Wordsmoker

1. The arc of my life thus far can be summed up in one anecdote: I had just started at a snooty J-school after barely graduating from an open-enrollment commuter college. Feeling insecure among all the Yale, etc. grads on my first day, I sneaked a peek at the monitor of the woman working next to me. Her writing was rough, the syntax not quite right, and I immediately felt much more comfortable, knowing there was somebody even more out of their depth than I was. A few minutes later she reached into her bag and pulled out a massive book. It was a Russian-into-English dictionary.

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1. The arc of my life thus far can be summed up in one anecdote: I had just started at a snooty J-school after barely graduating from an open-enrollment commuter college. Feeling insecure among all the Yale, etc. grads on my first day, I sneaked a peek at the monitor of the woman working next to me. Her writing was rough, the syntax not quite right, and I immediately felt much more comfortable, knowing there was somebody even more out of their depth than I was. A few minutes later she reached into her bag and pulled out a massive book. It was a Russian-into-English dictionary.

Read the rest of this entry →