Before reinstalling Word, you ought to launch /Apps/Font Book and check Lucida Grande to make sure it isn't problematic in some way.
I looked at it as suggested but I'm not sure how I might determine if something is problematic.
If there's a problem with a font, Font Book tells you, so nothing = nothing.
Back to the original complaint: All of a sudden the Lucida Grande 'contortions' returned, with 4000+ lines of machinations reported in Console.
So I went to OnyX and cleaned house, deleting the Fonts cache and restarting.
MS Word reset itself (as expected), a few websites took slightly longer to render (as OnyX advised), and Console seems to be happy.
As artie says: Fingers crossed.
