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The ordinary-sized words are for everyone, but the big ones are especially for children.



Thursday 28 June 2018

Descriptive words: a rant.

Words are tricky things. It's bad enough when things are written down (predictive text, eh?) but when spoken aloud then accents, speed, technical terms, dialect, and speaking-with-the-head-stuck-a-cupboard or through-a-gobstopper all make understanding each other difficult - and sometimes perilous.

But sometimes, just sometimes, you'd think things would be straightforward.

I was in a pasty shop in Dorset the other day (a pasty, for the non-British, is a single-portion semi-circular pie, usually savory:

File:20070802122215!Cornish pasty - cut.jpeg
photo by David Johnson) [1]

and I heard the shop assistant ask the Englishman beside me, who was making his order, small or large?

And the man replied what's the difference?

Word To Use Today: large. See if you can find an English-speaker who doesn't understand what large means. The word comes from the Latin largus, which means ample or abundant.


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