Vertiginous -- Dizzying Word Choice

In a recent review of the new Sasha Baron Cohen film Brüno, critic Ann Hornaday made this laudatory reference to the movie's predecessor: "These are all quintessential Cohen moments, and in Borat they possessed the vertiginous sense of spontaneity, danger and unwitting honesty that made that movie a cross between Jonathan Swift and Andy Kaufman. But in Brüno, the skits don't add up to anything substantive."

Vertiginous? Ok, so I admit, I had to look it up. My brain got sidetracked by the vert- which led me to thoughts of "green" and "fresh." If I'd paid closer attention to the first two syllables I would've realized that vertiginous is the adjectival form of vertigo and means, "whirling, spinning," and "affected with vertigo or capable of causing a state of dizziness."

So, the real question raised by this is not whether Hornaday is spot-on or off-her-nut in her assessment of the virtues of Brüno v. Borat. It's whether a word like vertiginous belongs in a newspaper movie review. Dredging through my vague recollections of my collegiate journalism courses, I recall the adage that newspapers are written at a fifth-grade reading level. Have they ever challenged the contestants on that "Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?" reality show to define vertiginous? The point being that if readers have to run for a dictionary to get the gist of what you're saying, you've failed to communicate. And, some might say, you've contributed to the melting of the paper's readership.

On the other hand, I'm tickled to see a term like vertiginous show up in a film review, especially one about a movie making equal opportunity fun of elitist sensibilities about high culture and P.C.ism as well as lowbrow prejudices and willful ignorance. But vertiginous is a 10-dollar word, I grant, and dizzying would've been a perfectly fine, more readily accessible word choice. So does a preference for vertiginous reveal me as one of those latte-drinking, Volvo-driving, sushi-eating, New York Times-reading, Hollywood-loving, liberal elites -- what Sarah Palin perhaps would call one of the "un-real" Americans? Maybe (though I drive a Prius). But I'd note that my propensity for 10-dollar words puts me in a camp that includes columnist George F. Will, whose word choice merited notation in his Wikipedia entry -- "[his] columns are known for their erudite vocabulary" -- and National Review founder and Firing Line host William F. Buckley Jr., whose prodigious use of arcane words led to the creation of The Lexicon, an entire book devoted to citations of the unusual words he employed.

Though I just checked and vertiginous isn't in The Lexicon.