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: fissiparous… From time to time, I like to read books that I’d describe as unchallenging but engaging. Political thrillers fall into that category for me, and Robert […]
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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: katabatic… I had heard of the book The Golden Spruce, by John Vaillant, more than 10 years ago but for reasons I don’t understand, had never persuaded myself
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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: irenic…. I feel especially happy whenever I discover a word I’ve never seen before. What can it possibly mean, I wonder? And what are the origins of
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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: quondam…. I always enjoy stumbling across words I’ve never before seen. Part of me is always astonished, because I read so much and so widely. On some
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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: obdurate… I never thought I’d describe a novel about Alzheimer’s Disease as “sprightly” but that cheerful adjective certainly applies to Goodbye, Vitamin: A Novel by Rachel Khong. Named a
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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: marmorated… I have little interest in insects but a March 12/18 New Yorker article on stinkbugs (one is pictured above) captured my attention recently. Headlined, “When Twenty-Six Thousand
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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: levantine… I live in a city, Vancouver, that is roughly 50 percent Asian. As a result, reading a book titled Crazy Rich Asians (by Kevin Kwan) makes me want
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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: oneiric… I can’t remember who recommended the novel We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves to me. But I read the book, by Karen Joy Fowler, during a
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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: anfractuous… I encountered the byline, ‘Anthony Horowitz,’ somewhere during the last year and — because I found his writing amusing — made a mental note of his
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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: crenulated…. I was flipping through an old copy of the New Yorker before passing it along to a friend (I could never throw out a magazine with
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