by Kevin Burton Not smashing, not daft, something mid-table I’d say, to use a football analogy. I thought I was ready, so I had a go, with middling results. Every day Merriam-Webster sends me an e-mail to help me watch my language. A few weeks ago they announced “The Great British Vocabulary …
Category Archives: language
My Bilingual Doubletalk In Mexico
by Kevin Burton My career as an English as a Second Language teacher came to an abrupt early end one night under the streetlights outside a small taco shop in Puebla. To tell you how and why that happened, I first turn to BBC writer Nicole Chang, who recently wrote about what speaking …
Fruit Of The Spirit: Joy In Serving God
by Kevin Burton The fruit of the Spirit is the outgrowth of a life surrendered to Jesus Christ and in consistent pursuit of His will. Last month we went to Galatians 5:22-23 to look at that fruit (“Shopping For Fruit With Paul In Galatians,” June 12). We return to our series today to …
Words For Real Life Or For Scrabble
by Kevin Burton “Scrabble” is not a German word meaning “one letter off,” that’s just my little joke. Scrabble also at its essence is not a word game as commonly supposed, but a game of mathematics and strategic placement of little tile soldiers. For the words used in scrabble aren’t words so …
Loud Arguments About Silent Letters
by Kevin Burton When my parents issued me flash cards before kindergarten, I wondered why the work “knife” had a K in it when it didn’t do anything. All these years later I hear from Merriam-Webster that not just e’s and k’s but all the letters of the English alphabet are silent at …
All The Letters Can Be Silent? Shut Up!
by Kevin Burton Silent E is so famous it has a song, we all know about that one. We know how the letter e at the end of man, changes the word to mane, for example. The silent e turns the a from short to long. But did you know all the …
Hearing My Story In The Rock And Roll
by Kevin Burton The stories, the images, the sound and fury of rock and roll, truly resonate when they hit close to home. By now we have enough rocking sounds to fill the seven seas. The messages are all over the map. The sheer variety is breathtaking. Not every song will get in …
Hey Word Lovers, Have An Awesome Day!
by Kevin Burton Good day you awesome readers! Are you sick yet of the word “awesome”? The term’s overuse is sparking some awesome outrage among speakers of English. Some generational friction emerges when you look into who is cool with “awesome” and who is not. “Awesome” started with the California surfer crowd …
My ABCs: C Is For Communication
by Kevin Burton So I had this great idea for a series, my ABCs. Take the words that letters stand for in kindergarten, A for apple, B for ball, etc., and trade them in for the words that seem more appropriate after years and years of experience in life. I started this …
Rapping To The Ladies, Wishful Thinking
by Kevin Burton I love the Doobie Brothers, but I have a complaint. Let’s engage in a little wishful thinking, shall we? I wish Michael McDonald would enunciate. Wishful thinking is “the attribution of reality to what one wishes to be true or the tenuous justification of what one wants to believe,” according …
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