I love words. It’s fun and challenging to choose the perfect one for the situation–my brain is like a quivering mouth salivating in front of a sumptuous buffet and deciding whether to take scalloped, roasted, or Duchesse potatoes–or maybe go in a different direction and take the Belgian endive. The right word enables descriptive, concise, engaging writing.

I learned the headline word from my Dictionary Word of the Day email. Antepenultimate. The meaning is clear, if you think about it, and the word would make the writing crisp. But that’s the point. Most readers would have to think about it. And the spell would be broken. In this case, I think “third from the end” would be the better choice.

Years ago I learned the word, perseverate. A friend and I were chatting and she said her mother perseverated on her disapproval of my friend’s move to Brooklyn. It rolled off her tongue as naturally as I might have said persist or continue. I had never heard it before and I have heard it only once or twice since. Persevere, perseverance, yes. But perseverate?

According to Dictionary.com the meaning is, “to repeat something insistently or redundantly“. “Redundantly” takes the meaning beyond the (my) understanding of persevere (“Continue in a course of action even in the face of difficulty or with little or no prospect of success.”). It introduces lack of necessity, which is not implied in persevere. So, an argument might be made for adding an extra syllable to a word that otherwise already seems to do the job.

Then we come to what I have called the word of the year for the last three and a half years–“unprecedented“. I recall thinking a couple of days after the election of 2016 that I wanted to write an Op Ed encouraging journalists to find new ways of expressing that concept. It was clear to me after the “unprecedented” campaign season and election that we were going to need some options.

My article is still critically needed. So, without rewarding the subject with a lot of labor and thinking, I Googled a list of synonyms. I was surprised to see that most of them carry a positive connotation, such as: unequaled, unmatched, unparalleled, unrivaled, without equal, extraordinary, singular, remarkable, exceptional, groundbreaking, pioneering, one of a kind, prodigious, revolutionary, unexampled.

In my view, none of those words fit the situations we have had to characterize of late, which can best be described by the more unforgiving synonyms in the list: untypical, freakish, anomalous.

So perhaps we can forgive the journalists and anyone else watching the dismantling of America for relying on the non-specific, hackneyed, “unprecedented” to carry their water while they perseverate. Or they could take my “go in a different direction” –and in this case truthful– approach and try words like ridiculous, criminal, illegal, felonious, indictable, wicked, fraudulent, corrupt, crooked, shady, punishable…..