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: epiphenomena…. When a word is similar to a better known cousin, sometimes it’s harder rather than easier to discern the meaning of the lesser known term. Such […]
What does the word ‘epiphenomena’ mean? Read More »
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: apogee…. I’ve seen the word apogee dozens of times in my reading. I knew, vaguely, that it meant the height or high spot of something. But I
What does ‘apogee’ mean? Read More »
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: hajj…. Some writers are clearly well educated and deeply literate and when I picked up Patricia Hampl’s book The Art of the Wasted Day, I knew immediately
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: teasel… I keep a Word document containing all the new and interesting words I encounter in my daily reading. When I collected the word teasel from Maggie
What is a ‘teasel’? Read More »
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: caesura…. When I saw the word caesura, I knew it meant a gap or a pause and I assumed the term to be musical. But I wasn’t
What’s a ‘caesura’? Read More »
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: badinage… When I read the word badinage I could guess at its meaning from context. It appeared in the highly-praised new novel by Susan Choi, Trust Exercise,
What does the word ‘badinage’ mean? Read More »
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: farrago… I thought I knew the word farrago but it turns out the only word I knew was fargo, as in the name of the 1996 comedy thriller
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: suzerainty… I knew of the late Clark Davey back in the 1980s when he must have been a ‘youngster’ of only 60 years old. At the time, I was
What is ‘suzerainty’? Read More »
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: comity…. When I read the fascinating Danish novel — shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize — Mirror, Shoulder, Signal by Dorthe Nors, I was struck by the cool precision
What does ‘comity’ mean? Read More »
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: liana… I had never heard or seen the word liana before reading the marvellous Maggie O’Farrell memoir I am I am I am. Here is how O’Farrell
