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?

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