Thursday, October 9, 2008

A.Word.A.Day Keeps the Boredom Away

Since I'm already on a roll today of recommending other websites, I'd like to commend to you A.Word.A.Day. A.W.A.D. is the creation of Anu Garg and has been around for ages (in Internet years). In fact, I originally subscribed to their mailing list back around 1995! Thankfully the list has matured along with the Net, and Anu is now broadcasting in RSS as well as email. That's where I learned the funny sounding, but absolutely appropriate for conversation word fard.

Each week A.W.A.D. sends out a group of oddball, obscure, or highbrow words on a particular theme. Many of them are not really made for normal, day-to-day conversation, unless your friends are all linguaphiles, though periodically, he features series of words intended for daily discussions. But, they're all bona fide words from the English dictionary that might just help you work through some wordy prose and definitely will stretch your brain.

Though I do not agree with Anu's worldview (which he shares in drips & drabs in his introductory comments each week, and via the attached quotations), I applaud his dedication to this project over the last fourteen-plus years. If you're on the hunt for quick ways to increase your brain power, give A.W.A.D. a try.

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