Category: Language

One Word: Pangram

You all know I love anagrams – those wonderful phrases created by rearranging the letters of one thing to spell something else. Like when I scramble the letters of “Gary Leland Matthews” to spell “sadly elegant warmth” (and lots of other things – most of them unflattering but hilarious). Until a few days ago, however,…

February 2, 2016
One Word: Beggar

Here’s a word I (sometimes) like and (sometimes) use: “beggar”. Depending on its meaning. Mostly the word strikes me unremarkable, even depressing. A beggar can be someone who survives by begging. That definition doesn’t inspire me. As a verb, something that “beggars” you reduces you to poverty. Don’t care for that one, either! Nowadays we…

February 1, 2016
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…

January 30, 2016
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…

January 29, 2016
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.)

January 27, 2016
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…

January 27, 2016
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…

January 25, 2016
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…

January 24, 2016
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 –…

January 23, 2016
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…

January 20, 2016
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…

January 19, 2016
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…

January 18, 2016