Language Monthly: May 2020, English

proud like an English lion

This May has been a busy month at work. In particular, it involved lots of writing: proposals, technical reports, and similar soulless documents.

Writing in English did not come easily to me, but after years of toiling and moiling, I began to enjoy it. I am not the smoothest writer, neither the most creative, nor the one with a flawless English prose. But I have developed some shortcuts that serve me well.

At work, when something needs to be written, I can sit down, focus, and just write it, claiming proudly better done than perfect. The expression big fish in a small pond truly applies to my English writing abilities, although I prefer a colourful Russian saying на безрыбье и рак рыба (‘when there is no fish, a crayfish would do’), roughly equivalent to better a small fish than an empty dish.

This is to say that after writing for a whole day at work, I did not have any bandwidth to write anything else after work, hence this hiatus.

Now I am back. Given that the focus of the month was English, I share three English-related discoveries I made recently.

I am a huge fan of etymology, and was excited to find a useful and reliable resource on English etymology, Online Etymology Dictionary. It publishes regular posts on language issues, for example, this one on the so-called Janus words, this one on language in a time of Corona, and this one on understanding relations between different languages by Mediaeval Europeans.

The second is also related to English etymology. It’s a website called World Wide Words, dedicated to ‘peculiarities and evolution of English language’. The website is not being updated any longer, but nearly 3000 published articles will keep the reader busy for a while!

The third discovery is an article on Farnam Street blog, about the difference between two words often treated as synonyms, although they differ in meaning, to convince and to persuade: the first applies to reason, the second to emotions.

This one will be helpful next time I have to write something where I both would need to convince and persuade.