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: panacea. I can’t recall when I learned the word panacea, but I’ve loved it ever since. For more than 40 years, I’ve known it means 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: chortle. I was reading an amusing Kathryn Schulz piece in the New Yorker about writer Nell Zink this week. (The piece was headlined “Outside In” and appeared 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: predella. I was recently in New York City where I satisfied a 25-year ambition: I finally managed to travel to Cloisters, a satellite
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Reading time: Less than 2 minutes 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: henid. I love learning new words! Some writers — such as Alice Gregory — make the task especially easy by including definitions of
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: sprezzatura… Many attribute God-like credentials to American writer John McPhee and hold his writing in awe. I do not. In fact, I find some 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: hurdy gurdy. Of course, I know what a hurdy-gurdy is. It’s a stringed instrument (pictured above) that produces sound by a crank-turned wheel
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Reading time: Less than 2 minutes 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: chimera. I’d never read anything written by British novelist Sebastian Faulks (pictured above), despite multiple urgings from my husband to give the book Birdsong
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: lineaments. When I read the novel Brazzaville Beach, by William Boyd (shown above), late last year, I wrote myself a brief note about
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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: hoyden. I read the novel Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger when I was about 13-years-old. I enjoyed it moderately, as I recall,
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: threnody. I read Anne-Marie MacDonald’s landmark novel, Fall on Your Knees, back in 1997, the year in which it was published. Set largely
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