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Month: January 2016

  • One Word: Ourself

    One Word: Ourself

    My recent article on the “singular they” prompted an insightful question from reader Mahin Pouryaghma. Just to provide context: Dr. Pouryaghma is a licensed professional counselor whose practice emphasizes self-honesty. You can read her background here on the Psychology Today website. She writes: “When I am talking to more than one person and am saying…

  • One Word: Strengths

    One Word: Strengths

    “Strengths” first caught my attention for being the longest English word with only one vowel. Longest, that is, in number of letters. There are other ways of measuring lengths. Nowadays, if we ask such a question on any Internet forum like Quora, while forgetting to specify letter-count, there’s no shortage of people to remind us…

  • One Word: Brevity

    One Word: Brevity

    “Brevity” is one of those words that exemplifies itself. Seven letters long, it’s the noun form of “brief”, which means short. “Brief” and “short” also are words constituting examples of themselves. Words that rhyme with brevity include “levity” and “longevity”. (This article is part of my series on words that are #worth1000pictures.)

  • One Word: Solitude

    One Word: Solitude

    Some words I love because of the way they sound. The way they feel when I write them. Their playful ambiguities. Their spelling quirks. Others I love mostly on account of what they mean to me. “Solitude” is a word I love for many reasons – but mostly for its meaning. I love to be…

  • One Word: The Singular They

    One Word: The Singular They

    Glad tidings! English now has a third-person pronoun that is both singular and gender-neutral. Best of all, it’s grammatically correct, according to all the best authorities we need to heed. It’s a pronoun we’ve always had – and used. For centuries it was universally accepted. For a while it fell out of favor in formal…

  • One Word: Orthotomeo

    Guest post today from Joel Smith, responding to my article about the word “epistemology” (how we know stuff). Joel writes: “The Apostle Paul, writing about correctly interpreting his letters, said that they need to be ‘rightly divided’ (2 Timothy 2:15). The term rightly divided is translated from the Greek word ORTHOTOMEO. “Ortho = correctly. Tomeo…

  • Phyllis Ring’s The Munich Girl

    Phyllis Ring’s The Munich Girl

    Cheri and I are thrilled to be reading the newly released novel from our friend Phyllis Edgerly Ring. It’s called The Munich Girl: A Novel of the Legacies That Outlast War. Not yet too far along, but already loving it. (I’ll post an update here when I’m finished.) Normally I don’t mention new books –…

  • Fabiola Gianotti’s Baffling Anagrams

    Fabiola Gianotti’s Baffling Anagrams

    CERN, the world’s top particle physics facility, has a new director-general, the fabulous Fabiola Gianotti. She took the reins this month, having been democratically chosen by colleagues. The soft-spoken, hard-driving, serenely brilliant Italian scientist will need every atom of her legendary stamina for the coming ordeal. That’s not only because she’s the first woman to…

  • Two Words: Compound

    Two Words: Compound

    This series is about single words that are each, individually, worth a thousand pictures. Seems a simple enough premise. Except when it isn’t. What about “words” that consist of two or more words? Increasingly I’m feeling the need to write about expressions such as “lame duck”, “ice cream”, or “son of a gun”. No, wait…

  • One Word: Common

    Looking over the list of words I’m writing about, it strikes me how high a percentage are common words – not fancy, unfamiliar words of the literary-technical variety. Not always, of course. I just wrote about “epistemology”, an uncommon word meaning “the study of how we know what we know”. That’s a word I almost…

  • One Word: Crumb

    One Word: Crumb

    Some words fascinate me on account of unusual or specialized ways they can be used. “Crumb” is such a word. Singular, not plural. I’m not especially interested in crumbs (plural), the little shards of bread, cake, pie crust, and the like that break off and make a mess that needs to be cleaned up so…

  • One Word: Epistemology

    Here’s a word I almost never use: “epistemology”. And yet – I love it. That odd-sounding word represents one of the defining themes of my life. A theme that runs through all my books and writings. A theme that engages my thoughts, rivets my attention. That theme is a question: How do we know what…

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