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: fulminating…. When I read the novel Where’d You Go, Bernadette, by Maria Semple, I didn’t expect to find my word of the […]
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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: prosody…. As a voracious reader, I regularly encounter words I’ve seen many times before but that I’m still hard-pressed to define. Prosody
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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: guignol … When reader John Friesen sent me the word guignol, I didn’t recognize it, although I knew immediately it was French. He found it
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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: synecdoche… When I read Rumaan Alam’s latest novel Leave the World Behind, the word synecdoche, rang a dim bell in my mind, although
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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: afflatus… I’ve been reading a lot about Ayad Akhtar lately. An American-born playwright, novelist, and screenwriter of Pakistani heritage who received the
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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: maieutics… When I read the memoir Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener, I encountered several new-to-me words. One was chelonian and the other,
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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: orrery… When my children were young, a dad in our social circle decided to acquaint all our young kids with the concept
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: gadabout… When I read Gail Caldwell’s marvellous book, Let’s Take the Long Way Home — a remarkable paean to friendship — one
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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: ginnel… When I read English authors, I often encounter words that are idiosyncratically British. Of course I can figure out the obvious
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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: infanta… When I stumbled across the word infanta, I knew I’d seen it before (and probably looked up its meaning) but I
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