Prize draw for Real Readers

There are four special days in the year which feel like extra birthdays for me. The mail arrives containing a fat package bearing the image of a rather knowing fox

and I am assured of weeks of pleasurable reading to come. The package contains my quarterly edition of Slightly Foxed.

Slightly Foxed is more than a review magazine, it is an entry into the magical world of libraries that I discovered as a child. I find forgotten treasures, new delights and fascinating insights into much loved works of fact and fiction. Of one thing I can be certain, each book reviewed will have true literary merit and even though I know I will never get to read all of the books, the reviews themselves increase my knowledge and understanding of our literary heritage.

If you would like the chance to win a subscription to Slightly Foxed for yourself, or perhaps as a gift for someone else if you already subscribe, then go to The Dabbler  now and enter the competition.

Good luck!

La Stupenda

Dame Joan Sutherland 1927 - 2010.  The gretaest voice of the twentieth century.

Lost words

One of the most thumbed books on our shelves is this:

As a family of avid readers and crossword puzzlers, we have frequent recourse to dictionaries and this one has provided the solution to many a disagreement. When son and daughter were young, we had a weekly exercise where each of us chose a word from the Dictionary of Difficult Words to learn and use as often as possible during the week. I have to admit that we seldom recalled the words beyond a day or two; the only one that entered our family vocabulary was olid, meaning evil-smelling. You can imagine how frequently that was used in a household of teenagers and their friends!

I was reminded of this pastime by blogging friend erp*, who sent me a link to Save the Words. It is a wonderful website with an enormous collection of archaic and obscure words; you can even "adopt" a word, pledging to use it as frequently as possible in conversation and correspondence. Take a look, it is great fun. I thought I might adopt senticous, meaning prickly or thorny; it sounds far more interesting than grumpy, doesn't it? From now on I shall be signing any letters of complaint from "a senticous old woman."

*erp has asked me to credit the the Volokh Conspiracy with providing her with this link