I’m one of those people who, on a flight, after doing the crossword puzzle and the medium sudoku, occasionally looks at the articles. I do it mainly to get a feel for what writers trained in the medium think Americans will understand.

So I was pleasantly surprised on an American Airlines flight last week from Nashville to Dallas when I read an article in the airline’s bi-monthly magazine, The American Way. The article, on golf courses, was written by Larry Olmsted. The article in itself was interesting and well-written. But that’s not what I want to focus on here.

Here’s the sentence I found interesting:

Courses are expensive to build and maintain, development lending is in short supply and the real estate itself often carries a high opportunity cost, especially for older courses in growing urban areas.

Three things, all positive, are interesting about this:
1. Olmsted used the term “opportunity cost.”
2. He used the term correctly.
3. Neither he nor his editor felt the need to explain the term; presumably they both thought that the “growing urban areas” part got the point across sufficiently.