Posts tagged as:

language

Cityscape, Skyline Metropolis?

March 7, 2010

The suf­fix of one word can lead to so many other inter­est­ing words. In look­ing into the theme for Doo­dle Week on U3 this Fri­day I knew I wanted to draw some kind of city sky­line, a cityscape. That led to look­ing up other kinds of words with ‘scape’ as a suf­fix. That led me […]

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Badaud

February 18, 2010

A per­son given to idle obser­va­tion of every­thing.
From Wordnik.com, word of the day.
Can you see this per­son as being some kind of know it all? Or are they just really aim­less and hav­ing noth­ing bet­ter to do with their time?
Write a char­ac­ter, some­one extremely badaud. Is the per­son like­able? Aggra­vat­ing? Or great fun to have around, […]

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Dystopia

February 17, 2010

From the Free Dic­tio­nary — Dystopia: an imag­i­nary place where every­thing is as bad as it can be.
Dystopia is the oppo­site of a utopia. It’s a pretty great word if you’re a sci­ence fic­tion fan, like myself. I hadn’t heard of it before. Or, at least I didn’t remem­ber it. My nephew started play­ing a new […]

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Ranty Editor

January 26, 2010

Ranty Edi­tor wants to teach the world spelling, gram­mar and punc­tu­a­tion one Twit­ter post at a time. Well worth fol­low­ing on Twitter.

Book­mark It

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The Campaign for Plain English

April 24, 2009

Have you heard about Plain Eng­lish Cam­paign or the Plain Lan­guage Net­work? The idea is to make com­mu­ni­ca­tion sim­ple and easy to under­stand. Going back to basics essen­tially. It has been used mainly as a guide for legal and gov­ern­ment com­mu­ni­ca­tions but should be a guide to every­one. What is the point of writ­ing if […]

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Would You Like Coffee With That?

December 8, 2007

Do you want a hot mug of cof­fee or do you want a mug of hot cof­fee? Do you watch your word place­ment as you write and edit? Make sure you are describ­ing a hot cof­fee and not a hot mug.
Some­thing like “I’m an antique lover.” Works in con­ver­sa­tion, spo­ken words have tone to show their […]

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Spelling Style

January 29, 2007

Spelling is tricky all on it’s own. When you throw in dif­fer­ent lan­guages and cul­tures it gets down right com­pli­cated.
First, con­sider Eng­lish and Amer­i­can spelling. Then throw in Cana­dian spelling, which is some com­bi­na­tion of the two. Same for other coun­tries in the com­mon­wealth.
Have you seen words spelt with an s instead of a z? […]

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Is your Meter Running?

September 25, 2006

Meter is one of those words with sev­eral mean­ings. It’s a mea­sure­ment of size, though we spell it metre in Canada. It’s a device like a park­ing meter, mea­sur­ing time. It’s also mea­sure­ment of rhythm and pace.
Accord­ing to my Funk Wag­nalls dic­tio­nary, a meter is:
“A mea­sured rhythm con­sti­tut­ing one of the chief char­ac­ter­is­tics of verse.”
Meter isn’t just […]

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Mistaken Words

September 11, 2006

What are your words? The ones you always have to look up and check spelling or mean­ings? Look­ing at a book with “the most com­mon mis­takes in Eng­lish usage” I found a cou­ple of my own.

Accept and except.

These even sound about the same. Do you know which is which? When do you accept and when do […]

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Time to Buy a New Dictionary

August 14, 2006

When did you last buy/ get a new dic­tio­nary? How about a the­saurus? Maybe you splurged and got a rhyming dic­tio­nary too?
I espe­cially like play­ing around with my the­saurus. But, tonight, I dis­cov­ered how out of touch my trusty dic­tio­nary is. In fact, good old trusty is down right rusty. There is no ergonom­ics in my […]

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Cuold Tihs Bcemoe Ppoluar?

June 12, 2006

Here’s some­thing for you to try…
Aoc­c­drnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uin­ervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit por­belm. Tihs […]

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Cutesy Words

May 8, 2006

I do not like cut­sey words. “Peeps” “sumpin” and “was­sup” make me cringe. Per­haps I’m just show­ing my age, or being too par­tic­u­lar and unbend­ing. What­ever the case, I don’t like them and I can’t see myself chang­ing on this.
It’s inter­est­ing to think, the way the Eng­lish lan­guage evolves, some of these so called words could […]

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Musing with Words

May 2, 2006

Words are great. They come in a vari­ety of styles, sizes and shapes. They don’t need to be fed and clothed or taken for walks. They won’t beg for food at your table and they never pee on the car­pet. They have other ways of nag­ging at you, dig­ging into your soul and mak­ing you […]

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