by Jamie Chavez | Apr 14, 2016 | Books You Might Like, Words & Language
Prefixes like “in,” “non,” “un,” “dis,” and “im” make words negative, yes? There may be grammatical particulars I am not addressing here, but generally speaking. So you have a positive word like “restrained,” and you add the prefix “un” to get a negative:...
by Jamie Chavez | Apr 4, 2016 | Words & Language
A writer friend of mine posted a little meme* on Facebook the other day: Never make fun of someone if they mispronounce a word. It means they learned it by reading. I doubt there’s any data to support this but I feel the truth of it in my bones, having been a child...
by Jamie Chavez | Mar 26, 2016 | Words & Language
I have said this more than once: I learned a lot from reading books. It led directly to my current vocation, for one thing. But before that, for example, it led to my acquisition of an excellent vocabulary and, I believe, my ability to put that vocabulary to work in a...
by Jamie Chavez | Jan 21, 2016 | Words & Language
The first half of the [eighteenth] century had witnessed a massive surge in printing and the appetite for print. Books circulated freely thanks in part to the new commercial lending libraries, and second-hand copies could be picked up cheaply from dealers who traded...
by Jamie Chavez | Jan 11, 2016 | Words & Language
Recently I was editing a manuscript whose author had used the word flautist. Having been raised in a musical household and taken classical piano lessons for many years, I am familiar with the word; as a child I was informed flautist was the appropriate [English] word...
