noun

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 phrase: etymological fallicist… As a result of my own recent foray into video —you can see my work here — I’ve started watching more Internet videos. No cat videos for me, unless they […]

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: anomie… Steven Heighton is a Canadian novelist, short story writer and poet. I’ve never read any of his books — the most famous of which is Afterlands (2006) currently being

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: miasma… Inspired by a mostly positive review on NPR, I recently read the novel The Devil and Webster, by Jean Hanff Korelitz. Described by some as a “thriller,” I found it more of a

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: cusp…. I was reading an interview with fiction writer Emma Richler (pictured above) this week when I stumbled across the word cusp. Here is how she used it (in answering

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: euphoria… I was flipping through a book on my shelves this week and encountered a favourite word of mine: euphoria. Here is how author Daniel Goleman used it

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: zeugma… My favourite television show of all time remains the West Wing a political drama (1999 to 2006) about the fictitious Democratic presidency of Josiah Bartlet (played by Martin Sheen). The stories are fascinating and complex 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:  flibbertigibbet… Here is a novel about four college classmates — an artist, an architect, a lawyer and an actor —who move to New York and support and torment each other for

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: manumission…. I grew up on the west coast of Canada, where our prejudice tends to be displayed towards Asian, South-Asian or First Nations people. I don’t think

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 — or, today, phrase — of the week. Today’s phrase: Tarpeian Rock….  Two years ago, I stood near the Tarpeian Rock, and I didn’t even know it was an historic site. My husband

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: hotchpotch… I picked up the book Spill, Simmer, Falter, Wither by Sara Baume on the shelf of my local library mainly because it was short. I saw it was