Word

“Be careful what you say—you may have to eat your words.”

I don’t think so much about eating my words as about wearing them. When someone sees me, the words come back to haunt like a miasma around me. No matter how colourful my dress, bad words turn everything grey and muddy brown.

I bought one of those Word-A-Day calendars to improve my vocabulary for college.

reify – to regard or treat (an abstraction) as if it had concrete or material existence.

Which is more useful to you: a dictionary that tells you how to use a word or a dictionary that tells you how a word is used?

The >>Word of the Day<< today over at dictionary.com is >>oblation<<.

>>Oblation<< comes from the past participle form of the Latin verb* >>offerre<< meaning >>to bring<<.

So, an oblation is an offering or a gift.

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* A Latin verb is traditionally cited by giving four forms, in this case: offero, offerre, obtuli, oblatum.

And then some more words come along and a paragraph is born.

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Words are like leaves; and where they most abound,
Much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found.

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 – Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
 – An Essay on Criticism [1711], pt. II, l. 109

Spaces define which letters go together to make up a word.

Spaces define which letters to together to make up a word.

A man of words and not of deeds
Is like a garden full of weeds.

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Once a word has been allowed to escape, it cannot be recalled.

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 – Horace (65-8 B.C.)
 – Epistles, bk. I, epistle xviii, l. 71

LI

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

--The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
(trans. Edward Fitzgerald, 1st ed.)

The web of words wraps round the whole wide world, concealing the secret numbers underneath.

1001 1001 0110 1001 1010 1001

My favourite word in the English language is »language«. However, if you gave me a slightly larger set of words to choose from I might have more difficulty expressing a preference.

The best way to discover new words is by reading a book.