Giving weight to words

Just when all language seemed to be going the way of Twitter and text message shorthand, a backlash to brevity is brewing. More words suddenly have more meaning, and they're making us stop and think.

"The nature of Twitter is you don't need to think about what you're saying," Katie Roiphe, an author and journalist, said in The Times. "Most of us need to think more about what we're saying, not less."

The United States Supreme Court is doing just that. Its use of dictionaries has boomed in the last two decades as justices ponder the meaning of every word. In May alone, the justices cited dictionaries in eight cases to determine what legislators meant when they used words like "prevent," "delay" and "report," The Times said. Justices have also looked up ordinary words like "of," "now," "also," "any" and "if."