Thoughts and Essays
Words words words. Don’t you just love them! These collections of letters that help you form an impression in your mind, a picture, an image. You read the letters, you hear a sound, you form a picture. It’s an incredible thing. Why is it that when I see a W, an O, an R, a D and an S together that I know that I...
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Thoughts and Essays
Recently I decided to try writing without thinking. What do I mean by that? Well basically I wrote down the first words that came in to my head. There was no conscious effort to choose the words for any specific purpose and I obviously didn’t even know what the end product would be. What follows here are two unedited pieces of writing done in this...
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Thoughts and Essays
Yesterday I tweeted that I was sitting in a café with an empty notebook, a pen and a skinny latte seeking inspiration for a short story. A few moments later I experienced one of those eureka moments, a “light in the dark” epiphany, as I took to task the ailing brain that was refusing all reasonable requests to cooperate with my need for creativity. I...
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Thoughts and Essays
I love idioms in foreign languages. They make your words stand out from the rest of the language learning crowd. Students love to say “Il pleut des vaches” literally “it’s raining cows” which seems somehow much more appropriate for heavy rain than our use of cats and dogs. An idiom, of course, is a phrase or sentence where the words mean something which can’t readily...
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