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Good profile. I feel like the author was having a lot of fun with his thesaurus:

"He has a lifelong habit of collecting garrulous friends and yet a tendency to induce some measure of taciturnity in all but the most voluble of them. His style of reticence is contagious."

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Every time I read a New Yorker article I feel like that. Here are four words I don't know in just the first paragraph: garrulous, taciturnity, voluble, reticence.

Really? Those words seem perfectly cromulent to me

haha, I guess I'm around a lot of bookish & verbal friends. That sentence didn't strike me as odd in the slightest.

Your friends are probably very garrulous. :)

I'd suggest that it's not so much the particular words, it's that all the "oddball" words in the sentence are directly Latin-derived -- garrulous, taciturnity, voluble, reticence. This is what gives the sentence a somewhat forced tone - perhaps a good Anglo-Saxon term might provide a punch.

Probably the stock phrases, "collecting friends", "some measure of X", "all but the most", "style is contagious", don't help either.

The quoted words don't seem that well-crafted, but the content of the observation serves as a good character sketch.

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