Wild Word Friday! As I’ve mentioned in a few other posts, our summers are hectic. Maybe I should say crazy. It’s not unusual for us to extend our table to seat more than twenty for multiple meals. It’s a great time, but to tell the truth without SPAGHETTI I’d be lost! A meal of SPAGHETTI…
Wild Word Friday! You have to admit that some of the names of states in the United States are pretty wild, at least in sound and spelling. The name, ILLINOIS – a state in the central portion of the U.S. – is of Algonquian origin. ILLINOIS translates as man – in the sense, “We are men, not deer, not…
Wild Word Friday! The elders in our little community often refer to a porch as a STOOP, and, when I hear that word, I visualize the daub-and-wattle huts of ancient times where a hard, swept-dirt pad fronts a small low door. You had to STOOP to get into the hut, and thus the first word for…
It’s very tempting to send YOUR Novel out into the world without a last rewrite for word use and phrasing, but please, after all your hard work, don’t succumb to the temptation to let that baby face the query gauntlet without a “sound check.” I recommend that you read this redux out loud. You will…
One of the first words I learned as young piano student was FORTE. FORTE is an Italian word (pronounced fore- tay) and it means loud. I loved seeing that little word FORTE printed on my music. Kick it in! Pound that keyboard! Permission to be loud? WooHoo! I soon began mimicing the adults in my life by using FORTE in…
Wild Word Friday! I’d never heard of the word CHOUSE (rhymes with house) until a month ago when I was browsing through a dictionary, and there it was, important enough to be tucked in its own little dictionary niche. Thus I learned that a CHOUSE is a swindler. Used as a verb, to CHOUSE means to trick…
Wild Word Friday! Don’t you just love a word like CHICANERY? Just saying it out loud engenders all kinds of mischievious images. Most of the CHICANERY in mylife happened when I was a kid. My younger brother Bob was my sidekick. Actually, I was probably his sidekick. He was a lot better at CHICANERY than I was, although…
Wild Word Friday! We couldn’t do a post last week about the word mother without including one this week about FATHER. My FATHER is a retired teacher and an active golfer. At age 84 he still regularly shoots in the low 40s and that’s after having back surgery last year. My FATHER always made life…
Wild Word Friday! My MOTHER is often on my mind right now. She is struggling with dementia, and, as always in matters of dementia, the whole family also struggles. My MOTHER played the piano beautifully and taught a more than a hundred students how to play. She was a church organist, a swing band pianist…
Wild Word Friday! HALL? Ummm, what’s wild about that? I’m not referring to HALL as in HALLway, but HALL as in the names of various German and Austrian places or towns such as HALLein, Schwaeblish HALL, and HALLstatt. You see, hal is the Celtic word for salt. During the HALLstatt Period (roughly around the 8th to…
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