A friend of mine e-mailed me a link to a website run by a grammar columnist (I lost hours of my day reading it all over). In many of her columns she gives equal weight to the way words are used in newspapers as she does to the way they are used in dictionaries. In
this column , she gives one example of how to look up a word to see how often it is used in print media.
I figure that since Lois and Clark are both journalists they might take a similar view, so I looked up the word "chumpy" to find out how discerning others journalists are. Lo and behold, there were five hits. While five is an extremely low number compared to the thousands of words published daily, it's not zero as Clark implied it should be. I'm wondering it if is merely used by elite journalists. (BTW, feel free to look it up yourself, but don't make my mistake. I googled it with my kids in the room and was totally surprised by the off-color picture that came up, as well.)
Elisabeth
