by Jamie Chavez | Mar 25, 2017 | Words & Language
You know how I feel about my dictionary. It’s the first place I go, not just for spelling but even for fact-checking. Everything starts at the dictionary (here’s just one example). Even the Chicago Manual of Style tells editors to defer to the dictionary. So I was...
by Jamie Chavez | Dec 18, 2016 | Words & Language
On Christmas Eve last year, I was alone in the house, awaiting my son’s arrival from out of town the next morning. It was a quiet—but happily anticipatory—time. When I posted a comment on Facebook— A little melancholy tonight … but my heart is full. I am blessed in...
by Jamie Chavez | Nov 21, 2016 | Miscellany, Words & Language
Stationery is an old-fashioned word. Or maybe I just think it’s old-fashioned because I learned it a long time ago and I don’t see it used much any more, given our electronic culture. But no, my fave dictionary lists it as having appeared in 1688—which is old enough,...
by Jamie Chavez | Nov 14, 2016 | Words & Language, Your Editor Says …
You know I love my thesaurus, right? I do. I have at least four of them, from various decades dating back to the ’40s (you’d be surprised how useful that is), as well as a rhyming dictionary, a slang dictionary, and something called the Flip Dictionary, which is more...
by Jamie Chavez | Nov 8, 2016 | Words & Language
The word until can be a preposition (it took until late that evening to unload the truck, for example) or a conjunction (we kept unloading until it got dark) and for many years I believed the shortened version of this word was ’til. You know—like ’til is a truncation...
