If You Don’t Speak English, Forget about Running for Office

The ability to speak English is not a sign of intelligence or stupidity. The ability to communicate in English is not a sign you are American. The sign you are an American is that you take your voting power and the great gift of democracy to change the country for the better.

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100 Beautiful Words: Deciphering the Diction Divide

In my prolonged dalliance with the English language, the cynosure has always been how certain becoming words conflate with others to form the most comely, mellifluous sounds in the human ear. In other words, I’d like to examine why some words sound so beautiful and others drown in the wide lagoon of linguistic mediocrity. And as I find myself with some fugacious leisure time this afternoon, I’d like to imbue some of our language’s glamour into the minds among the fine assemblage of our lunch break community. To help me enter this labyrinthine demesne, my incipient internet research led me to a quintessential list of the most audibly fetching words from Robert Beard’s book, The 100 Most Beautiful Words in English. Despite my furtive eloquence in the art of writing, I will try to make this blog post a panoply of the words from this lissome list, whose contents have been placed in bold, in the hopes that we can all rescue some of this wonderful vocabulary from desuetude and avoid some of the more mundane patterns of speech.

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