Today’s Word That You Only Ever Hear In Book Reviews Is “Lapidary”

Unless you’re a gemologist, there’s only one context in which you’ll ever hear the word ‘lapidary’: a review, like Michiko Kakutani‘s review of Jhumpa Lahiri‘s ‘Unaccustomed Earth’: “Ms. Lahiri writes about these people in ‘Unaccustomed Earth’ with an intimate knowledge of their conflicted hearts, using her lapidary eye for detail to conjure their daily lives with extraordinary precision.” “Mercurial” and, famously, “limn” are also, to blurbers and book reviewers, what “jai alai” is to crossword puzzles. To be fair, though, there really is almost no other way to say “characterized by an exactitude and extreme refinement that suggests gem cutting.”