by Jamie Chavez | Dec 12, 2016 | Words & Language
We’ve had a drought here in the American South. It stopped raining in early August and didn’t start again until early December, after the irrigation system had been turned off for some weeks. So it seemed only appropriate to republish this post from 2012—a sort of...
by Jamie Chavez | Dec 5, 2016 | Words & Language
My siblings and I talk like Midwesterners, although none of us live there (or have ever lived there). Our mother was a Midwesterner: born and raised in Chicago. Daddy was also a Midwesterner, born/raised in St. Louis, although he had Southern roots: his mother was...
by Jamie Chavez | Oct 31, 2016 | Words & Language
I admit I’m sometimes out of the loop. (Or behind the curve. Or whatever.) I don’t watch television and it’s only me up here in the swanky second-floor office in the pink house with the blue door, so whole fads pass me by. Whole memes pass me by. But I am up on my...
by Jamie Chavez | Oct 24, 2016 | Words & Language
One of my authors was dismayed, recently, when he got a disturbing letter from a young reader who took his book back to the bookstore without finishing it because we (the author, his publisher, and me, his editor) had used the word gosh. The letter came complete with...
by Jamie Chavez | Oct 10, 2016 | Words & Language
A book I’ve been working on has an interesting and lovely mention of terms of venery—which are a very special form of collective nouns—and it occured to me that it would be fun to take a look at them. You know what a collective noun is—team, committee, crowd are all...
