Ten minutes to write. Less time to read.

I’m here hiding under my rock. (If you read yesterday’s blog, you understand.) I’m waiting for the angst of the current politics to subside and am concentrating on literary things in the meantime.

For the past seven years, I’ve worked in finance and human resources. Go figure. Now I’m updating this website, because I recently quit my job and want to focus on writing. I’m researching what’s happened in the publishing industry since I stopped working as a pen for hire eight years ago. I’m trying to reconnect with my writer’s self. I hope to get my work into print via a traditional publisher. If I don’t succeed, I’m evaluating e-books.

Part of my research is to read. And today I read an article about the most looked-up words in articles found in the New York Times. It seems there’s a department at the newspaper that studies this. It fuels the debate about whether print newspapers should dumb down their writing to accommodate readers who want news in a hurry vs. readers who think they know a lot of unusual words and are proud of it.

For the record, the top three words on the look-up list are “panegyric,” “immiscible,” and “Manichean.” I must admit I’d heard all of them, but didn’t know what they meant. So I took the time to look them up. I urge you to do the same.

And whether you come down on the side of quick reading or erudite reading when a newspaper is involved, I hope you at least consider the issue in the first place. Newspapers, as well as books, are quickly being relegated to the endangered species list; and we might not even have this discussion before too long.