'books' Category Archive

Word of the (Election) Day

Tuesday, November 2nd, 2004

scrutinize \SKROO-tuh-nyze\ verb
1 : to examine closely and minutely
2 : to make a scrutiny
Example sentence:
Signora Bernasconi scrutinized the painting, said to be by Fra Angelico, and declared it a fake.
A close look at the etymology of “scrutinize” reveals that the word stems from the Latin verb “scrutari” (meaning “to search” or “to examine”), [...]

Words

Tuesday, August 10th, 2004

I get the Merriam-Webster “Word of the Day” email newsletter. (Which is very cool. You can subscribe here.) Each day you get a new word, definition, example sentence, and etymology.
As you’d expect, most of the words are traced back to an original Greek or Latin source. However, sometimes the history of the word is [...]

Ronald Reagan, Books, and Happenstance

Thursday, July 1st, 2004

Katy always gets onto me for buying books–mostly because we live in a 300 square foot, one-room apartment. “We have no room,” she says.
But I still like to buy them. I buy books that I’m interested in but don’t have time to read. So, I end up with a lot of books around that [...]