The New York Times is so essential that I actually pay for a paper subscription, & I use the website constantly. However, there’s a so-called “feature” that’s been driving me batty for a while. When you select a word, a little tooltip appears with a question mark in it; click on that, & a popup window opens with a definition of the word, provided by Wordnik.

First of all, this is completely frickin’ useless. I can Google words I don’t know, thank you very much.

And second, & more importantly, it catches all double- & triple-clicks, so you can’t double-click on words to select them or triple-click on words to select an entire paragraph. For a person who likes to select text to paste into an assignment for students or blog post, this is extremely annoying.

So today I decided to do something about it. I looked at the source & searched for all instances of js, since I knew it had to be a JavaScript. I saw this line, which looked like the right one:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/js/common/screen/altClickToSearch.js"></script>

If you have AdBlock or the equivalent, you could use that to block that JavaScript. I use Glimmer Blocker, a System Preference that acts as an ad- & annoyance-blocking proxy on my Mac. You can subscribe to Filters or create your own, so I added a new Rule to a Filter called “RSG Scripts” that looked like this:

'Blocking Wordnik with Glimmer Blocker'

The two key parts are:

  • Host, where I chose Is In Domain & entered nytimes.com
  • Path, where I chose Ends With & entered altClickToSearch.js

For Comments, I explained what I was doing & why; this is of course completely optional:

Blocks Wordnik, which appears when you double-click on words on nytimes.com. By blocking it, you can double-click on words or triple-click to select paragraphs again.

I went back to The New York Times, double-clicked on a word, & the word was selected, with not a hint of Wordnik in sight! I triple-clicked, & the paragraph was selected. Goodbye, Wordnik, you are not missed!