Tag: word

240 Pages by 2 Hours Equals a Book

I Couldn’t Read Them All Until Now

Messy bookcases and desk filled with books
Books on Shelf by Ekrulila – unsplash

Outside of writing, I am happiest when I’m reading. My preference is non-fiction since I love learning and my writing genre is non-fiction. Every so often I pick up a fiction book to expose myself to colorful words and phrases. It helps my writing and I love a well-written mystery. I adore books however; I can’t read enough of them. Then I discovered that 240 pages by 2 hours equal a book. I couldn’t read them all until now.

240 Pages by 2 Hours Equals a Book

I found an article by Jesse Wisnewski on “How to Read a 240-Page Book in 2 Hours.” Of course, I was  intrigued. I couldn’t wait to read the 12-minute article which would take me 20 minutes.

Published in medium.com, a site I also write for, Jesse states; “Based on a speed-reading survey by Staples, the average reading speed is 300 words per minute.” A college student reads 450 wpm, high-level execs read 575 wpm, and speed readers crank out 1,500 wpm. Sounds interesting but how fast do I read.

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Why Don’t You Know What Crib Means

What do you think of when I use the word crib? Did you think a baby’s bed or a place to live in urban slang? Standing alone it’s hard to determine. The words that lead up to and are after in a sentence make it possible for you to grasp the meaning for crib. What do you think of when I say stroke?

That’s the power of language. Words, put together, make communication possible. It’s the essence of how people interact, whether spoken or written.

An Example – Game Shows

Game shows use this as the basis of how they work. Think of the show the $25,000 Pyramid. One teammate tries to get the other to say a word by describing that word. This is the same idea as speaking a word without context except in reverse. What makes it difficult is words can have more than one definition and not every person knows the same definition. This involves the teammate giving different meanings as clues to help their partner guess the right word.

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2019 WOTY and Neologism

What?

The Word of the Year for 2019 is “existential,” or “climate emergency,” “climate strike,” or my personal favorite, “they;” depending on where you search. Each year a group of linguists from different organizations; i.e. Merriam-Webster, Oxford Languages, Collins Dictionary, dictionary.com, and the American Dialect Society, among others, pick their word of the year. Sometimes abbreviated WOTY, the word of the year is a singular word or expression that is significant to the public. Linguists also look at the usage of current words, which is called neologism. 

Linguists study the science and utilization of language. Their attention is on public practice of the term or expression and how it interfaces with the real-world. To become the Word of the Year, linguists consider the most searched words, the ones that have a significant spike from the previous year, and do they have lasting potential.

Merriam-Webster‘s WOTY

The 2019 Word of the Year for Merriam Webster is they, having a 313% spike in searches over the previous year. Moreover, there is a shift in the way they is used, which lured people to their dictionaries to hunt for the current definition. The first definition states, “those people, animals, or things.” The second meaning is, “used to refer to people in a general way or to a group of people who are not specified.”

As stated by Merriam-Webster, “English famously lacks a gender-neutral singular pronoun to correspond neatly with singular pronouns like everyone or someone, and as a consequence, they has been used for this purpose for over 600 years.” Preferred in professional writing, now in the place of the word “he or she,” use the singular pronoun “them or they,”

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