What’s a Male Mistress?
The other day someone asked me for the male equivalent of “mistress.”
Naturally, I shot back “master,” but that was not the answer. My questioner wanted a word that was the male equivalent of:
woman having sexual relations on a regular basis and being supported by man not her husband
Hot Topics on the Daily Writing Tips Forum
Around two weeks after we opened the doors of our Forum, and we already have more than 300 members. Thanks for everyone who joined, I am sure we will be able to help each other with those tricky English questions.
Here are some hot topics that emerged on the Forum on the past two weeks:
Reduplicatives And Their Meanings
After my recent post on reduplicatives, Jaguar asked for definitions of the terms in the post. Of course, now I’m wishing that I hadn’t included quite so many examples, but here goes:
Creative Writing 101
What is Creative Writing?
Creative writing is anything where the purpose is to express thoughts, feelings and emotions rather than to simply convey information.

I’ll be focusing on creative fiction in this post (mainly short stories and novels), but poetry, (auto)biography and creative non-fiction are all other forms of creative writing. Here’s a couple of definitions:
Should You Use Footnotes or Endnotes?
One of our readers, Billy Green, wrote to ask:
Could you enlighten some of us old folks about the proper use of footnotes? Below is what I wrote to the publisher:
I am a firm believer in footnotes printed on the same page where the asterisk is printed. Nowadays in many books which are published, footnotes are sometimes printed at the end of a chapter and other times can rarely be found at all.
Womanly Words - Gyn
Well, I couldn’t let the men have all the fun. English has a lot of words that contain the Greek root meaning woman or female - gyn. This appears at the start or in the middle of many common words. As with the andr- words, many of these have biological or scientific origins. Here’s a list to start you off:
A While vs Awhile
One of our readers, Robert, wrote to ask Daily Writing Tips:
Here’s a couple of words I use all the time interchangeably. But are they? a while vs. awhile Help me out, o oracle!
Most Popular Articles April 2008
Below you will find the most popular articles of the past month. Check them out to make sure you have not missed any.
- English to Become the Official and Obligatory Language of the Internet: The Central Authority for Internet Control (CAIC) announced today that they plan to make English the official and obligatory language of the Internet, and that by 2010 all the web pages should already be using English exclusively.










