Trying to Remodel the Kitchen While You Are Cooking Thanksgiving Dinner

Will be completed by early June.

Vocabulary Expansion Words: New Edition of “Words of the Month”

Just realized that I had not announced in this blog the last edition (March/ April 2017) of “Words of the Month,” my free vocabulary enrichment feature. It has been online since the end of March. Here are the six featured words, all of which lie within the conversational vocabulary of America’s most articulate (as is the case with all of the words featured in my book, “The ArticulateProfessional-3rd Edition”): 

1. tribune

2. vapid
3. redolent
4. sophomoric
5. mendacious
6. vivify

Vocabulary Expansion Words: New Edition of “Words of the Month”

Have you checked out the latest edition (January/ February 2017) of “Words of the Month,” my free vocabulary enrichment feature, which has been online since about a month ago? Here are the six featured words, all of which lie within the conversational vocabulary of America’s most articulate (as is the case with all of the words featured in my book, “The Articulate Professional-3rdEdition”):

1. studied

2. detritus
3. assuage
4. inexplicable
5. predilection
6. volte-face

 

 

 

“Great Art Has Been Put Into a Coma”; “Sears is Like the Mythical Headless Horseman Wandering Aimlessly In the Night Looking for its Lost, Never-To-Be-Found Head”--Visual, Evocative Expression to Emphasize Something

[Rewritten on May 27, 2017]

Here are some recent examples of highly effective communicators using a vivid, evocative expression while emphasizing something and thus making their assertion indelible--examples which, I hope, will inspire the rest of us into similarly imaginative use of the language, especially when we are trying to break through the clutter.

 

• (From a BBC TV news report earlier this year) Commenting on the Geneva Freeport--one of the largest such fortified storage facilities in the world and which houses in secrecy over a million works of art (including hundreds of Picassos), most of which are destined not to be seen by the public for decades--a curator lamenting: “Great art has been put into a coma.”

 

A quick 101 on “free ports”: Described by some as “the greatest museums no one can see,” free ports are tax-free facilities for goods in transit and, according to the BBC, these are places “where the super-rich can secretly store their priceless art works that often include smuggled, even Nazi-looted, paintings. (As a result) great masterpieces can be incarcerated here for decades!” Thus, these free ports are a serious impediment to stamping out the illegal art trade.

 

• With reference to the fast declining fortunes of Sears (stock price plummeting over 40% in the past year and 70% in the most recent three years; sales down from $41b in 2012 to $22b in 2016), Mark Cohen, former CEO of Sears Canada and now a marketing professor at Columbia Business School, telling PBS’s “Nightly Business Report” this past winter: “Sears Holding is like the mythical headless horseman wandering aimlessly in the night looking for its lost, never-to-be-found head.”

© Copyright 2017  V. J. Singal

Vocabulary Expansion Words: New Edition of “Words of the Month”

Have you checked out the latest edition (November/December 2016) of “Words of the Month,” my free vocabulary enrichment feature, which has been online since the Thanksgiving holidays? Here are the six featured words, all of which lie within the conversational vocabulary of America’s most articulate (as is the case with all of the words featured in my book, “The ArticulateProfessional-3rd Edition”): 

1. exigent

2. galvanic
3. recrimination
4. nadir
5. hypercritical
6. inapposite