word of the week

kulturkampf - conflict between civil government and religious authorities espically over control of education and church appointments. particularly: the struggle (1871-1883) between the Roman Catholic Church and the German government under Bismarck for control over school and ecclesiastical appointments and civil marriage.

i don't have a sentence for this word, it is way to early in the morning, but i just like the word so much i wanted to share it with everyone.

word of the week

i haven't done this in a little bit so i thought i would bring it back. this week's word is: dirigible.

dirigible - capable of being steered.

so here's my sentence with it: 'though the truck was stalled, it was still dirigible.' not the best sentence but it's 10:30 at night, so cut me a little slack.

dictonary writing exercise

so this morning i did a writing exercise to just keep my mind working. this comes from the same book i talked about in this post, the daily writer by fred white. i put two different exercises into one. one was to build your vocabulary list and then the other was the at random open up the dictionary and jot down any word you didn't know and then use it in a poem. so i put them together and opened up the dictionary at random and wrote down any words i didn't know into my notebook. then after i have a bunch of different words i tried to use them in different sentences.

for example: ripsnorter - something extraordinary. sentence: marianne's wedding dress was ripsnorter.

so i did a bunch of those. and while writing those sentences different ideas come to me about what kind of story i would write that would use these kinds of words. i remember doing things like this in middle school and high school. and it seems like just busy work, but i think it is a valuable tool (now that i'm older) to help build my vocabulary skills.

ps- when i used spell check for this post, blogger said that ripsnorter wasn't a word.