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: brumous… My husband is extraordinarily interested in birds. I am not, although I don’t mind the creatures. But on his request I gave him the book H is […]
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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: hermetic… I’m a bit of a foodie so I read New York Times restaurant reviews with particular interest. Not that I’ll ever likely be able to eat at
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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: logorrheic… Despite my habit of reading voraciously and widely, I don’t always accumulate enough words for this column. Thus, I’m always grateful when readers send me interesting 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: riparian. As a youth, I was a serious canoeist. I had belonged to the Girl Guides (known as the Girl Scouts in the US) and, when I hit
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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: ogival… It took me many weeks to finish the novel Safekeeping by Jessamyn Hope. Although others — including the Boston Globe — described it as “luminous, irreverent, and ambitious,” I
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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: procrustean… Earlier this year I enjoyed reading A Story Larger Than My Own, a collection of essays (Janet Burroway, ed) that had been given as a gift to
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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: walleyed. While on holiday recently, I read the memoir Undress Me In the Temple of Heaven by Susan Jane Gilman. The story of Gilman’s 1986 trip to China — which had then just
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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: lambent. I don’t typically read autobiographies written by TV performers, but I made an exception for Kate Mulgrew, one of the stars of the hit show Orange is
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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: halcyon. I had never known the shameful story of the Hungarian Gold Train until I read Ayelet Waldman’s striking 2014 novel, Love and Treasure. Operating during the Second World
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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: aldehydic… The novel The Perfume Collector by Kathleen Tessaro was a book I shouldn’t have bothered to finish. The story — about a young newly married woman
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