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: geschrei… When I read the very funny and urbane book Dreyer’s English by Benjamin Dryer, I was expecting to be both amused and educated. But I wasn’t […]
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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: hornswoggle… When I encountered the word hornswoggle in Elizabeth Gilbert’s new novel City of Girls, I knew exactly what it meant: to cheat or to deceive. Here
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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: slewed…. The verb slewed strikes me as rather British, although I can’t say why. Perhaps it’s because it carries the whiff of something slightly old-fashioned? In 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: spraddling…. Something about the pandemic is causing me to read more murder mysteries than usual. I’m not sure why except perhaps that I find reading such books
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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: scarpered… I don’t read many murder mysteries but when a book is recommended by the New York Times, I’ll consider spending some time with it. Ruth Ware’s
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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: gamboling… If you had asked me what the word “gamboling” meant, I would have told you, correctly, that it refers to running or jumping about playfully. I might even have
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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: pullulated. I may not know the precise meaning of a word but I seldom meet one I have never heard or seen before. Hence my surprise when I came
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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: roiling … I attended college at the very end of the 1970s. The place my children now attend — my own alma mater — seems vastly changed. As different as grapes
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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: forfend… I don’t think I had ever encountered the word forfend before reading a delightfully snarky Gail Collins column in the May 26/16 New York Times. Under the
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Reading time: Less than 3 minutes Several readers recently asked me how to eliminate the verb ‘to be’ in their writing. Here’s how… When Hamlet moaned, “to be or not to be, that is the question” he was actually reflecting the dark thoughts of many overworked editors. Writers frequently use the verb “to be” more
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