For years I had seen this particular word in print and never bothered to look it up. Basically, in French it means “pinch nose”. Makes sense, right? From The Oxford Essential Dictionary of Difficult Words: a pair of eyeglasses with a nose clip instead of ear pieces From A Passage to India
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From The Free Dictionary: A vast semiarid grass-covered plain, as found in southeast Europe, Siberia, and central North America. I wanted to do this word because, quite frankly, though I have had a number of ecology classes over the years, I never really felt like I grasped the meaning. Numerous
Ok, someone recently asked me about this, so I decided a Weekly Word on it might not be a bad idea. A mallard is a species of duck, specifically Anas platyrhynchos. It is the most common species of duck and tends to live in close proximity to man, so if you’ve
It’s officially the first day of spring. And despite the dusting of snow this morning, it’s a pretty nice day. A day worth documenting, I thought, with a few glimpses of what’s to come in a few weeks. It’s over faster than you can say “Hooray! It’s Spring!” so get
The Freeman is a magazine published by the Foundation for Economic Education, a non-profit organization founded by Leonard Read in 1946. I’ve attended lectures at the Foundation’s mansion in Irvington-on-Hudson, NY since 2002. Lately, however, I have been a little bit disappointed with some of the things I’ve been reading
Part of my daily routine includes a walk in the park where I practice being as aware of my surroundings as possible. These are techniques I learned reading Tom Brown Jr.’s nature observation and tracking guides, but is also something that I think comes from just being interested in a
So, about a week ago I was checking my logs and saw someone typed in the search terms “how low can the dow go”. That sounded like panic to me. Now, a while back I told you it COULD happen, remember? Well, looking at this chart, it’s sure starting to
The death of a loved one can send you into a metaphysical tailspin, so to speak. You want so much to believe that you will one day see them again. At the same time, if you’re like me, you want to puzzle it out with reason. But this is a
We have all heard the word, but do we really know what it means? It certainly has a negative connotation, but for me this word was a little fuzzy – so I looked it up in my trusty Dictionary of Difficult Words. Here is what I think is the typical
Most people will be familiar with definition #1 of this word (from The Free Online Dictionary:): a. A building or complex in which units of property, such as apartments, are owned by individuals and common parts of the property, such as the grounds and building structure, are owned jointly by
From The Free Online Dictionary: One of a row of upright pointed sticks forming a fence; a pale. Pointed sticks used in making fences; pales. A fence made of pales or pickets. From Asimov’s Chronology of the World: The English established themselves at first only about the area of Dublin.
In my studies I often come across words that I have heard before but I do not know the precise definition of. In many cases, the context gives me a good idea, but I find that even with words that I am very familiar with and use in my own
Doublespeak is a type of logical fallacy known as equivocation. Equivocation is the use in a logical argument of a word that has two or more distinct meanings. The purpose of using Doublespeak is to evade real debate by confusing or obfuscating. In any spoken language, words naturally change over
In the first part of this two-part series on inflation and deflation we discussed how money came to be used to facilitate trade. Metals were the best commodities for use as money because they were durable, relatively rare, and were easy to mold into identical pieces. As the wealth of
What exactly does it mean to be a “soft science”? Over the holidays I got into a discussion with a relative about just this topic. Economics, he told me, is a “soft” science, unlike physics which is a “hard” science. What exactly is the difference? The word “science” itself is
