I gave the NYTBR so much grief last week for being decades out of step, but I'm pleased to say that this week's issue is a significant improvement on the "news about the culture" front: You've got your Judith Shulevitz essay on intelligent design, you've got books about transgender subterfuge and sexual identity assimilation...and then, for some reason, you've got a lot of twaddle. It starts with David Kamp's review of Self-Made Man, in which he's so enthusiastic about the bulk of Norah Vincent's account of her life as a man that he finds her attempts to find final meaning a "folie à twaddle." Then Wyatt Mason tears into The Power of Movies, declaring, "The word for this sort of writing is twaddle."

Now, that's an unusual word to appear twice in the same issue of the Review...especially considering that it was the first appearance in just over four years. You have to go back to October 2001 to find it again—and that was in a direct quotation from the collection of Dwight Macdonald's letters under consideration. The last time a reviewer actually used it was Erik Tarloff's passing reference in a 1999 review, but it wasn't used to describe the book in question; for that kind of citation, we have to reach back to 1997, when Walter Kirn called Bradford Morrow's Giovanni's Gift "a thin romantic melodrama insulated in operatic twaddle." After that, the trail grows cold until 1989. Does that mean "twaddle" goes back on the shelf until 2014? Perhaps—but in the meantime, if the Review is resurrecting obscure vocabulary, might I put in a vote for "gibber"? You'll find gibbering gibberish here and there, but real gibber hasn't been in the Review since 1987!