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How'd you like to increase your vocabulary, have fun doing it and by doing so be contributing to fighting world hunger?

Head on over to Free Rice and see how many bowls of rice you can donate. I managed to donate 2000 grains in about ten minutes. I'm addicted! They have great words like weald and taiga. Go! Visit! Donate rice!

I have been tagged by my dear friend (and official biographer) Sally at Scribblings. I’ve never been tagged before, but since I learned to come down from the shelf and sing, I’ve learnt that trying something new is usually a good thing. So, I’ll join in.

Here’s how it works:

Link to the person that tagged you, and post the rules on your blog. Share 7 random and/or weird facts about yourself. Tag 7 random people at the end of your post, and include links to their blogs. Let each person know that they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.

So here we go - 7 random facts about me:

1. My fur is a little worn on my bottom. This is from spending too long sitting all alone on my shelf.

2. I love to sing, but have yet to fulfil my ambition of appearing on Australian Idol. I went to the auditions once, but people kept picking me up and cuddling me, and pretty soon I smelt like cheap perfume and iced coffee, and I had to go home to get clean.

3. I love learning and using new words. My favourite word at the moment is perspicacious. If someone is perspicacious they are acutely perceptive or discerning. My friend Primula is perspicacious. When I was alone on my shelf she saw that, deep down, what I needed was company and for someone to believe in me.

4. My favourite book (apart from my life story, Pemberthy Bear), is Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus, by Mo Willems.

5. I once tried sky diving – in my sleep. Okay, maybe it wasn’t sky-diving, but it felt like it. See, I was asleep up on my high, high shelf, and was having a bad dream. I must have been tossing and turning in my sleep because the next thing I felt like I was flying and then WHAM I woke up on the toy room mat. Luckily I wasn’t hurt – just dreadfully embarrassed.

6. I like to write poetry, but haven’t written a new poem since the 9th of September. Oops – better get to work on a new offering.

7. This one is a little sad. I’m supposed to tag seven other people to also share their seven random facts, but I don’t KNOW seven other bloggers. And the bloggers I do know have all been tagged by Sally! So perhaps if you’re reading this, and you have a blog, you could pretend to be my friend and share your seven things. Leave a comment here and I’ll come and read them.

By Anatoly Liberman

For quite some time, I have been answering direct questions at the expense of comments, even though they, too, often contained enquiries. I want to offer my apologies to the correspondents who have had to wait so long and incorporate my answers to them into this month’s gleanings. (more…)

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Half the battle of being a writer is locating the correct word for a particular context.

There's a big difference between using a phrase like "that scrawny man" and "that lithe man," even though the words are essentially synonyms. 

Every entry in the Oxford English Dictionary contains a beautiful citation that locates the word in real-word usage, helping you grok the best context for the word. Now there's a television show where contestants actually help the OED spot the original context of a word in the real world--it's a combination of citizen journalism, reality television and word porn for all us writers.

Our writing depends on our contextual brain muscles. Whenever I can, I practice coming up with the ideal adjective or noun for describing people on the subway. Seen Reading is the perfect website to read while practicing this kind of contextual description.

Dig it:

"The OED seeks to find the earliest verifiable usage of every single word in the English language—currently 600,000 in the OED and counting—and of every separate meaning of every word."  

(Thanks, Papercuts)