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: hobbledehoy… I thought I knew the meaning of the word ‘hobbledehoy,’ but it turns out I was only partly right. I encountered it recently in the delightful […]
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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: augury…. Sometimes, if I’m struggling with a word, I’ll stop to see if there’s anything in the root of it that seems vaguely familiar to me. This
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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: lambrequin… One of the great — and simultaneously annoying — aspects of historical novels is that they may use words no longer part of the common lexicon.
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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: catamount…. I had heard or seen the word catamount, before I read it recently, but I had never taken the time to learn its meaning. Now, I’m
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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: skerry…. An award-winning poet and storyteller, Michael Crummey was born in Buchans, a mining town in the interior of Newfoundland. He writes about life in Newfoundland with
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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: loge…. When I read the very amusing book The White Angel by John MacLachlan Gray, I encountered a word that was new to me, loges. Here is
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: barouche landau…. When I read the book Outline by Rachel Cusk, I encountered a term that was new to me: barouche landau. Here is how Cusk used
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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: fumarole…. I live on the Pacific West Coast, in an earthquake zone. Perhaps that’s why I’m familiar with seismological terms — and mostly unfamiliar with ones related
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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: scion…. If you’d asked me if I understood the meaning of the term scion, I would have said yes. But I would never have been able to
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: hawser… As a longtime fan of the English writer Julian Barnes, I gave a little squeal of joy when my husband picked up a 1989 book of
