Recently my learned friend and colleague sent me a link to a Slate article about the tendency of writers to abuse the long dash, with the note “are we guilty of this?” Absolutely not, I thought. Dashes have a very specific purpose, namely to mark the presence of parentheses. There are three other marks for [...]
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A love affair with “-spire”
When I drive, I think (though I still primarily pay attention to the road). And sometimes when I think, I think about words (please don’t judge me). And when I think about words, I try to figure out their roots in Latin to see if I can understand the etymology. One thing that recently had [...]
When I first met this word: “Guerilla”
Editor’s Note: This post is part of an occasional series on words we found and took an immediate shine to…. When: late 1970s. I first met this word when I was eight years old (or thereabouts). It was just after dinner, and my family and I were standing in front of our house in Sea [...]
Beauty in a word
We’re spoilt for choice when it comes to words about, or describing, beauty – just open any thesaurus and see how many words you can use instead of beautiful . These are relatively standard (and perhaps even overused) words in our vocabulary today. But what about the more unusual ones? Robin Bloor explores 10 Beautiful [...]
When words change meaning
Poynter Online has posted a very interesting article about the “semantic shift” through which the meaning of a word changes drastically. Some original meanings that might raise an eyebrow or two include “enthusiastic” (overzealous, misdirected religious emotion) and “girl” (a young person of either sex—in the 14th century). Try to do the little exercise at [...]
