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: portcullis… I have certain gaps in my reading and one of the large ones is that I’ve never read any Barbara Tuchman. (I’ve also failed to read any […]
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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: fo’c’s’le… I read the novel Fifteen Dogs by Andre Alexis because a friend highly recommended it and, to be honest, because it had won a couple of big awards
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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: ontogeny… I discovered Ms Magazine when I was a teenager in the 1970s and I’ve long been interested in the work of Gloria Steinem. This year, however, when I read
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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: feuilleton. I began my working life in the newspaper business so, honestly, I should have known what the word feuilleton meant. But when reader John Friesen sent 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: attar… I had long associated the word attar with scent, but I didn’t know its meaning any further than that and would have been reluctant to use it in
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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: parvenu. I learned the word parvenu as a child. My father was extraordinarily pompous and used it to describe people he didn’t like: wealthy people with no class
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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: hypotaxis. I’ve watched the upcoming American election with more than my usual interest (I have an undergrad degree in political science), as a result of the bizarre performance
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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: cruft… My word-of-the-week comes from my good friend Eve Johnson. She stumbled across it twice in one day. The word, cruft, was new to me as well. It means
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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: soubrette… Earlier this year I read the funny and interesting memoir Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life by Steve Martin. An actor, comedian, writer, producer and musician, Martin came to public
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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: ferrule… After hearing a radio interview with author Jonathan Lee I decided his novel, High Dive, would interest me. The book is a fictionalized re-telling of the 1984 attempt
