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: portmanteau… When I recently read the word portmanteau, I mistakenly thought of a porte cochère. The latter term refers to a covered entrance […]
What’s a ‘portmanteau’? 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: auscultation… Many friends and colleagues had recommended the 2011 novel The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht to me but I never picked
What does ‘auscultation’ 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: rime… I had never read anything written by the darkly comic Danish author Dorothe Nors. But when her 2017 novel Mirror, Shoulder,
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: ruction… An unsparing novel that addresses and denunciates the sexual abuse in the Catholic Church in Ireland, A History of Loneliness, by
What’s a ‘ruction’? 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: dovecote…. When I read the word dovecote in John LeCarré’s memoir Pigeon Tunnel, I had no idea how appropriate it was. Here
What’s a ‘dovecote’? 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: rick…. My father grew up on a farm but I was born a city girl. As a result, I had never heard
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: tignon… If you had said the word tignon to me, I wouldn’t have been able to guess its meaning. But, encountering it
What’s a ‘tignon’? 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: pentimento…. Like many people, I was obsessed with the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court hearings in 2018 and the riveting testimony of Christine
What does ‘pentimento’ 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: belfry…. Of course, I know that a belfry is the part of a bell tower or steeple in which bells are housed.
What’s the origin of the word ‘belfry’? 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: recursion… What happens when medical diagnoses become automated? That was the question that physician and writer Siddhartha Mukherjee (author of the superb
What does the word ‘recursion’ mean? Read More »
