The problem with "featuritis" or WTF are Usonians?

I spend quite a bit of time at the New York Times website, mostly because they have what I consider to be the best news site (in English) on the internet. A first rate paper is well on their way to being a first rate web news outlet.

Some time ago (more than a year ago) they introduced a feature on their website I found interesting, but slightly annoying. They set up their site with a javascript gadget of some kind that allowed double-clicking on any word in any article and it would pop up a box with the definition of the word. Brilliant! But not very useful, unfortunately.

What I found annoying about this feature was if I happened to be mousing around a page and accidentally double-clicked (something that happens more often than you might think), there would be a pause while the site did a search for the word, and then popped up a separate window with the definition. And of course, like anything "web" there was also a separate lookup for advertising copy to include in the handy new window, and having to override the pop-up blocker in Firefox when the site attempted to open a separate window. This is, as I now think about it, a good motivator to tell the browser's AdBlock plugin to unblock the New York Times-- I know I did that. Overall, for someone with a good vocabulary, this was an interesting but ultimately not very useful feature.

This morning I found the big, ugly Achilles heel of that feature. In an article about a Frank Lloyd Wright home that's available for vacation rental, I came across this sentence,

"The rentable Wrights are all Usonians, smaller, simpler and designed toward the end of Wright’s career for the middle class."

Now I'm a careful reader, and I figured I was missing a key point of the paragraph because I don't know what "Usonians" means. No problem, thinks I, because the Old Gray Lady has that nifty double-click definition feature, I can find out. Double-click, watch the separate window open with ads and what-all, and Nooooo! Say it ain't sooooo! The feature returns 0 results! That word is not in the dictionary. I don't know what the heck the journalist means by "Usonians," and that nifty feature of the NYT is unmasked as a web hack of dropping a standard dictionary behind a bit of javascript that encourages people to turn off pop up blocking. But here at my computer, where the rubber meets the road, I find this feature has no tread. And now I have to go and Google to find out WTF are Usonians!