Month: September 2015

I’m working on a new editing project. It’s a paranormal book set in the mid-1800’s, so I’ve found myself looking up words and phrases a lot, wondering if they were a bit too modern. I have to say, I’ve been surprised by some of the origins of certain words and phrases – a lot of them are way older than I realized, and some phrases just have really strange or interesting stories behind them. Here are some examples that I came across in my research: OK – I thought this word seemed a little modern in dialogue (even spelled okay), so I was surprised to see that it came into popular use before 1840 when it was used in Martin Van Buren’s campaign. Daddy – When I think of kids talking to their fathers in “the olden days” I think of more formal or archaic words – father, pa or… Read more »

Supposedly a true book lover adores the smell of books. I have to confess, I’ve never really understood this. I mean, just before writing this post, I tested this again by smelling my current book and it smells like – paper. Doesn’t give me any nostalgic notions of reading by the fire or anything like that. Still, SO many people talk about book sniffing that there must be some merit to it, right? So I started thinking about how there are a few books that really do smell good. In fact, sitting here right now, I can literally imagine the smell of my leather bound copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. Something about the combination of the leather and the gold-edged pages smells divine! Then there’s OLD books. They seem to smell better, right? I always just thought this was because they were … well, old. I… Read more »