Monthly Archive: June 2025

The older I get, the more I remember the past with clarity. By the time I went to kindergarten, I could read on my own. My father had nightly read to me and listened while I read from a range of books including those by Thornton W. Burgess. I can vividly remember pronouncing “gnaw” in The Adventures of Danny Meadow Mouse with a hard “g” as if it had two syllables – g-naw – and being corrected. As a result of his fine tutelage I became an early and avid reader at the Carnegie Library in Guelph. The children’s books...

As a writer, I love language. When I think back to my university days, I shake my head at the many and varied forms of the English language with which I struggled to become familiar. First, there was Old English, which was closer to Norse than anything recognizable today. A typical pair of words in Old English looked something like this, “Pæs oferéode,” meaning “That was overcome.” Old English was used until the Norman conquest of England in 1066. Those invaders carried out an inventory called the Domesday Book of all the captured buildings. Included was the church in Earsham,...