A glut of abstruse neologisms for NYT readers

In class this morning, a writer mentioned that one of the reasons she has a good vocabulary is that, while growing up, whenever she asked her stepfather what a word meant, he would answer in the form of another, bigger word — and then she'd have to look them both up. It reminded me of how I became a good speller: Whenever I asked my mom how to spell something, she'd say "Look it up" — and when you don't know how to spell something or even where to begin looking (and this was back in the day when