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One Step Now Education October 31, 2025 impermanence Another phrase stuck out to me from my reading- "galaxy of impermanence." I'm well aware of this word's meaning and the author's intent in using the phrase. However, sometimes, I get curious about a word's base. This word also brings up another structural element I see here and there that I'm curious about. In this investigation, you'll see how meaning and structure are intertwined. We'll look at the paired derivational suffixes <-ent> and...

One Step Now Education October 24, 2025 incarnate In a recent article I was reading about financial wellbeing, the author used the phrase "a part of incarnate existence." What did she mean by that? How can we piece together the elements in this word to help ascertain its meaning? This investigation will illustrate several fascinating linguistic concepts. We'll explore how adjectives can appear in unexpected positions, discover why looks can be deceiving when analyzing word structure, and...

One Step Now Education October 17, 2025 amnesia Remember soap operas? There are only a few left in the traditional form, but in addition to evil twins and coming back from the dead, another soap opera trope was amnesia. When considering the orthography of this word, I thought there might be an opportunity to share with you a large etymological family. In this investigation, you'll find out how uncountable nouns are different than their countable cousins. We will discover what it means for...

One Step Now Education October 10, 2025 harbinger The leaves turn shades of brown, yellow, orange, and red, a harbinger of the fall. Autumn is my favorite season, and October is my favorite month. However, autumn leads into winter, my least favorite. Winter never used to bother me at all with its inches of snow and zero temperatures. As I grow older, I become less enamored. I turned to a book by Kari Leibowitz, How To Winter, to help me transition into this dark and frigid time. In her book,...

One Step Now Education Oct. 3, 2025 proselytize Yuval Noah Harari wrote a "brief" history of humankind, "Sapiens," in 2015, making waves in both academic and popular circles. Harari has reimagined the work in graphic novel form, and I have been enjoying the installments as they have come out. When reading on the interactions of humankind and religion, I became intrigued by the word proselytize. In our exploration of this words meaning, structure, relatives, and graphemes, we will review the...

One Step Now Education Sept. 26, 2025 fascination I was reading a middle school historical fiction book, The Thieves of Ostia, to prepare for future sessions with a student. I paused at the following sentence: "They watched in fascination as he leapt six feet to the next tree." I knew my student would probably know what fascination was, but they would probably stumble over the spelling. There was that interesting <sc> digraph to look at. In addition, could fascinate have a base that surprises...