AJR Asks   

What are some of your favorite words?

What are some of your favorite words?

Mike Jacobs, editor, North Dakota's Grand Forks Herald
"I like words that start with the 'wh' sound, like who, what and why, but my very favorite is wheat."

Tom Hallman Jr., staff writer, Portland's Oregonian
"Well, send, for one, because that means I've turned my story in.... I like 'pay to the order of.' Coming from a cops background, I pick really boring words that are easy for people to understand. One word I don't like is queue.... I think it's pretentious. I don't have any favorite word. I feel like I'm on a game show and there's all this pressure. Let me get my dictionary."

Ron Suskind, senior national affairs writer, Wall Street Journal,and author of "A Hope in the Unseen, An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League"
"Astonishing. That's the one I like. Other words I like to read--unheralded. Perspicuity. Nuance. I got a zillion of 'em. I like to write the word faith because it's a word that everybody brings strong feelings to and very personal feelings. I like to be a midwife to those feelings."

J. Peder Zane, book review editor and columnist, Raleigh, North Carolina, News & Observer
"Onomatopoeia. I like ca-ching [as in the sound a cash register makes], kerplunk, kaput, goobly-goop and thingamajig. They're fun; they lighten the tone. My favorite is paradox. I think most issues are complex, and that word forces me to look at the tension."

Joanne Weintraub, TV critic, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
"Oleaginous, schlocky and luminous. I ration myself to using each no more than once a year."

Eric Black, staff writer, Minneapolis' Star-Tribune
"Perspicacity, sesquipedalian, serendipity. With perspicacity and sesquipedalian, I like the sound."
Black managed to get sesquipedalian (favoring the use of long words) in a satirical opinion piece recently. The excerpt, one of only 26 uses of the word Lexis-Nexis found in the last year and one of a whopping 227 in Lexis-Nexis history: "To put it more plainly: Sesquipedalian obfuscation transmogrifies thrift inducement subsidization into revenue disenhancement measures. Or as Harry Truman might prefer it: The buck never stops anywhere."

--Interviews by AJR editorial assistants Bridget Gutierrez and Shanteé C. Woodards