30 Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary
The 1950s content, paper, fonts, and typesetting make for a kind of armchair time-traveling experience.
Category: vocabulary
Does “oblong” mean “rectangle”?
“The voice came from an oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror which formed part of the surface of the right-hand wall.” —Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four
Money words
In the past, I’ve read British books and not known the relevant money-related vocabulary. This sign, spotted at the museum of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, should help!
Crave vs. crave for
It used to be normal to say “[someone] craved for [something]” instead of “[someone] craved [something]”. The former sounds like a mistake to me, as if the speaker meant to say “[someone] had a...
Opaque
Once upon a time, I knew that ‘opaque’ had something to do with whether you can see through something, but I thought it was a synonym of ‘transparent’, not an antonym. Since most things...
Painstakingly
For the longest time, I understood how to use the word ‘painstakingly’ but I thought that the action embedded in the adverb was ‘staking one’s pain’ on something, which perhaps I thought meant something...
Thing Explainer by Randall Munroe
To create Thing Explainer, Randall drew and labeled pictures to—well—explain various scientific and cultural ideas, but he chose to write all the text in the book using only a thousand commonly-used English words, just...
I gladly concede the loss of historical ‘decimate’.
That’s part of page 105 of the 1952 edition of Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage. I looked up the word after I read the plot summary in the Wikipedia entry about the film...
Words related to ‘receive’
The word ‘recipient’ sounds weird here because normally (I would think) a recipient is a person, and the instructions are obviously talking about a thing (a container or ‘receptacle’). The words ‘recipient’ and ‘receptacle’...
Wear your shoe
Singlish: “You need to go toilet? Okay, wear your shoe first.” English: “You need to go to the toilet? Okay, put on your shoes first.” ‘Wear’ is really not the same as ‘put on’,...