Opinion

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Be careful with nonce words

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Have you ever heard or uttered a sentence and then thought, “I’ll bet no one’s ever said that before”? I think about these kinds of sentences all the time. Do you know that there’s a version of this “once-in-a-lifetime” occasion for standalone words? They’re called “nonce” words, or “occasionalisms.” Nonce words are born when one word gets invented and subsequently utilized one time for one occurrence in one work of writing.
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Hard to catch a fish without water

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It was just one of those things. It didn’t really mean Marvin Pincus had lost his mind. Consider this yourself for a minute. Marvin had opened the mail that morning and in it was the Fenwick glass fly rod he’d ordered. Oh, it was used, of course. The new ones are graphite. But there’s a feel to a fiberglass Fenwick that only a man dedicated to a life of using dry flies can appreciate.
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Putting the ‘fun’ in ‘phonetics’

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I took my son Miles to get his hair cut this past weekend. Miles’ barber has recently moved into a new salon down the road. The new spot is inside a larger salon called Phenix Salon Suites, a national chain of salons. Although California-based Phenix Salon Suites has a growing nationwide presence, I can’t help but cringe at the business’ spelling: Phenix. It should be “Phoenix,” shouldn’t it?