wrong words

Why you should use “service” and many other words more carefully

service and other words

By the Oxford English Dictionary’s best guess, the English language contains more than a quarter of a million words. And, while scholars and researchers disagree wildly, most concede that the average intelligent person knows somewhere between 10,000 and 50,000 of them. Of course, there’s a difference between knowing 10,000 words and knowing the precise shades … Read more

YOU WANT A BETTER WORD?

When FDR spoke about freedom from want in his 1941 State of the Union address, he was talking about the concept, not the word itself. However, I’ve noticed that many people — particularly in the business world — have a very real aversion to “want” and an apparent need to be free from it.

I’m not sure why people are afraid of such a simple word. My only guess is that they’re focused on its more negative contexts, or that they find it too simple and folksy to serve intelligent readers. In most cases, though, it’s the ideal verb for the situation.

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