The 30-day blogging challenge 12: Doup
A few Scots words for today, starting with Doup. Hands up if you knew it meant the bottom section of an eggshell? No, I didn’t either. It also means the buttocks or the bottom end of anything....
View ArticleThe 30-day blogging challenge 13: words, words, words.
Words, words, words – what’s the fascination with them? Why bother finding the precisely perfect word when most people won’t appreciate the trouble you’ve taken? When you write for a living, finding...
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The 30-day blogging challenge 14: Love is in the air
Well of course it is, it’s Valentine’s day. The earliest known Valentine’s card, in the UK at least, was sent in 1477 by Margery Brews to John Paston of Norfolk (their family papers, published by the...
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The 30-day blogging challenge 15: draught
Remember the ad “There’s a terrific draught in here”? Or am I showing my age? Another everyday word with multiple meanings and at least two spellings (though I think I’m right in saying you’d use only...
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The 30-day blogging challenge 16: E.
Ee ba gum! We’ve reached E. The sixth letter of the alphabet works hard for its living. If you’re a musician you’ll know it as the second whole tone above C. If you’re not a musician and you want to...
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The 30-day blogging challenge 17: educ-
The Latin means “to lead out”: e or de, both meaning “out” + ducere (which is the root of the British “Duke” and where Mussolini got his title Il Duce, the leader, too). Today we’re looking at three...
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The 30-day blogging challenge 18: eidetic.
A psychological term this, but taken from a dictionary of words, not of psychology, so I probably won’t give it the full array of detail that a psychologist attaches to the word. Eidetic is an...
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Do you make these mistakes in English?
Apologies to the genius who invented that headline – it ran and ran in American publications in the early years of the 20th Century, promoting a home-study course to improve both written and spoken...
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Singular “they” wins Word of the Year
“Singular “they”, the gender-neutral pronoun, has been named the Word of the Year by a crowd of over 200 linguists at the American Dialect Society’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C.,” said the...
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Improve your SEO with keywords
Everyone will tell you that blogging helps your SEO – I’ve done it myself – but often they don’t say why or how it works. Now I’m not going into technical SEO-speak (I wouldn’t know how!), but there...
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