I had a most shocking experience recently. I’m fortunate to be a part of a lovely bloggers’ group, Blogs in Bloom. People share their blog posts, and social-media links, and everyone is invited to read, share, and comment.
Of course you let the people know that you’ve read, or liked, or shared their post, by commenting under their link. Something simple like Commented! or Read and liked! At first, anyway…
A while back I wondered, considering one can be ruthless, can one also therefore be ruthful. Toaday I considered a similar case: can you be reckful?
The answer is yes, but you’d sound quite old-fashioned. To reck is a now mainly obsolete word meaning to heed/pay attention to. It’s from the 16th century, and derived from the Old English reccan, meaning to take care of/heed of.
As to reck came to be used as a noun as well as a verb, the adjectives reckful and reckless logically followed. Reckful didn’t stand the test of time though, probably for two main reasons. I think it simply doesn’t sound as catchy as reckless. More importantly though, talking about someone being reckful generally isn’t as interesting as talking about someone reckless, so we’re naturally going to talk about the latter more.
So if you want to use the word reckful, you can, but consider that you can also use heedful, attentive, or other similar, more common words. But also consider: wouldn’t it be much more exciting to use reckless instead!?
I’ll have to make up some excuse for why I’m late.
They often argue, but they always make up soon afterwards.
Let me just finish putting on my make-up and then we can go.
I’m often impressed by the economy of the English language.
I don’t have any 2018 goals to be honest. I just wanted to set that out straight away so you’re not disappointed. I’m one of those terrible people who never set New Year’s resolutions.
I don’t have any particular problem with them. I just think that if you want to make some change, you don’t need to wait for a particular point in time to start. And if it’s a big change, it’s probably better to ease into it, rather than making a sudden change. The word goal though, is somewhat interesting to me.
Writing in a recent post about telling the time got me thinking about the words analogue and digital.
They’re two words that can be used in many different contexts, and I can safely say that I have a general sense of their meaning. Giving each a precise definition, however, is not always so easy.
A pretty straightforward question generally, but one with a surprisingly complex range of possible answers.
There are many things that annoy us about how others use our native tongue. That’s just the way our brains work. There’s one interesting example though, that’s often mentioned by British-English speakers: Can I get…?
English-Language Thoughts 