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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: misprision. I can’t escape the notion that, every once in awhile, some authors use words to show off. I level this critique […]

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: plectrumed. My family is intensely interested in music. My grandmother was a conductor, my aunt a concert violinist. My husband sings in a

Reading time: About 2.5 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: scurf. I read the book Tinkers by Paul Harding in 2010, the same year it won the Pulitzer Prize. Although I didn’t  find

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: vitrine. It’s not often I stumble across a noun I find difficult to define (unless, of course, it’s a scientific name for

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: ambivert. I recently hosted a birthday dinner for my brother-in-law, Doug.  Over the meal we started talking about extroversion and introversion. Doug

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: agora. When I read Kathryn Schulz’s rousing article about Twitter, I blogged on it. Then I pondered the meaning of a word she’d

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: paladin. This Friday, November 22, marks the 50th anniversary of the assassination of JFK. I remember being in grade 2 and having

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: bibelots. When I studied French in high school, I loathed the subject. I think I might even have had a mild learning

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: bisque. When I read the 1965 novel, Stoner, by John Williams, I disagreed with the characterization of it as the “perfect novel.”

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: scalawag. I’m the eldest of five children and, when I was a youngster, my parents used to call all of us kids