How can you kick the verbal habit of saying you know and um so many times in a sentence? For one thing, get comfortable with pauses. There’s no need to fill every silence during a conversation. Also, a doctor who treats patients in Appalachia...
Inkhorn terms are showy Latin- and Greek-based words stuffed into English, a label that looks back to the animal-horn ink bottles used by 14th-century scribes. Henry Cockeram’s 1623 The English Dictionarie (Amazon) includes catillate, meaning “to...
Is there a word in the English language that means “to read by candlelight”? A listener in Kittery Point, Maine, used to read the dictionary every night as a teenager and came across such a word. She’s been racking her brain to...