What caught our eye in David Carr’s Business Day column in the New York Times was the language in the following paragraph (the bold words are our emphasis):

“But what started as a mea culpa soon turned into j’accuse. Both Mr. Frey and Ms. Talese [Frey’s editor at Doubleday] were snapped in two like dry winter twigs. A Greek chorus of media types (including from The New York Times), ostensibly on hand to provide third-party context to examine Ms. Winfrey’s enthrallment with a con, mostly fell into step as well. Richard Cohen, the Washington Post columnist who had written that Ms. Winfrey was ‘deluded,’ was beaming and describing her as ‘mensch of the year.’”

It’s not often that you see a Latin phrase, a French verb, a reference to Greek drama, and a Yiddish word all in one paragraph, much less in the business section of an American newspaper. Might this column be lost in translation for many U.S. readers?