Letters to the Editor
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Good gods
"Back when looking things up was a chore"? Excuse me??
What a sad thing to say. I've always found looking up new words to be a delight, and far more so "back when" one had to do it with a dictionary rather than flipping around some website. As usual with books, there's not only the target you're looking to acquire (in this case, the word in question), but all the rest of the knowledge that moves before your eyes as you're searching. Often when looking up a word in my trusty Webster's, I'd catch sight of some other word, related or not, that would interest or enlighten me. Diving into a dictionary is not a "chore", it's more like a treasure hunt, yielding up unexpected goodies.
And it's also a sad commentary on these times that people are so perplexed by a word like "perspicacious". I think I knew that word by the time I was fourteen. But then, I did a hell of a lot of reading from the time I was a kid (not "age-appropriate" crap, but REAL books - the kind with adult level words in them), and that is really the only way to pick up a sizable vocabulary.