Seven Deadly Review Words

There was a funny little post on one of the New York Times blogs about overused (and creatively lazy) words in book reviews. The author picked seven particularly egregious nouns and adjectives:

• poignant
• compelling
• intriguing
• eschew
• craft
• muse
• lyrical

I've been guilty over-using nearly all these review standbys in my own writing... except perhaps "lyrical", which I've always considered in the same faux-poetic family as lambent, luminous, etc. etc. And even though I've dropped it into sentences dozens of times, I'm not sure if I even know how to pronounce "eschew" properly!