The story itself, or the lady it was about, was interesting, but for fucks sake
> In a way, the happy turn of events in the past few months had left her even more discombobulated.
> The work was impenetrably abstruse.
> … but neither did they go in for gooey panegyrics to the likes of Newt Gingrich…
When did it become a thing amongst American journalists that knowing how to use thesaurus on your word processor makes you both a really amazing writer as well as super-duper cool smart person?! For fucks sake, Orwell and Hemingway wrote the way 11-year-old could understand every word, they were still masterful in the depth of their stories. I hate this jargony thesaurus-wanking in today’s journalism and I don’t think I am only one.
I guess it depends on your background. For me, those words are part of my vocabulary, and I would not think twice when seeing them in an article. The author might not have been thesaurus-hunting if they had already internalized those words, right?
However, I agree that some authors go too hard on the thesaurus for seemingly no good reason. The New Yorker and certain other "high brow" publications are well known for this. "Obstreperous", "prelapsarian", and "fuliginous" are not, I would argue, part of anyone's vocabulary.
> In a way, the happy turn of events in the past few months had left her even more discombobulated.
> The work was impenetrably abstruse.
> … but neither did they go in for gooey panegyrics to the likes of Newt Gingrich…
When did it become a thing amongst American journalists that knowing how to use thesaurus on your word processor makes you both a really amazing writer as well as super-duper cool smart person?! For fucks sake, Orwell and Hemingway wrote the way 11-year-old could understand every word, they were still masterful in the depth of their stories. I hate this jargony thesaurus-wanking in today’s journalism and I don’t think I am only one.
Please stop.