Uncleftish Beholding (1989) is a short text written by Poul Anderson. It is written using almost exclusively words of Germanic origin, and was intended to illustrate what the English language might look like if it had not received its considerable number of words from other languages, particularly Latin, Greek and French. The text is about …
Language is alive. It’s changed a lot since Mr. Keating’s English class. To keep your writing current, here are three outdated rules that you can finally break: 1. Use two spaces after a period. Back in typewriter days, teachers taught students to type two spaces after periods. Computers have changed everything. Programs are now designed …
English is a tricky language. You’re pretty sure you know what a word means, then you blink twice and its meaning has changed entirely. Here are ten examples: Bully Pretty Sad Stupid Last Brave Amuse Meat Cute Mugger Source: List25.com
Have you have ever spoken with anyone from ProEdit? If so, you quickly realized that most of us are from the South (Cumming, GA, specifically). Folks say we talk kinda funny. We think we sound quite normal. Here are 13 Southern expressions. Are they weird? You be the judge: “Like a cat on a hot tin roof.”Cats …
Maybe telling people that they shouldn’t read your blog post is a lousy idea for actually getting people to read your blog post. But the point is made, nonetheless. You’re here. This week’s post is about how to write attention-getting titles for your blog posts. Here are some templates that you can put to immediate …
Most Word People love morphemes, but they may not even know it. A “morpheme” is a word or a part of a word that has a meaning and that contains no smaller part that has a meaning. An example is probably the best way to explain this concept. Let’s begin with the lexical item nation …
History is full of amazing and sometimes terrible old words. Here are some notables. abroad out of doors advertisement a notice to readers in a book ague malaria or a similar illness aliment food; nourishment animalcule a microscopic animal apothecary a person who prepared and sold medicine asunder apart audition the power of hearing aught …
This week’s blog posting will explore a topic that has bugged Word People for hundreds of years. What is “Lorem Ipsum” anyway, and why do we use it in page layout? According to lipsum.com (and yes, there is a website devoted to this topic…who knew?): “Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and …
What in the world is a palindrome? A palindrome is a word or sentence that reads the same forward as it does backward. Here are some cool palindromes for your amusement. Can you make up some of your own? aibohphobia alula cammac civic deified deleveled detartrated devoved dewed evitative Hannah kayak kinnikinnik lemel level madam …
In this age of quick social media posts and tweets, it’s easy to fall into sloppy habits with email correspondences. A poorly written email can leave a lasting, unfavorable impression.