Have you ever completed the Word Power feature in Reader’s Digest? I’m not much interested in such games – I don’t even do crosswords! – but I am committed to increasing my own vocabulary. Why? Because if I know more words, I’ll be able to read more fluently. But even more important, I’ll be able to write better. Knowing lots of words allows me – and you — to be more precise in writing. In my word-of-the-week feature I share a word with you that I’ve discovered in my own reading.
Reading time: Less than 1 minute Increase your vocabulary and you’ll make your writing much more precise. That’s why I provide a word of the week. Today’s word: hermeneutical. I love few things more than reading about food, when two of my most intensely held pleasures combine into one glorious mouthful. When I read the New Yorker article […]
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Reading time: Less than 1 minute Increase your vocabulary and you’ll make your writing much more precise. That’s why I provide a word of the week. Today’s word: titivating. I discovered the writing of Sarah Waters about 10 years ago when I read her marvellous 2002 novel Fingersmith. A Victorian crime novel with fine writing and
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Reading time: About 1 minute Increase your vocabulary and you’ll make your writing much more precise. That’s why I provide a word of the week. Today’s word: excrescence. I haven’t seen the movie Frank. But I can tell you it’s a comedy about a young man who joins a band of pop musicians led by a guy named
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Reading time: Less than 1 minute Increase your vocabulary and you’ll make your writing much more precise. That’s why I provide a word of the week. Today’s word: caterwauling. I think I’ve known since grade 5 that the term caterwauling means a long,wailing cry, usually heard on streets. What I hadn’t realized is that it’s the perfect example
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Reading time: Less than 1 minute Increase your vocabulary and you’ll make your writing much more precise. That’s why I provide a word of the week. Today’s word: meniscus…. I am obsessed with food memoirs. So obsessed that I’m writing one myself. And part of my research is reading even more of these books. I’m
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Reading time: Less than 1 minute Increase your vocabulary and you’ll make your writing much more precise. That’s why I provide a word of the week. Today’s word (well, really, it’s a phrase): screaming meemies. I adore reduplications and I use them whenever I can. What are they? They occur whenever the root or stem or a
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Reading time: About 1 minute Increase your vocabulary and you’ll make your writing much more precise. That’s why I provide a word of the week. Today’s word: quisling. I’m a trailing edge baby-boomer, born in the late 1950s. My parents, both Canadians, were deeply marked by the Second World War. My father was enlisted in the Air Force
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Reading time: Less than 1 minute Increase your vocabulary and you’ll make your writing much more precise. That’s why I provide a word of the week. Today’s word: ambuscader. One of my readers, Richard Holden, has published a collection of short stories in a genre he calls “Elderlit.” I hadn’t before heard the term so he
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Reading time: Less than 1 minute Increase your vocabulary and you’ll make your writing much more precise. That’s why I provide a word of the week. Today’s word: cagoule. I seldom encounter words that offer me terra incognita. But a word in the very fine novel, Landing Gear, by Kate Pullinger, took me into just such a
Reading time: Less than 1 minute Increase your vocabulary and you’ll make your writing much more precise. That’s why I provide a word of the week. Today’s word: marmoreal. I’ve never read anything by William S. Burroughs, not even Naked Lunch (1959), but when flipping through a stack of my beloved New Yorkers, just before handing them
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