Wise Words from Yeats
“Think like a wise man but express yourself like the common people.” Yeats offered this advice to another poet in 1935. Source: Letters on Poetry from W. B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley (1940).
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Words Queen Esther Taught Me
Faithful readers of John Irving love his novels for (among other things) colourful characters, morbid humour and their celebration of diversity. As one of those faithful readers, another thing I appreciate is that I learn new words with every Irving opus. His latest, Queen Esther, graced me with these additions to my vocabulary. folderol: fuss,
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AI Content Is Sloppy
Artificial intelligence (AI) has become widely used, so it’s not surprising to see Merriam-Webster choose an AI-related term as 2025’s “word of the year.” The go-to dictionary for The Associated Press says slop – “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence” – is the leading word
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Figuring Out Numbers
When to spell out numbers depends in good part on what kind of writing you’re doing. In books for general readerships, the standard is The Chicago Manual of Style’s “general rule” of writing out whole numbers from zero to one hundred. In newspaper journalism, whole numbers from zero to nine are written. After nine, numbers
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‘The Secret of Writing’
“Well, the secret to writing is writing. It’s only a secret to people who don’t want to hear it. Writing is how you be a writer.” Source: The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination (2004).
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Non-Identical Twins in the Dictionary
Some pairs of words are like Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen. Let me explain. The Olsens were the youngest cast members of Full House, a popular TV series that had its original run from 1987 to 1995. They played just one character, the daughter of a widowed sportscaster. The girls were cast jointly for the same
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Embracing the Singular They
With its 18th edition, The Chicago Manual of Style has fully embraced the singular they. This comes many years after the manual and the Associated Press mostly accepted the singular they in a development that one veteran editor called “the middle of the end for the insistence that ‘they’ can be only a plural pronoun.”
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A Commonly Misused Verb: Refute
One too-common mistake in journalism is the misuse of the verb refute. For example, there’s this headline at a regional news website in my part of the world: “Neebing Minor Hockey refutes allegations from Lakehead Minor Hockey League.” The problem here is that the Neebing organization did not refute the allegations. That is to say,
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Life Advice
“Never whine. Whining lets a brute know that a victim is in the neighborhood.” This quotation is from Letter to My Daughter (2009).
The 2023 Word of the Year Is …
Dictionaries have made their choices for 2023 English “word of the year”: authentic, hallucinate and rizz. Authentic is the choice of Merriam-Webster as deepfake video and AI-generated writing and pictures have created a sort of “crisis in authenticity.” A Merriam-Webster editor told The Associated Press that “when we question authenticity, we value it even more.”
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