Tag: language

Borrowed Words

  English never met a noun it didn’t want to adopt. It has words for drizzle, shower, downpour, mist, mizzle (surprised?…me too) sleet and hail – which feels like overkill for something I’d happily live without – but it still leaves some fairly inconvenient holes. English has a word for the smell of rain on […]

how to say grace without jesus

A MODERN RITUAL OF GRATITUDE AT THE TABLE I grew up in a fruit shop. I didn’t work, I ate. When our bucolic family was wrangled indoors, think; lots of boisterous male energy and one baby female in semi-rural New Zealand, we gathered around the table.  In our household we had a daily format with […]