In last week's Talk of the Town, Lauren Collins used the word belletristic:

...the book ["Amo, Amas, Amat...and All That", a primer in Latin] turned out to be the Tickle Me Elmo of the belletristic-stocking-stuffer trade, selling more than ninety thousand copies.

As I kept forgetting to look this up and wondering about its meaning, the only idea I had was something about belle and triste, beautiful and sad, a nice combination. It turns out to mean of or pertaining to belles-lettres, or: "Literary works valued more for their aesthetic qualities rather than for any informative or educational content, " according to Wikipedia.

The week before, Nancy Franklin used the word ginormous in her review of Gossip Girl:

It comes from the kind of stock that makes it a perfect fit for a network geared toward young viewers: it’s based on a best-selling series of novels for teen-age girls which are centered on the juicy extracurricular doings and desires and the brand-name possessions of the most privileged kids in the most privileged part of Manhattan—private-school students on the Upper East Side. Because this is a world open only to the few, it’s of great interest to the many. (And, it goes without saying, of ginormous interest to the few.)

I used to scoff at my roommate Al's indiscriminate use of this word in college. It just made it into the dictionary this year, and I've become more a descriptivist. Still, it's surprising to see it in the New Yorker, especially used to describe something like interest.