In English, words get multiple meanings when they are used to associate a base definition with a different context. I leave for your later exploration the word “bear” as a beautiful example. The best way of identifying that base meaning is to explore what other words or phrases can possibly used for the same meaning in the same context.
Continue readingI just received a gentle warning that I had mis-spelled a word on this site, and that there were tools to help me avoid this problem.
Alarmed, I looked to see what word I had mis-spelled, as this can completely alter the meaning of a sentence and a post – a most appalling possibility.
The word my gentle correspondent sent to me was “atall.”
There is, of course, the word “atoll” which refers to a tiny remnant of an island, but as I did not discuss anything smaller than an island on my site to my knowledge, that would not be a mis-spelling that I would suffer.
The other option is the dialect word “atall”, which like the generally used word “into” is a combination of two words yielding a meaning similar to, but subtly different from, the source words.
The Dusty Kitchen 