Predominately predominates
In Twelve Years a Slave, Solomon Northrup writes about his wife’s mixed blood ethnicity, “It is difficult to tell whether the red, white, or black predominates.”
Word of the Week – limelight
Awards season is about to begin. The Golden Globes airs Sunday. The NFL crowns a champion in a few weeks, and in March we get the Oscars. All these events put folks in the spotlight.
Can We All Just Agree?
I think we can all agree that subjects and verbs need to agree with one another.
Have a lollapalooza new year
It’s a new year and a re-start on my Word of the Week posts. Why not start off with a neologism—a made-up word. One that I hope characterizes the year ahead: lollapalooza.
Let’s Compare
Tis the season…for comparison shopping. Thanks to the convenience of the Internet, we can still let our fingers do the walking and save ourselves from the crowds.
Of Mother Love and Ugly Ornaments
For years, one of our family’s Christmas traditions consisted of our own version of Where’s Waldo. Only my husband and his mother played. The object of their hide and seek was not a person but an ornament Bob had made as a Cub Scout. Proponents of "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle would be impressed at the creativity displayed in his recycled Styrofoam ball, toothpicks and flashbulbs topped off with red and gold glitter. (For readers younger than 30, before the digitization of photography, cameras used flashbulbs when natural light was limited.)
Thankful? Count the ways to say it.
I’m taking a page from the folks at Daily Writing Tips who occasionally write a post on all the synonyms for a certain word, and adding my own twist to the exercise so many are involved in this month—posting 30 days of thankfulness. How many ways are there to say “thank you” or express thankfulness?
On Muffins and Risk Aversion
Rarely does anything good come out of a container that’s been in the back of the refrigerator longer than, say, a month. I'm sure I'm not the only person to occasionally discover leftovers whose origins are but a dim memory. Moldy and smelly, they quickly end up in the disposal. If the mold weren't enough to disgust me, the smell would make me vomit.
Vice or vise versa?
For the record, a vice is a moral fault or failing - a bad habit. Definitions of vice range from a trivial foible or character flaw to the illegal - gambling, drug dealing, prostitution. I suppose the workbench might be useful for some of those activities.
Word of the Week – flagrant
Referees and umpires call them; athletes deny them; politicos charge them: flagrant violations or infractions of the rules. These are the offenses that are obvious even to the armchair spectator. They are disgraceful, monstrous, immoral. They are glaring—meaning they shine in the harsh light to which they are exposed—an appropriate synonym since the original meaning of the Latin flagrāre was to burn, blaze.