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: faience. When I read Ian McEwan’s wonderful new novel, Sweet Tooth, I encountered a word I’d never seen before: faience. Here is the sentence in which it […]
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: bildungsroman. My son is studying to become an opera singer so we hear lots of languages in our house — Italian, German, Spanish and French among others. When
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Word count: 232 words 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: balustrade. I’ve known for years — decades, even — that the group of spindles underneath the railing in a set of stairs was
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Word count: 272 words 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: solipsist… I must have read the word solipsist dozens — if not hundreds — of times over the last 20 years. And I’ve never
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Word count: 258 words 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: bathos. The first time I encountered the word bathos, while in university, I thought it was at typo for pathos. Pathetic, eh? What
Word count: 195 words 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: harmattan. When I first encountered the word harmattan, while reading Will Ferguson’s compelling novel 419, I had no idea what it meant. But
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Word count: 270 words 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: skein. I know a skein is a length of wool or yarn but when I encountered the word again recently, I wondered about
Word count: 328 words 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: chaplet. Do you ever find yourself reading a book or a piece of text and letting your eyes skid by the words you
Word count: 221 words 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: punim. I hope to spare you the misery of watching the HBO special Behind the Candelabra — a cinebiography of entertainer Liberace (see
Word count: 326 words 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: raiment. Have you ever observed that when you learn a previously unknown word, the newcomer starts appearing all over the place? This happens
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