One reason I enjoy reading The New York Times is its writers appear to be under instruction to send even reasonably well-educated readers scrambling for the dictionary at least once in every article.

Looking up the words can be a pain, and something I try to avoid inflicting on my own readers, but it’s gotten easier now that I do most of my reading on my phone; all I have to do is highlight a word and the phone finds the definition for me.

Once in a while, an unfamiliar word in those Times thumbsuckers illuminates life and the universe for me like a bolt of lightning.

I came across such word a few days ago in an article about anchovies, as in the fish, falling out of the sky in the San Francisco Bay region.

While many residents saw the phenomenon as something otherworldly, as usual there was a scientist to spoil the conspiratorial fun.

Jarrod Santora of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration told the newspaper that anchovies are unusually abundant off the West Coast this year, and they’re being herded into shallow coves by humpback whales and other ocean predators that feed on them.

Opportunistic seabirds get in on the feast, and the anchovies falling from the sky are simply the result of gluttonous gulls trying to carry more than their beaks can hold or fighting to steal fish from other birds’ mouths — a behavior he called “kleptoparasitism.”

I studied the word with appreciation. Where have you been all my writing life?

I’d been mulling a legislative legislative measure on Gov. David Ige’s veto list, Senate Bill 2510, which would set an arbitrary mandate that 33% of the state’s renewable energy be “firm renewables” such as potentially polluting wood and biodiesel instead of solar and wind.

State Sen. Donovan Dela Cruz reportedly went to extraordinary lengths to bully other legislators into passing the bill despite expert warnings it would undercut Hawaii’s clean-energy goals.

A primary beneficiary appeared to be Hu Honua Bioenergy LLC, a controversial wood-burning project on the Big Island that has twice been rejected by the Public Utilities Commission and is appealing to the state Supreme Court.

According to Honolulu Civil Beat, a Hu Honua lobbyist in June helped put together a political fundraiser for Dela Cruz and three SB 2510 co-sponsors — Sens. Glenn Wakai, Michelle Kidani and Bennette Misalucha — with donations of up to $2,000.

I struggled for a word to describe this until I read in the Times about those greedy gulls scrounging in the skies above San Francisco for pilfered fish scraps.

Then there was former Sen. J. Kalani English explaining himself to Senior U.S. District Judge Susan Oki Mollway for accepting $18,305 cash from businessman Milton J. Choy to corrupt legislation.

“I ask myself continually, ‘Why did I do it?’” English said. “I can’t answer it.”

He should spend his 40 months in federal lockup learning to spell “kleptoparasitism” and use it in a sentence his former colleagues can understand.

Reach David Shapiro at volcanicash@gmail.com.