Writing. DRAFT - Opinionator. John Wells and I have been together a very long time.
If you haven’t heard of Wells, he’s a C.I.A. operative who plays the starring role in a series of espionage thrillers that I started writing a decade ago. Random House published the first, “The Faithful Spy,” in 2006. I planned to kill Wells off at its end, a la John le Carre’s Alec Leamas. But my editor told me I couldn’t end with a fade to black, that I’d have to have a funeral. I found I couldn’t write the scene. Since then, Wells has proven too tough to die, or maybe too mean. Wells predates my wife, Jackie, and our daughter, Lucy. All of which is another way of saying that John Wells has markedly enriched my life — an impressive feat for a man who doesn’t exist.
Manifesto of the Communist Party. Orwell: Politics and the English Language. Ost people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it.
Our civilization is decadent and our language -- so the argument runs -- must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes. Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer.
But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. Dying metaphors. Operators or verbal false limbs. Pretentious diction.
Fantasy Writers. Map making - Discussion about creating, analyzing, and loving maps. World building. All Sorts - a linguistic experiment. Grandiloquent Dictionary. This is the result of an ongoing project to collect and distribute the most obscure and rare words in the English language.
It also contains a few words which do not have equivalent words in English. At present, the dictionary contains approximately 2700 words, though it is constantly growing. Following a large number of requests, pronounciations are now being (slowly) added to the listing, although it will be a long time before they are all added. After almost three years of work, the new Third Edition of the Grandiloquent Dictionary is now available as a PDF File. Including ~500 Words Not in the Online Version! In honour of ten years of the Grandiloquent Dictionary being available online, a special edition print version has been published!
The Author's Webpage You are visitor since this counter was added. Donate0 Donate0 Experimental Search The authors intend to eventually add a search box for searching this dictionary, but for the present we rely on a more general google search. Logophilia - And I'd rather be in Spidey's arms than die from a fall. Online Etymology Dictionary. Reverse Dictionary. <div id="needs_javascript"><center><b>Note: OneLook Thesaurus requires JavaScript.
</b><br /><img src="/img/a.gif? Q=omg_a_user_without_js"> If you have disabled JavaScript in your browser, please <a href=" it for this site</a> or use the <a href="/? W=entersearchhere&loc=revfp_legacy">old version of the reverse dictionary</a> here. </p><p></center><div> How do I use OneLook's thesaurus / reverse dictionary? Etymology: What life means.