Origins – Doing and Feeling.
If you watch a furious athletic event, and you get tired, though the athletes expend all the energy – that’s vicarious fatigue. If your friend goes on a bender, and…
Grammar – What is a Sentence?
So much, then, for the individual parts of speech. In isolation they mean little. Only when words form part of a phrase or sentence do they begin to serve a…
Origins – Zeno and the front porch
Centuries ago, in ancient Greece, the philosopher Zeno lectured on a topic that still piques the human mind, to wit: ‘How to Live a Happy Life’. Zeno would stand on…
Grammar – What is Determiner?
Determiners are small words used before nouns to tell you which one, or how many, or whose, and so on. For example: the man; a school girl; all people; every…
Origins – Head and Tails
We can hardly close our book on the words suggested by ingenuous without looking at the other side of the coin. If ingenuous means frank, open, then disingenuous should mean…
Grammar – What is an Adjective?
Adjectives go with or ‘qualify’ or ‘modify’ nouns, and sometimes pronouns. They are often used to describe the thing that the noun refers to. Adjectives tend to turn up in…
Origins – What people believe in
Credo, to believe, is the origin of four other useful English words. 1.Credo – personal belief, code of ethics; the principles by which people guide their actions. 2.Creed – a…
Some Common Combining Forms – Words using syn-.
The Greek syn-, like the Latin com-, means ‘together’. Like many initial combining forms and prefixes, it may change slightly in form depending on what letter follows it. As syn-…