Hey, Check Out This Beam in My Eye!

A few people have emailed me a link to Bob Harris‘s list of seven words book reviewers have overused on the NYT Book Review Paper Cuts blog, and about half of them have suggested slyly that a certain Times reviewer makes abundant use of all seven. But before I started knocking other book reviewers, I thought I’d better check the files on the reviews I wrote for Publishers Weekly over the last three years, before I started blogging here full-time…

And, yeah, although I’d given up poignant by the end of 2006, and I’m convinced that the two times I used the word lyrical were totally appropriate (especially since one was about songwriting), I have fallen back on compelling, and craft as a verb, way too many times. At least I only used eschew once that I could spot, and I don’t seem to have ever used muse as a verb. And thank God, per Harris’s addendum, I’ve never used limn. Anyway, the topic is proving very popular with Paper Cuts commenters, so if you’ve got a pet peeve of your own, they may well have uncovered it already…

And how would you score?

Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews.