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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: speculaas… I picked up the new novel Akin by Emma Donoghue with eager anticipation. I’d enjoyed her earlier book Room (although I hadn’t seen the movie) and […]

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: schist… My uncle was a geologist but I never even took a basic overview course while in school. (A die-hard ‘artsie,’ I avoided most science classes like

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: tamasha…. I don’t typically read murder mysteries, particularly not ones in a series, which I often find a bit too predictable for my taste. Nevertheless, my neighbours

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: fatberg…. You’ll certainly be familiar with the word iceberg, but have you ever heard of a fatberg? I hadn’t until I received an email from longtime reader

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: interstices… Some authors use unusual words multiple times in a single book. No reader is surprised to see words like “it” or “that” or “was” a multitude of times.

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: clerisy… I regularly read the New York Times but, as a Canadian, don’t have the time for many other American newspapers, excellent though they may be. Thus,

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: samizdat…. I haven’t yet watched The Handmaid’s Tale on television (I’m a slow enough TV watcher that I’m still making my belated way through a boxed set of

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: blackbirding… Set in Australia, in the middle of the 19th century, David Malouf’s award-winning novel, Remembering Babylon, explores both the subtleties and the gross injustices of racism. The

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: phalanx… I enjoy literary mystery stories. One of my longtime favourites has been A.S. Byatt’s Booker-Prize winning novel Possession, the story of a  pair of young scholars investigating the lives

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: doppelgänger… I wasn’t terribly impressed by the novel The Twilight Wife by A.J. Banner. I can’t recall where I picked it up but I know I found it