English has adopted a rich store of words about feeling and suffering from the classical languages. The Greek pathos, for example, has come down to us intact to mean, in English, an evocation of pity or compassion, but that’s just for starters. Pathology (the word literally means “the study of feeling or suffering”) is the … Read more
We’ll be closing the doors of the DWT Freelance Writing Course this Friday, September 30, at midnight (GMT). That’s within 12 hours, so if you were planning to join, well, do it now! As we mentioned before the course is a 6-week program aimed at people who want to get started making money freelance writing … Read more
Reduplication, a type of vocabulary variation that allows writers and speakers of English to indulge in the rich potential for wordplay the language so often provides, refers to any of three types of repetitive extension of sounds. (Many other languages also feature reduplication, but this post focuses exclusively on the English tongue.) Rhyming Reduplication When … Read more
I don’t want to make you feel bad, but because so many writers handle this issue badly, I’m going to discuss the use of bad and badly. Let’s start with badly, which is an adverb. Roughly speaking, an adverb describes how something is done: “She handled the news badly.” Bad, on the other hand, is … Read more
The Internet completely changed the freelance writing landscape. For some people (those who were freelance writers before), these changes are scary. For others (those who are getting started), they are quite exciting. In my opinion there has never been a better time to be a freelance writer, and that is why we decided to launch … Read more
Some words appear to be antonyms of other words because they consist of one of those words preceded by an antonymic prefix. However, the sense of the prefixed word may be only tangentially related to the root word. Here are some examples of such mismatches: 1. Apprehension/misapprehension: The most common sense of apprehension is of … Read more
Is the United States a democracy, or a republic? (Both.) What’s the difference between an autocracy and a dictatorship? (There is none.) These and other questions of usage are answered with definitions and connotations of terms referring to forms and philosophies of government listed below: 1. Anarchy: Anarchy is from the Greek word meaning “no … Read more
In honor of National Punctuation Day, commemorated on September 24 (you didn’t forget, did you?), here’s a directory of Web sites documenting, usually with photographs, egregious punctuation errors. First, by the way, note that the founder of National Punctuation Day, a freelance business-newsletter writer named Jeff Rubin, sponsors a Punctuation Paragraph Contest. The only rule … Read more
One of the most inventive aspects of invention-friendly English is verbing, the denominalization of nouns into verbs. It’s nothing new — verbs have been created from noun forms throughout the life span of Modern English and perhaps even before it evolved from Middle English; what’s been different during our lifetime, perhaps, is the rate at … Read more
Marshal and martial are a pair of words that, perhaps aided by similar associations, are often confused. Marshal The first image that marshal provokes in one’s mind, at least for Americans, is likely a lawman of the Old West, but the word’s origin is hundreds of years older. The term comes from a Germanic compound … Read more
Some of these similar-looking words do have, among various meanings, the same sense, but their primary definitions are quite different. Know these distinctions: 1. ambiguous/ambivalent: To be ambiguous is be able to be understood in more than one way (or, less commonly, of uncertain identity); to be ambivalent is to express uncertainty or contradictory opinions. … Read more
An adverb is a word that modifies a verb or another adverb, or perhaps an adjective — or possibly even a clause or an entire sentence. How versatile! But there’s more to this part of speech: It can sometimes shed the nearly ubiquitous -ly ending and, though it subsequently appears to be an adjective, retains … Read more