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: scrimshaw… Someday soon, I will create a dictionary of the words I’ve seen several hundred times but still have no idea what they mean. It embarrasses me […]
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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: riverine…. In reading the New Yorker, I encountered a word I’d never seen before. It appeared an Aug. 21/17 article headlined, “Is there any point to protesting?”
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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: skeevy…. I choose today’s word, skeevy, not because I didn’t know what it meant but because I wanted to take the chance to explore its etymology. I
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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: inchoate…. I’ve long held a particular fondness for the adjective inchoate. Perhaps it’s the idiosyncratic pronunciation that charms me — the CH sound is not soft, as in
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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: precipitous…. Ophelia Dahl (pictured above) grew up in privileged and challenging circumstances. She was the daughter of movie star Patricia Neal and wildly successful writer Roald Dahl,
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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: rebarbative…. I’m still reading the book Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman (pictured above) and I can tell you already that it’s one of the
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Reading time: Just over 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: restive…. I started subscribing to the New Yorker magazine back in 1993, shortly after Tina Brown (pictured above) had become its editor. While I’d found much of her work
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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: spavined…. When I read a Calvin Tomkins story about artist Dana Schutz in the New Yorker, I was thrilled to see it gave me three fascinating words.
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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: calcareous… I’ve been captivated by the very fine writing of Stefan Hertmans. The Belgian writer and head of a study centre at University College Ghent is the
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Reading time: Less than one 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: punctilious… In a riveting novel, a young nun is sent by the Vatican to investigate allegations of misconduct at a Catholic school in Iceland. Titled The Sacrament,
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