SubscribeI’m reposting this (from June last year) partly as a result of a little chat I had with Jo Carroll on Twitter yesterday morning, and partly because I am heartily sick of hearing news clips about how debt/unemployment/financial crises are ’spreading like cancers’. Every time I hear someone say cancer, a little tremor of recognition [...]
Tag: language
I prefer Starbucks
As you know, I think the language we use around cancer is powerful, and important. I talk about a dance, not a fight. I talk about having had a cancer, singular, not cancer, the big scary thing. On the title of this blog, on the cover of my book, the ‘c’ of cancer is not [...]
Where the words are
Yesterday I discovered a website called Wordcount. It’s an experiment in the way we use language, tracking how often the 86,800 most frequently used words in the English language are used.
I looked up some of the words that mean something here.
‘Cancer’, it turns out, is the 2,397th most frequently used word in English. It’s right [...]
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