Obnoxious Vocabulary

In a column about Pitt basketball, Post-Gazette columnist Gene Collier wrote the following:

Pitt's skittish free-throw shooting and recent habit of putting together somnambulant first halves have its rooters wondering if one problem or the other will eventually derail a promising March.

Is it me or is "somnambulant" an obnoxious word to use in a college basketball story? I don't think that every word in every newspaper story has to be on a third-grade reading level or we have to assume that all readers are idiots, but that word just seems unnecessary. I consider myself to have an above average vocabulary and I had no idea what that word means. How does a word like that end up in a sports story? This strikes me as a columnist just trying to show off his vocabulary and use big words rather than actually inform readers. In fact, I think the setence became more awkward by trying to jam somnambulant into the sentence rather than using a simpler word. Isn't "Pitt's skittish free-throw shooting and recent habit sleep walking through first halves have its rooters wondering if one problem or the other will eventually derail a promising March." a much simpler sentence?

So how do you decide what words are good for a story and which words will sail over readers heads unnecessarily?

 

It is obnoxious. If you think your readers will have to use a dictionary, don't do it.
We have a prep guy who tried to do this every week. I made him stop after he used "shambolic."

 

Gene Collier is far above me and most others on this site, but it would have been much better just to write "sleepwalk through first halves." But then that would be a cliche.

 

I'm all for Collier using somnambulant (which, by the way, spell check doesn't even recognize here) and using it well.

God forbid someone has to look up a new word and learn something instead of being fed the mindless drivel that takes up the majority of our reading material anymore.

 

Relying on adjectives and adverbs makes for weak media writing any time. Save your thesaurus for strong nouns and verbs.

 

Full disagree. Adverbs and adjectives, used efficiently, are great things to have. But the Poynter somnambulists have filled people's heads with fear about them.

 

I'm more concerned with the misuse of the word "obnoxious" in this discussion.

 

Exactly. I wouldn't do it, but I have no problem with Collier doing it. Collier isn't afraid to push his readers a bit with his use of language. Having read his stuff for many years, this didn't seem at all out of place.

 

Why should someone have to use a dictionary to read a sports story? There is a huge gap between mindless drivel and somnambulant. The sports page isn't a vocabulary test. It's entertainment.

People open it up to learn more about their teams, which they follow for entertainment. Push them to learn more about how the games were played, about social conditions that have an impact on sports, about health, financial and other issues that related to sports. As you pointed out, spell check on this site doesn't even recognize this word, which would seem to make it awfully obscure.

 

Ditto.

Also, at this late date in the death spiral of newspapers, why insist on writing down to the reading level of people who do not read?