Recently, I read a pitch for a guided, small-group trip to Vietnam. (Like a lot of people, quarantine lit a fire under me about all the traveling I haven’t done). This trip had a specific focus: It was a culinary tour of Vietnam’s larger cities, designed for “the adventurous palette.”

At times like this, I wish Medium allowed sound effects. Cue the needle scratch across the vinyl record! Of course, the word the copywriter was reaching for was “palate.” Here’s the difference:

A palette is an artist’s tool, a handheld tray with concave receptacles built-in for small amounts of paint…

A few years back, I read an entertaining blog post about a college writing course. The post’s author wrote dryly about the teaching assistant who graded her work, referring to him as “Mr. Could Cut,” because that was his favorite piece of advice, appearing frequently and tersely in the margins of students’ work: could cut. (At least he practiced what he preached).

Every writer has known not just one, but several teachers and editors in the vein of Mr. Could Cut. For my part, especially in the newspaper business, I’ve known editor after editor who evidently believed that Job One…

I’m a freelance editor of fiction. Sometimes, in a tongue-in-cheek way, I refer to myself as “a professional re-punctuator of novels.” Punctuation misuse is, by far, the biggest issue I see in the books I handle. Including the underuse of that essential workhorse, the comma.

In most cases, I immediately know how a sentence should be punctuated; the fix is easy. Occasionally, though, I have to stop and reflect on punctuation as a matter of stylistic choice.

Now we are ready to talk about punctuation marks within dialogue.

The word dialogue indicates fiction, and that’s what I’ll be talking about…

Recently, I wrote about the rarely-used word anagoge. Since I had been unfamiliar with anagoge until running across it in the surprisingly fascinating A section of the dictionary, I had to do a little more research. Boy, did that open some doors.

Wikipedia’s short article on anagoge explained that it was part of Biblical interpretation in the Middle Ages. According to wikipedia, many medieval theologians used four methods of scriptural interpretation: literal/historical, allegorical, tropological, and anagogic. At the time, I was pursuing the meaning of anagoge, but not so single-mindedly that I didn’t pause a moment to think, Tropological? …

As ever, I’m considerably behind on my goal to read The World Book Dictionary, cover-to-cover, in about two years’ time (a pace of approximately 2.5 to 3 pages a day). In fact, I’m still in the A section. However, I can’t feel too bad about this, because I’ve reached the ana- words — and, as it turns out, they are fascinating … as evidenced by the fact that my most popular Medium story to date is this one.

I expect to linger in the ana- section of the dictionary, which is about three pages in length, for longer than the…

Recently, I received a manuscript to edit from one of the small ebook publishers for whom I work. The managing editor had sent along a memo concerning the novel. It contained the following warning: “This author’s weakness is over-description, especially in how she moves characters within scenes.”

Those words immediately pinged for me. Not only have I seen this in a number of writers … I see it, unfortunately, in my own work. Random, aimless movements: He put his hand on the doorknob. She picked up her coffee cup, but did not drink. He tapped the steering wheel thoughtfully before…

Let’s get this embarrassing disclosure out of the way: My introduction to the word anachronism came via Tiger Eyes, the 1981 novel by Judy Blume. Hey, don’t judge. In American suburbia in the 1980s, if you didn’t read Judy Blume, they revoked your birth certificate and forced your parents to have another child. Well, if you were a girl. I think boys had a different ritual: At age 12, they had to choose between Star Trek and Star Wars, and there was no going back, like choosing your faction in Divergent.

Where was I? Oh yes: In Tiger Eyes, the…

Before I explain the title of this piece, perhaps I should define ‘tincture’ — it’s been many decades since this word was in regular use in medicine. Though if you enjoy historical or fantasy novels, it might be familiar, as ‘potion’ and ‘decoction’ are. A ‘tincture’ is a solution of medicine in alcohol, or a medicine consisting chiefly of alcohol.

Short story short, a tincture is a type of medicine, so ‘tincture of time’ is easy enough to understand: It’s the curative effect of doing nothing and letting a symptom or problem resolve itself. …