Maybe this cell, with its mellifluous name, gives us our special capacity to understand one another—to care, to learn, and to communicate.

mellifluous (adj) : flowing as with honey; smooth; flowing sweetly or smoothly; pleasing to the ear [syn: dulcet, honeyed, mellisonant, sweet] – Cells That Read Minds?

But later work has increasingly focused on the picayune.

picayune (adj) : (informal terms) small and of little importance [syn: fiddling, footling, lilliputian, little, Mickey Mouse, niggling, piddling, piffling, petty, trivial] – Superfreaky

If all that sounds like a gossamer bit of Web 2.0 preciousness, consider that Gannett is in the process of remaking the newsrooms at its 90 newspapers into “information centers,” a place where readers are given access to all the tools of journalism including, yes, the journalists themselves.

gossamer (adj) 1: characterized by unusual lightness and delicacy [syn: ethereal] 2: so thin as to transmit light [syn: diaphanous, filmy, gauzy, see-through, sheer, transparent, vaporous, cobwebby] – All the World’s a Story

Later, as a highly paid star, he still evinced the sense of freedom that came with working on cheap pictures outside the big studio system.

evince (v) 1. To conquer; to subdue; 2. To show in a clear manner; to prove beyond any reasonable doubt; to manifest; to make evident; to bring to light; to evidence. – Seventy years, and he’s still shining

The ”ebony-haired ecdysiast” was irresistible copy, especially when it came to her sixty-inch chest.

ecdysiast (n) : a performer who provides erotic entertainment by undressing to music [syn: stripper, striptease artist, striptease, stripteaser, exotic dancer, peeler] – The Greatest Stories Never Told

A knowledgeable expert puts in a lot of work improving an article on their pet topic, but without constant diligence, the mob will introduce pablum and distortion until all their precious work is undone.

Pablum (n) 1: a soft form of cereal for infants 2: worthless or oversimplified ideas [syn: pap] – On Wikipedia burnout and hostility toward expertise

He offers the original words of Rodney King as an instance: ”People, I just want to say, you know, can we all get along? Can we get along? Can we stop making it, making it horrible for the older people and the kids? . . . Please, we can get along here. We all can get along. I mean, we’re all stuck here for a while. Let’s try to work it out. Let’s try to beat it. Let’s try to beat it. Let’s try to work it out.” This is the rambling outburst that became the astringent and immortal ”Can’t we all get along?”

astringent (adj) 1: sour or bitter in taste [syn: acerb, acerbic, sharp] 2: tending to draw together or constrict soft organic tissue – Notable Quotables

In addition, the essay’s prose style is forbidding in its rodomontade.

rodomontade (n) : vain and empty boasting [syn: braggadocio, bluster, rhodomontade] – David Bordwell: 3 notions about CREMASTER 2

What you get in this alternative world are houses, home decorations, clothes, jewellery, cars, motorbikes, casinos, strip clubs and shops in which to sell all these things to cartoon characters representing their computer owners, who ‘live’ in the houses on the virtual land they have bought, titivate their interiors, change their clothes, hair and jewellery, drive the cars, gamble in the casinos and stand around gazing at naked pole dancers.

titivate (v) : make neat, smart, or trim [syn: spruce up, spruce, tittivate, smarten up, slick up, spiff up] – Jowls are available: Jenny Diski on ’Second Life’

Conservatives have long taken it as self-evident that the press unfavorably distorts the war, which may be the case; but today that country is a vastation, and the unified field theory of media bias has not been altered one jot.

vastation (n) : a laying waste; waste; depopulation; devastation – The Blog Mob