At our family gathering this past weekend, my brother-in-law and his girlfriend said they had a word quandary for me. We proceeded to have a delightful conversation about word usage and context. Afterward, I mentioned it would make a great feature . . . and here it is. This week’s…
A recent editing job sent me on an etymological hunt for the difference between historic and historical. My search would serve two purposes: The first, for my client; the second, for Which Word Wednesday. C’est magnifique! This quandary arose because I needed to know if Jesus would be considered a…
Some word pairs are like identical twins. Unless you get to know each one individually, you always mix them up. Compose and comprise are twins in the linguistic sense. I can’t tell them apart, so I am forced to look to the dictionary with every encounter. It is frustrating to…
When it comes to word quandaries, we’ve seen again and again here at Which Word Wednesday that proper usage is directly related to context. And there’s the rub. Context is difficult to ascertain mid-sentence. We cannot grasp the correct word for the context so we insert whatever word is at…
We’ve all experienced the sick-to-the-stomach feeling of envy. It’s no fun whatsoever. And it makes us green, which is not a desirable pallor for anyone—except Kermit, but he’s green all the time, not due to any emotional wellspring. (Mary Kassian describes the origin of the phrase green with envy if…
Do you have favorite words? My guess is you do. Each of us has a preferred vocabulary storehouse from which we draw to think, speak, and write. My vocabulary storehouse holds some words simply because of how they sound rolling off the tongue. These are the words I use generously—words…
You can tell a lot about people by the way they approach a new book. Do they read the back cover or the inside flap? Do they skim the table of contents? Do they read the last pages first, to know where the story is heading? Do they judge a…
Conversation is flowing, discussion is vibrant, and then . . . There’s a blip on the communication horizon. The sentence you are speaking will soon hit a snag because the word you had intended to use is now up for debate in the unseen recesses of your brain. Which word…
Humans are funny creatures. (Funny ha-ha and funny peculiar.) Get us together, and that funny factor increases exponentially. We begin to mirror speech and communication gestures. And we do so without realizing it. This scares me. What words and gestures do I mimic without conscious awareness? Not sure I want…
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