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Pigeonhole
WotD: Pigeonhole As today’s picture quickly demonstrates, a pigeonhole is a small box where mail or messages can be placed. At a Japanese high school where I once worked, the teacher’s room had a little box like the one above for each teacher. If someone wanted to leave a teacher a message or there was a newsletter…
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Gaffe
WotD: Gaffe If you have ever experienced social awkwardness, you can understand how it feels to make a public gaffe. A gaffe is something you say or do which is socially inappropriate. It’s a social mistake that offends people. One stereotypical example would be asking a woman when her baby is due because you think she’s pregnant, only…
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Stop to smell the roses
Phrase: Stop to smell the roses It’s become a cliché to tell someone to stop and smell the roses. Life is so busy now, or at least it seems to be. I suppose people have always been busy; it’s just that the things which occupy our busyness have changed. Did people ever really have the time…
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Live rough
WotD: Live rough I’ve travelled a lot in my time, but some of the biggest shocks and most vivid memories I have are of seeing people live rough on the streets of big cities. I grew up in a small rural town of about 1,200 people. There were no homeless. Yes, there were a lot of poor…
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Lose track of time
Phrase: Lose track of time There’s a war happening online. It’s a battle for our time. All websites strive to attract us and make us lose track of time so that we will stay on their site for as long as possible. One minute you’re concentrating on preparing a document for a meeting, then suddenly, you realize…
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Boys will be boys
Phrase: Boys will be boys Ladies, I’m going to tell you what you probably already know and what most males will deny. It’s a known fact that males of all ages have done, do now and will in the future, stupid and childish things. In other words, boys will be boys. Boys will be boys means…
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Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed
WotD: Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed You know, sometimes life doesn’t work out how you want it to. Today is Monday, and I woke up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed to write and publish this post to have it out by my self-imposed deadline of 11:00 am. Well, that didn’t happen. It’s hard to make plans when you run your own…
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Mesmerize
WotD: Mesmerize It must be tough to be a hypnotist these days. Everyone is so busy multitasking while using their smartphones that you can’t get an opportunity to mesmerize them. Perhaps that’s just what the problem is. Everyone is so mesmerized by smartphones that they can’t direct their attention to anything else for any length of time. When’s the…
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Sign of the times
Phrase: Sign of the times Whether it’s the miniskirts of the ’60s, the corduroys of the ’70s and ’80s or the flannel-clad grunge bands of the ’90s, there’s always something we can look back on as a sign of the times. What will be the sign of the times in which we’re living now? I bet it will…
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Binge-watch
WotD: Binge-watch Tell me you haven’t done it, and I’ll call you a liar. Binge-watching is one of our favourite pastimes. Streaming online video services such as Amazon Video, Netflix, and Hulu have made it easier to choose what we watch and when. They didn’t invent binge-watching, though. To binge-watch means to watch multiple episodes or perhaps…
Got any book recommendations?