Word du jour.

• Author: Peters, Charles
• Position: TILTING at windmills - Brief article

I have long been fascinated by how certain words attain the status of "in" and then appear over and over in conversation and in writing for the next several years. Soon after I entered Columbia in 1946, it became clear to me that those who aspired to intellectual respectability had to learn to make frequent use of "ambiguity" and "dichotomy." In the 1990s, "nuance"...