune, supercilious, totalitarian, feckless, fatuous, vacuous, deleterious, plagiarizing, bellicose, diffident, nihilistic, and/or excessively ironic behavior. Then we will have little need for these words, which wil fall out of common circulation except when needed to describe characters in vintage novels and reality shows.

Hmmm. I defend “facetious” on the grounds that it covers intent better than “comic,” “funny,” “humorous,” etc. I’m with you on the others, and I’ll even add “paradigm.”

For more idiosyncratic reasons, I dislike “hegemony” and “enervate” as well.

I don’t really see why “orthography” makes this list.

To end this comment on a positive note, my favorite word here is “feckless”!

Where is “zeitgeist” and “schadenfreud”? I first read these in TNY as a college student and had to look them up. A short while back it seemed you couldn’t escape it. Last year it seemed “schadenfreud” was in favor. Maybe on the next random list.

I am waging a personal war against “quotidian”. It’s a fancy-schmansy way of saying “everyday”. Was it a New Yorker editor who said “Never use the two-dollar word where the ten-cent one will do?”

For the record, “schadenfreude” gets 6 hits, “zeitgeist” gets 19.

As a German speaker (true!), I dislike “zeitgeist” (in English) but like “schadenfreude” quite a bit.

Stephen: I’ve been Googling it, and as far as I can tell, both Strunk/White and Orwell made very much the same point without use of a monetary metaphor.

It’s definitely a challenge to use “quotidian” without being pretentious.

I googled the spelling of “schadenfreude” before posting. The New York Review of Books was my source, and they spelled it “schadenfreud”. Are there two ways to spell it?

Never mind! I now see that it was a play on words.

“Avoid the elaborate, the pretentious, the coy, and the cute. Do not be tempted by a twenty-dollar word when there is a ten-center handy, ready and able. Anglo-Saxon is a livelier tongue than Latin, so use Anglo-Saxon words. In this, as in so many matters pertaining to style, one’s ear must be one’s guide…” (Strunk and White 77)

I find it odd that “euro” didn’t come up more often. Can that be right? Surely the NYer did a bunch of articles related to the EU and the common euro standard? Hm.

I agree with Martin about facetious, though. And I’d argue that all high school students who want to attend small liberal arts colleges DO need to know “hegemony.” That’s bound to come up during orientation, when members of the hegemony have to stand to one side and promise not to speak for the first month of school.

notbatgirl: Thanks for the backup on “facetious.” I wouldn’t have been surprised if the Euro had come up much more, but I’m also not surprised this way. If the search were full-text, if The New Yorker were The Economist, if The New Yorker were based in England…. all of these factors subtly bring the numbers down. It seems like it should have been a massive story for The New Yorker, but in practice you can only write one story every couple of months that’s even tangentially about it, which is about what the numbers show. Also, a hypothetical 40-page article that mentioned “Euro” five times in every paragraph would register as precisely one hit, so there’s that too. (The closest thing to that, for the record, would seem to be Isabel Hilton’s 4/27/1998 “Annals of Money” article.)

John: Well done! My Google searches were on variations of the phrase “word will do.” Do people know that the entire (pre-White) text of The Elements of Style is at Bartleby? Well, it is.

“Look to the left of you. Look to the right of you. In four years, one of these students will have embraced hegemony, and the other will be excessively facetious.”