I wrote the line “gave a wan smile” yesterday and, realizing that I wasn’t sure what wan meant, flew to the arms of Webster like a teenage girl flying to the arms of her loving vampire, or werewolf, or whatever violent nocturnal creature it is currently OK to encourage our young girls to snuggle with. [...]
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Posted 25 June 2010
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Also in news: I’ve begun grant writing. (What’s that? You need a grant written? Well, do let me know!) In my efforts to understand the arcane arts that apply to grant writing, I’ve begun reading about budgets and have discovered this delightful etymological morsel: Budget is from the middle French bougette, which is the diminutive [...]
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Posted 07 June 2010
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Happy belated Memorial Day! Did we have fun working all weekend and eking out exhausted attempts at fiction in a our few hours off? No? Was that just me? Have begun Lolita, which has forced me to keep my dictionary ready in my holster for quick reference. Today’s vocabularial speed bump was incondite. Incondite – [...]
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Posted 02 June 2010
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I have been recovering of late from Not-Getting-Into-Any-MFA-Program-Anywhere, a disease unfortunately on the rise despite assurances from the CDC. I shall not belabor your patience with a detailed description of the gruesome symptoms, as sick people are usually wont to do, but instead shall leave you with two neat-o technical terms for novel plotting: energeic [...]
While perusing the dictionary for fun I came across the phrase “the Peter Principle.” This principle, stated in 1968 by Lawrence J. Peter, a Canadian born educator, states that in a heirarchy employees tend to rise to the level of their incompetence. Much like Murhpy’s Law, the Peter Principle is clearly a useful method of [...]
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Posted 31 March 2010
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It’s been far too long since I posted a word of the day. How you must be suffering! Well here’s something that should help: Anodyne is an adjective that means serving to assuage pain, and though it’s a word I’d read before, I had no idea what it meant. It comes from the Greek, with [...]
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Posted 12 January 2010
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The word of the day is a contraction. Ima. Ima is properly used in place of “I am going to.” Since apostrophes are used in contractions to replace the missing letters, I believe the correct spelling of Ima would be… well in reality Ima is a combination of one contraction “I’m” and the non-technical mashup, [...]
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Posted 28 September 2009
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Parlous - according to old Webster, parlous once meant “dangerously shrewd or cunning,” though this definition is generally obsolete now and parlous means simply “full of danger or risk.” As you might guess, the word comes from the same origin as perilous, and thus it’s a tad superfluous, since perilous works quite nicely and is [...]
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Posted 04 May 2009
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My word of the day for this fine non-freezing morning is codswallop. Codswallop means nonsense and is exciting in that its origin is unknown, though its creation is dated by Webster at circa 1963. Apparently codswallop has no connotation other than it’s dictionary denotation. It is a perfect synonym for nonsense except that it sounds [...]
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Posted 09 February 2009
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Apotropaic – adj, designed to avert evil, as in an apotropaic ritual. Despite writing about good and evil in the ancient church, Dan Brown’s vocabularly probably doesn’t include the word apotropaic. Obviously, neither does his publishers. That’s right; had the publishers taken apotropaic action, the Da Vinci Code wouldn’t exist and the world would be [...]
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Posted 27 January 2009
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